August 05, 2006
Response on Gender Gap in enrollments- BECKER
Let me return to our discussion a few weeks ago of the gender gap in college enrollments, and respond to a few of the many interesting comments. The gap in male-female median earnings is indeed less than in mean earnings because the distribution of male earnings is more skewed to the right. The greater skewness in male earnings is due to their greater variance in "skills", and to an interaction between skills and market demand. For a model of this kind (but not applied to male-female earnings differences), see my Human Capital.
To clarify my position on affirmative action for men and for various other groups, I am not claiming that non-hispanic whites do not have any desire to have African American, Latinos, and other minorities in their classes. Surely, many of them do, but I do claim that the desire of women to have a significant fraction of male students in the colleges they attend, and visa versa for men, is on the whole greater than the desire to have many members of these minority groups.
For reasons given in previous posts, I am against all government-enforced affirmative action admission-programs. Still, colleges should be free to choose their admission policies in the competitive higher education market of the United States. This includes the freedom to bring in more male students to balance a majority of female students. It also very definitely includes freedom of schools to show preference for minority students. We can argue about whether colleges should want to do this, but I leave that up to them to decide. However, it is unwise for governments to force such actions on colleges, as long as there is sufficient competition among colleges. There is enough competition in American higher education (but not in higher education in many other countries).
The war on drugs is certainly a factor, indeed I believe an important factor, in the low rate of high school completion among African-American males, and also in the higher education of African American females. The comment posted gives a good discussion of the reasons why. While there are many other forces involved, such as unstable families, the war on drugs is in principle the easiest to correct simply by legalizing drugs.
Part of the source in the gender gap in earnings during the past couple of decades is that many males who would be at the low end of the earnings distribution have dropped out of the labor force. However, there is still a sizeable gender gap in earnings even after correcting for the high male drop out rates. Moreover, the same type of selectivity applies to women since college educated women are more likely to work than women with lesser education.
Some of you in effect argue that colleges should take account of the greater variability in performance of men as well as their lower average performance. I agree and stated that in my post.
Posted by Gary Becker at 05:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.lessig.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1270
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Response on Gender Gap in enrollments- BECKER:
» Gender from Gender
In the meantime, why not check out our blog ? We apologize for the inconvenience. For an explanation, read this... [Read More]
Tracked on August 12, 2006 04:53 AM
» dragonball xxx immagini from dragonball xxx immagini
dragonball xxx immagini [Read More]
Tracked on November 28, 2006 06:56 PM
» buffet caterer from buffet caterer
buffet caterer [Read More]
Tracked on January 25, 2007 08:03 AM
» Rape Drawing from Rape Drawing
Rape Drawing [Read More]
Tracked on March 16, 2007 07:05 AM
» rape pics from rape pics
rape pics [Read More]
Tracked on March 25, 2007 03:06 PM
» incest pics from incest pics
incest pics [Read More]
Tracked on March 27, 2007 09:26 AM
» Rape Videos from Rape Videos
Rape Videos [Read More]
Tracked on April 20, 2007 03:30 PM
» rape video from forced sex
forced sex [Read More]
Tracked on August 1, 2008 08:41 AM
Comments
India has the opposite sex ratio in their better known undergraduate colleges. U.S.-India can pay tango and American women can see what brown can do for them:)
Posted by Arun Khanna at August 6, 2006 08:53 AM | direct link
Oxford and Cambridge may provide some data points here. Cambridge undergraduates belong to one of 33 colleges, which compete. When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, most colleges were single-sex; but after Kings and Churchill went co-ed, the others followed. Competitive pressures also drove med school admissions from a small minority of women then to a bare majority now.
In England, the hot affirmative-action issue isn't so much gender or race, but class. Cambridge colleges used to discriminate mildly in favour of working-class children; their goal was to maximise exam scores at graduation three years later, and they expected to add more value to youngsters who'd been to less fancy schools. Recently the government has been trying to centralise and bureaucratise this by bringing in targers and financial incentives. It's not working so well any more.
Posted by Ross at August 6, 2006 04:21 PM | direct link
look!
电伴热
Posted by 环氧树脂 at August 8, 2006 03:28 AM | direct link
