Elite Universities and Women's Careers--Posner

An article in the New York Times of September 20 by Louise Story, entitled "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood," reports the results of surveys and interviews concerning career plans of women at the nation's most prestigious colleges, law schools, and business schools. Although not rigorously empirical, the article confirms--what everyone associated with such institutions has long known--that a vastly higher percentage of female than of male students will drop out of the work force to take care of their children. Some will resume full-time work at some point in the children's maturation; some will work part time; some will not work at all after their children are born, instead devoting their time to family and to civic activities. One survey of Yale alumni found that 90 percent of the male alumni in their 40s were still working, but only 56 percent of the female. A survey of Harvard Business School alumni found that 31 percent of the women who had graduated between 10 and 20 years earlier were no longer working at all, and another 31 percent were working part time. What appears to be new is that these earlier vintages did not expect to drop out of the workforce at such a high rate (though they did), whereas current students do expect this. That is not surprising, since the current students observe the career paths of their predecessors. So, contrary to the implication of the article, there is no evidence that the drop-out rate will rise. The article does not discuss the interesting policy issues presented by the disproportionate rate of exit of elite women from the workforce. Nor does it have much to say about why women drop out at the rate they do. The answer to the latter question seems pretty straightforward, however. Since like tend to marry like ("assortative mating"), women who attend elite educational institutions tend to marry men who attend such institutions (and for the further reason that marital search costs are at their minimum when the search is conducted within the same, coeducational institution). Those men have on average high expected incomes, probably higher than the expected incomes even of equally able women who have a full working career. Given diminishing marginal utility of income, a second, smaller income will often increase the welfare of a couple less than will the added household production if the person with the smaller income allocates all or most of her time to household production, freeing up more time for her spouse to work in the market. The reason that in most cases it is indeed the wife (hence my choice of pronoun) rather than the husband who gives up full-time work in favor of household production is not only that the husband is likely to have the higher expected earnings; it is also because, for reasons probably both biological and social, women on average have a greater taste and aptitude for taking care of children, and indeed for nonmarket activities generally, than men do. But it is at this point that policy questions arise. Even at the current very high tuition rates, there is excess demand for places at the elite colleges and professional schools, as shown by the high ratio of applications to acceptances at those schools. Demand is excess--supply and demand are not in balance--because the colleges and professional schools do not raise tuition to the market-clearing level but instead ration places in their entering classes on the basis (largely) of ability, as proxied by grades, performance on standardized tests, and extracurricular activities. Since women do as well on these measures as men, the student body of an elite educational institution is usually about 50 percent female. Suppose for simplicity that in an entering class at an elite law school of 100 students, split evenly among men and women, 45 of the men but only 30 of the women will have full-time careers in law. Then 5 of the men and 20 of the women will be taking places that would otherwise be occupied by men (and a few women) who would have more productive careers, assuming realistically that the difference in ability between those admitted and those just below the cut off for admission is small. While well-educated mothers contribute more to the human capital of their offspring than mothers who are not well educated, it is doubtful that a woman who graduates from Harvard College and goes on to get a law degree from Yale will be a better mother than one who stopped after graduating from Harvard. But I have to try to be precise about the meaning of "more productive" in this context. I mean only that if a man and woman of similar ability were competing for a place in the entering class of an elite professional school, the man would (on average) pay more for the place than the woman would; admission would create more "value added" for him than for her. The principal effect of professional education of women who are not going to have full working careers is to reduce the contribution of professional schools to the output of professional services. Not that the professional education the women who drop out of the workforce receive is worthless; if it were, such women would not enroll. Whether the benefit these women derive consists of satisfying their intellectual curiosity, reducing marital search costs, obtaining an expected income from part-time work, or obtaining a hedge against divorce or other economic misfortune, it will be on average a smaller benefit than the person (usually a man) whose place she took who would have a full working career would obtain from the same education. The professional schools worry about this phenomenon because the lower the aggregate lifetime incomes of their graduates, the lower the level of alumni donations the schools can expect to receive. (This is one reason medical schools are reluctant to admit applicants who are in their 40s or 50s.) The colleges worry for the same reason. But these particular worries have no significance for the welfare of society as a whole. In contrast, the fact that a significant percentage of places in the best professional schools are being occupied by individuals who are not going to obtain the maximum possible value from such an education is troubling from an overall economic standpoint. Education tends to confer external benefits, that is, benefits that the recipient of the education cannot fully capture in the higher income that the education enables him to obtain after graduation. This is true even of professional education, for while successful lawyers and businessmen command high incomes, those incomes often fall short of the contribution to economic welfare that such professionals make. This is clearest when the lawyer or businessman is an innovator, because producers of intellectual property are rarely able to appropriate the entire social gain from their production. Yet even noninnovative lawyers and businessmen, if successful--perhaps by virtue of the education they received at a top-flight professional school--do not capture their full social product in their income, at least if the income taxes they pay exceed the benefits they receive from government. Suppose a professional school wanted to correct the labor-market distortion that I have been discussing. (For I am not suggesting that the distortion is so serious as to warrant government intervention.) It would be unlawful discrimination to refuse admission to these schools to all women, for many women will have full working careers and some men will not. It would be rational but impracticable to impose a monetary penalty on the drop-outs (regardless of gender)--making them pay, say, additional tuition retroactively at the very moment that they were giving up a market income. It would also be infeasible to base admission on an individualized determination of whether the applicant was likely to have a full working career. A better idea, though counterintuitive, might be to raise tuition to all students but couple the raise with a program of rebates for graduates who work full time. For example, they might be rebated 1 percent of their tuition for each year they worked full time. Probably the graduates working full time at good jobs would not take the rebate but instead would convert it into a donation. The real significance of the plan would be the higher tuition, which would discourage applicants who were not planning to have full working careers (including applicants of advanced age and professional graduate students). This would open up places to applicants who will use their professional education more productively; they are the more deserving applicants. Although women continue to complain about discrimination, sometimes quite justly, the gender-neutral policies that govern admission to the elite professional schools illustrate discrimination in favor of women. Were admission to such schools based on a prediction of the social value of the education offered, fewer women would be admitted.

