So I’ve really been sucked into social media, particularly Twitter, lately. Getting news in 140 character chunks is just easy right now. My eyes start glazing over at anything longer. And I’m a reader. I used to go to bed at 9pm and sit in bed reading until 11:30pm or later. A Song of Fire and Ice just about murdered me when I read them 3 years ago. I think I read all of them within a month? And those are some pretty hefty books. (God, I can’t wait for the next one)… but I digress….
This article caught my attention though, retweeted by Postsecret. It’s a perfect example why a degree at a prohibitively expensive profit-whoring “college” an elite higher learning institution is pretty much useless for most women.
Women with elite educations opting-out of full time careers
“Even though elite graduates are more likely to earn advanced degrees, marry at later ages and have higher expected earnings, they are still opting out of full-time work at much higher rates than other graduates, especially if they have children,” said Hersch.
Hersch’s research finds that 60 percent of female graduates from elite colleges are working full time compared to 68 percent of women from other schools.
I’m incredibly surprised by the 60% stat. I never would have guessed that so many women were foregoing careers to raise their children, particularly those who may have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their education.
A common question associated with opting out is whether highly educated women are willingly choosing to exit the labor force to care for their children or whether they are “pushed out” by inflexible workplaces. But Hersch said this hypothesis of inflexible workplaces does not explain why labor market activity differs between graduates of elite and non-elite schools.
“Graduates of elite institutions are likely to have a greater range of workplace options as well as higher expected wages than graduates of less selective institutions, which would suggest that labor market activity would be higher among such women,” Hersch writes.
“Without discounting the well-known challenges of combining family and professional responsibilities, increasing workplace flexibility alone may have only a limited impact of reducing the gap between graduates of elite and non-elite schools.”
Are women realizing they can’t have it all? An expensive lesson, no doubt. I’m sure it’s absolutely baffling to feminists reading this article that so many women choose to forgo their careers for their families. Particularly the kidless feminists.
Hersch found that when comparing graduates from elite and less selective schools, the largest gap in full-time labor market activity is among women who also earned a master’s in business degree.
“Married MBA mothers with a bachelor’s degree from the most selective schools are 30 percentage points less likely to be employed full time than are graduates of less selective schools,” said Hersch.
I have a hunch about this, and about these statistics in general. I think women go to Harvard or Princeton to get their business degrees, and happen to fall in love with the Cute Guy sitting across the way in Economics 101. Love turns to marriage, marriage to kids, and Cute Guy ends up with an Elite Job, so they can afford for her to stay home. And so she takes the opportunity. So she essentially spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to land a rich husband, whether she realizes it or not.
Just how much does that elite degree count for once you’ve been out of the workforce for 5-10 years?
But I’m not sure about the Rich Husband Hypothesis, because obviously the couple would be absolutely swimming in student loan debt. Do elite college degrees actually net that much more money? Obviously so if he ends up a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, but how many MBA students from elite schools turn CEO? I know I have readers way smarter than me on this subject, what do you guys think?
