Two good articles from Bloomberg Business Week highlighting a huge issue that is not getting enough attention - the lack of men getting college educations.
The chart below is from Men are Becoming the Undereducated Gender and shows the long-standing college education gap between women and men.
Even more alarming, the gap is forecast to grow with 60% of all college students being women in 2019 (up from 57% in 2011).
Why this is a huge problem is covered in Unemployment Falls Fast in U.S. if Men Get College Degrees. Key quote:
The U.S. workplace is polarizing between the education haves and have-nots, says David Autor, professor of economics at MIT. So-called middle-skill jobs, typically well-paying work that doesn’t require extensive higher education, are vanishing, dividing the labor force into high- and low-skill positions. While women are moving up the knowledge ladder, male educational attainment is growing at a slower rate.
The education haves and have-nots is starkly shown in the unemployment rate by education levels.
The current unemployment rate for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher is 4.2%, for people with a high school education it's 8 percent and for people with no high school diploma it's 12.6 percent.
We've long followed two inter-related trends - the Rise of Women and the End of Men. The basics behind these are trends is a growing set of data showing that men are falling behind women in a wide range of well being, educational, and employment measures.
These trends are leading to major societal shifts - some good and some bad.
But one key issues jumps out - America needs to figure out why men are under performing in education and fix this problem.
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