The rather leisurely pace of the American educational schedule has largely been designed for males, who tend to mature slower than females and who face a much less pressing biological clock.
In recent decades, there has been much interest in “redshirting” your son, such as by having him repeat kindergarten so that he is a year older than his classmates and thus enjoys athletic, academic, and social advantages over them.
Similarly, the lengthy traditional American higher education schedules — four years for a BA, four years for an MD, three for a JD, two for an MBA, and five to seven years for a Ph.D. — are designed for young men who need a few years to mature.
For example, I mentioned recently that most elite colleges don’t offer majors in business administration. Instead, you are expected to major in, say, economics, then return to a university at age 27 for a two year MBA program. By the time you are 30, you will probably know what career and perhaps what metropolis will be yours for the middle decades of your life.
Charles Murray wrote a book on education policy in which he was about to praise majoring in accounting because in just four years you could be launched on a professional career … only to find out that now you had to spend five years in higher education to become a CPA.
If you graduate from college at 22 and immediately begin a Ph.D. program, your best case scenario for winning tenure (5 years for Ph.D. and 6 years on the tenure track) is age 33. If your doctorate takes 7 years and it takes you 14 to win tenure, you’ll be 43.
Making partner at a law firm might take 8 to 13 years, so if you go straight from college to law school to a Big Law firm, you’ll have made partner somewhere from age 33 to age 38.
All this time-killing isn’t that detrimental for men’s lives because … so what if it delays their fathering children to age 35 or 45? They’ve got plenty of time, right?
Except that evolving cultural norms have been trending toward demonizing men who marry women who went to school more than a year or two later than them. One reason that the only thing everybody can agree upon is that “pedophilia” is the worst thing ever is that a lot of 37 year old women want to socially bully well-paid 37 year old men into marrying 37 year old women, such as, to pick a random example, themselves, rather than marrying 27 year old women, which is downright pedophilia by 2026 standards.
But now females make up the majority of higher education students. So are we so sure that educational traditions invented in the Age of Patriarchy are ideal for women?
Perhaps we should be thinking more about rearranging traditional schedules to help women get finished faster with education and launched on a career so they will have time to have babies before their clock ticks down.
I’m focusing here on the right quartile or so of the bell curve, the kids who can absorb academic material faster than average and have hopes of advanced degrees.
From Today’s Hospitalist:
Sacrifices female physicians make to have children
When researchers asked women about regrets, about half said they wished they had started a family earlier.
August 2023
A NEW STUDY that looks at how female physicians juggle having and raising children while maintaining their careers found that two-thirds delayed starting a family by about five years—and that about half wish they hadn’t waited so long.
The research in JAMA Network Open looked at a group of just over 1,000 women across various stages of training. …
When researchers asked female physicians what they wished they had done differently, nearly half (45.7%) said they wished that they had conceived earlier. Looking back, 45% said they wished that they had cut their work hours, 39% said they wished that they had taken an extended leave, and 29% said they wished that they had pursued oocyte cryopreservation. …
The study pointed out that the strategies used by women “suggest that fertility and family-building concerns among women in medicine may contribute to ongoing gender disparities and attrition and represent a potentially critical area for policy reform and future change.”
The decision for women to put off childbearing by five years may help explain another major finding of the study: Just over one-third (36.8%) of respondents said they had experienced infertility.
Researchers said that the infertility rate of female physicians was alarming, particularly when compared to infertility rates of nonphysicians, which range from 6% to 19%. While the study found that delayed childbearing is likely associated with lower fertility rates among female physicians, researchers also acknowledged that lifestyle factors such as shift work and poor sleep quality may have some impact on fertility.
The study also found that 11.5% of respondents underwent oocyte or embryo cryopreservation. Less than 10% said insurance covered the procedure.
You can think about speeding up your daughter’s education in term of A) What society would have to do and B) What you can do.
Paywall here.