Comments

[Cogliostro Demon]

How can we predict which women will have children?

Two women got to a top-ranked law school, say UGa. or FSU. One marries and has children, the other's womb is barren. The first woman drops out and raises her family, the other, rises to be Chief Judge of the 11th Circuit. How can we tell which is which at 21?

[Ash]

Posner argues that when female graduates of elite institutions drop out of the workforce to stay at home, there is an overall drop in labour productivity. However, it is precisely because the female spouse is dedicating herself to the household that her husband can be fully professionally productive (and, therefore, presumably be worthy of his elite education). If there was a complete and equal division of labour, both partners would only be partially professionally productive, and this would not mean any difference in overall economic/labour production. Of course, if we all did not have families or personal lives, then we would all be professionally productive and overall economic production would increase. In this regard, university admissions committees should also be weeding out those men and women who dare to have a social life, care about public issues etc which all take away from their time in their cubicles.

Posner misses the central point of the article, which pertains to the social and feminist implications of the women most equipped to break the glass ceiling being more interested in cleaning it. There is nothing necessarily wrong with staying at home and taking care of one's family - - the women who choose this path are not empty Stepford wives. However, that this is such a consistent trend speaks to prevailing social discourses that advance a certain vision of an ideal life for women, and implicitly and explicitly pressures women to pursue this. And even when it is a rational ie. economic decision as to which spouse stays at home (that is, when the wife's income is lower than her husband's, even with equal qualifications), this still points to broad-based sexism and sexual discrimmination. There are plenty of women who genuinely choose to drop out of the workforce and find fulfillment elsewhere; however, given prevailing social norms and pressures, and the continued discrimmination in terms of labour compensation, it is unfair and inaccurate to penalise women for their 'choice' to leave the workforce.

Posner has an extremely limited conception of what is socially and economically worthwhile and an even more questionable measure of productivity. This is an inherent flaw with economic analysis that seeks to address social and political questions when it articulates no normative foundations itself. In Posner's world, women yet again have to defend their choices: women must justify why they choose to pursue a career and not dedicate their resources to the family, and now, they must justify why they should be educated if they do not plan on being productive corporate drones - - even though it is precisely their choice not to that enables such corporate drones to exist.

