University Admissions: At least the frat boys’ll be happy…
June 12, 2007 · By Matthew Campbell
They’re sounding the warning bells over at CTV again; this time over a StatsCan study that looks into the wage gap between men and women in the context of university education. The bulk of the report is obsessed with the fact that apparently women are still making less than men despite the fact that we’ve done everything socially possible since the early ’90s aside from barring men from high-paying jobs to give women dominance in the workforce (and even Bob Rae was on his way to implementing sexist policies known as “employment equity” when he was turfed from office in 1995!).
Now, I could dwell a tad on the obvious holes in this article, including the fact that the raw data on how large this gap is, but I would rather draw everyone’s attention to the third paragraph, where the article neatly tucks in what is perhaps an even greater scandal:
From 1991 to 2001, the proportion of 25- to 29-year-old women holding university degrees went to 34 per cent from 21 while the proportion of men with degrees in their 20s rose only moderately, to 21 per cent from 16.
So to put this in context, women make up somewhere around 54% of the population and 34% hold recent degrees, but men who make up the other 46% of Canadians only hold recent degrees 21% of the time. Transpose those numbers to the whole population and 18.34% of the population are women with new degrees, yet only 9.7% are degree holding men; in other words, we’re graduating literally twice as many women as men despite a roughly 50/50 split in the population.
Granted, these number could also have flaws, like not accounting for grads who move outside of Canada for decent wages (eg. doctors, engineers, accountants, bankers; all largely male areas of study), but it still shouldn’t result in a 67/33 split in favour of women. Instead, our taxpayer-funded public institutions might be skewing the admissions proceedings in favour of only half those taxpayers; am I the only one who cares about the real sexism here?
Actually, Matthew, the universities are not skewing anything. If you look at university participation by sex in comparison to how young men and women are doing in high school, then it should come as no surprise that women are getting in and men are not. This is the first reason for the statistic. Next, when you look at university participation by sex compared to the strength of the labour market, (where men still typically dominate for many reasons) then you will notice that when the labour market is strong, that many men choose to work rather than go to school – given that the opportunity cost for going to university is higher when they can get a good paying job straight out of high school.
On the topic of the labour market, when it is really strong, fewer men actually finish high school because they can get really good paying jobs – and as you know, not finishing high school automatically excludes you from university entrance.
Finally, if you take a look at participation rates of men and women in university and compare them to the participation rates of men and women in college, you will find the exact opposite to be true: men participate at a higher rate than women. This could be a function of a lot of different factors.
But what it all boils down to is choice. Men and women make many different choices about their postsecondary participation (or non-participation as the case may be). Many of these choices happen at junior and senior high (i.e. poor literacy skills coming out of elementry school, the courses they take which may exclude them from the university track – dropping out to work – poor grades – not knowing what to take if you went to school, etc.).
Now what is more interesting than the sex of university participants is the family income that these students come from. Canadian students are half as likely to participate at university if they come from a family in the lowest income quartile, compared to those in the two highest. When you add distance into the mix (i.e. if you are a rural kid vs. a city kid) then you are 8 times less likely to participate at university if you come from a poor family that lives more than 80 km from the nearest university than those in the highest income quartiles. How does this compare to college? Well, the participation rate accross all income quartiles is pretty much flat. So there is no difference at the lower levels. There are also many more colleges in rural areas, so distance matters less.
The largest single factor that determines a person’s participation in postsecondary education is the highest level of education reach by their parents. You are more likely to go to university if your mom or dad went. You are more likely to go to college if your mom or dad finished college. You are more likely to not go at all if neither of your parents did.
As we know, education level is a typical measure for income. So, it is no surprise then that poor kids participate at a much lower rate than the rest of the kids in Canada.
The reason I bring this up is because no one chooses which family they are born into, or the income of their parents, or for that matter, where your parents live, and these three things actually matter – whereas sex does not.
I think the statistics are interesting, but do not tell the right story. Some choices are made for you (the family you are born into) and others are not (how well you do in high school) – I highly doubt that the education system in any province is skewed to make sure more women participate at university than men. The data just doesn’t support that theory.