[Harry Nelson]

Both Posner in his editorial, and Ms. Wexler, sourced in the article itself, are stuck in the 70's. That is, they believe that the only real measure of worth of a person is that income that they produce. And that such an elite education gone underutilized, either in its intrinsic value of income production (Posner's point), or its social change value(Wexler's point), is tragic. Ms., excuse me, Dr. Wexler, goes so far as to lament this is something that she thought "would be solved by now." A generation has passed these two by. The 70's did produce a generation of women who flooded America's Colleges and Universities under the lie that "you can have it all." That, as a woman, you are entitled to a full professional career with all of the opportunity and compensation that accompanies, with no drag placed on it by family issues. AND, you are entitled to be the best Mother, with no prejudice on the fact that someone else actually raises their child 12 of the 15 hours that they are awake every day.

As Posner points out, the fact is that many of these women did eventually realize this under the stark reality of, well, reality. That you get what you pay for. That you get out of things what you put into them.

We all should have hope that women in today's elite universities see education, not as a job or husband producing "investment," rather an exercise that grows the mind and heart. And one that will pay dividends either in a career, or equally(or more), at home.

They realize that motherhood is more than daycare. That it is taking a primary role in building the next generation. A much more noble and difficult cause than taking $1, and turning it into $1.40(pre-tax)...

[Renuka Sane]

How does one reconcile this article to declining fertility rates everywhere in the West? Raising the bar for women's entry to professional schools will actually make the fertility decision that much more difficult. Is it not more likely that women will postpone/give up on babies if the cost of their education has been greater?

[Linda Hirshman]

"But I do not want my tax dollars going to pay for Hurricane Katrina, because some millionaire gave money to the U of C Law School to turn out these princesses and is deducting it."

Can anyone tell me what this sentence means?

Posted by R at September 27, 2005 01:05 PM
Dear R
I just glanced back here to see if there was anything I could use for an article I'm writing on this subject and found your post. Although I generally don't respond to commens like Can anyone tell me what this sentence means, because it's an implicit comment that the stance is so stupid no one could understand it.
But assuming it was just a passing fit of lack of understanding of basic principles, I will say that there's a public burden of all costs of government including Hurricane Katrina. If someone gives the U of C a million dollars, he usually deducts it as a charitable donation and pays less taxes. If the cost of government does not go down, the rest of us pay more taxes. If the U of C uses the money to pay for the non tuition part of legal education for students who then go into babysitting, I am indirectly paying for that with my tax money.
Get it now?

[Glenda]

Your definition of "productivity" is the foundation upon which you premise your conclusions (generalizations is probably a better word.) Since your definition is so narrow, your conclusions are too.

If education at these prestigious colleges has sunk to the point where it is only about who makes more money with their degree and how much money they can give to their alma mater until they die, then I recommend the leaders of these colleges go back and try to get in touch again with the reasons they initially chose the field of education for their profession. Believe me, it is a much broader and more honorable calling than what you have painted in this article.

[PGM]

"Although women continue to complain about discrimination, sometimes quite justly, the gender-neutral policies that govern admission to the elite professional schools illustrate discrimination in favor of women. Were admission to such schools based on a prediction of the social value of the education offered, fewer women would be admitted."

I find it ironic that in the conclusion, the author uses the phrase "social value" when he is really referring to the pure market-driven economic value of making lots of money as opposed to any other type of "socially" valuable, productive and enriching activity. I know many professional women who don't drop out of the work force when they are raising families, but rather take jobs with high social value, but less pay, simply because those jobs are both professionally and socially rewarding and allow adequate and meaningful time with family. In addition, these women are among the most organized, effective and creative people I know because circumstances require them to juggle so many responsibilities and still succeed in work and at home. They have to -- there simply is no other choice. How can that be a waste of an education - elite or otherwise? Furthermore, the conclusion of the author is a sad reflection on our society that we value making money (by men in particular) over taking even a reasonable amount of responsibility for raising a family -- our next generation of money earners and social contributors.

[Jan Russell]

The obvious extension of your argument, Judge Posner and Mr. Becker, is that giving medical treatment to gentlemen of your age has a diminishing marginal utility, and we should deny medical assistance to men over the age, let's say, of fifty. For that matter, food and shelter have a diminishing marginal utility for men your age.
The point of this comment is to illustrate that economic analysis is not appropriate for every question.

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