Women who graduated from highly selective colleges more likely to drop out of workforce

Which women are more likely to drop out of the workforce?

… women who attended highly selective schools are more likely to opt out of the workforce than are their counterparts from less selective schools.

A university professor who was “absolutely infuriated” to see so many highly educated women leave the workforce decided to study this topic.

Joni Hersch, a law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University, analyzed data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates and crossed the information with the Carnegie Foundation’s classifications of schools and selectivity measures from Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. She found that women who attended highly selective schools are more likely to opt out of the workforce than are their counterparts from less selective schools.

Why?  For one thing, these women tend to marry high-achieving men.

Such a divide might have its seeds in the college admissions office. …  students who attend the most selective schools tend to come from wealthier backgrounds than those who opt for less selective schools. They don’t take out as many student loans. They have a better shot at getting accepted to an elite graduate school. And they will be surrounded by (and therefore more likely to marry) men with similarly successful backgrounds and strong earnings potential, making their financial contribution less critical. (Maybe this is what Susan Patton was trying to say?) 

Such women can actually afford to step back from the workforce, a luxury that women without spousal safety nets or hefty bank accounts just don’t have, Hersch says.

This helps explain the low numbers of women in higher management positions.

There are major consequences to this opt-out trend among graduates from selective programs, Hersch says: Elite companies hire from elite schools, but women from elite schools don’t stick around for long, limiting the talent pipeline for leadership positions.

Doctors and teachers are more likely to continue working, perhaps because they can often avoid the long hours required in other professions that women choose.

A lot depends on the kind of degree that a married woman with children has obtained. If she is a physician, has a PhD, or has an MA in education (i.e., is probably a K-12 teacher), she is as likely to be employed as graduates from lower-tier schools. But those degrees involve only 24% of mothers who graduated from tier 1 schools. Those with law degrees are 9 percentage points less likely to be employed than graduates from lower-tier schools; those with MBAs are 16 percentage points less likely to be employed, and the largest single group, those with just a BA, are 13 percentage points less likely to be employed.

Charles Murray points out how these women may be helping to sharpen the edges of our nation’s class divisions.

So Professor Hersch has established that the next generation of children who have everything from genes to family structure to money going for them are also more likely to have a stay-at-home mom — and not just any mom, but one who has been sifted through the micron-fine mesh of the admissions process at elite schools and been judged to have both the IQ and other sterling qualities that gained her entrance, and who is devoting that package of exceptional abilities to the upbringing of her children. Lucky kids. And a new upper class polished to an ever-shinier gloss.

Here’s the paper:  Opting Out among Women with Elite Education

Related:

• How would you advise your daughter? (Cost of College)
• Non-marital births by education level as part of the growing class divide (Cost of College)

How would you advise your daughter?

Would you advise your daughter to look for a husband while she’s in college?

Susan Patton set off internet mania with her recent ‘letter to the Daily Princetonian newspaper advising the school’s female students: “You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you. . . . Find a husband on campus before you graduate.”‘

Her advice proved wildly unpopular among a vocal segment of progressive thinkers.

Feminist attacks on Ms. Patton began immediately—the paper’s website was swamped with complaints, the Twitter crowd was livid, and writers lit into her at Slate, New York magazine and beyond.

Another mother gave the same advice.

Five years ago when she was a Dartmouth college junior, Emily Esfahani Smith was surprised when her mother gave her similar advice to start looking for a husband.  Why would “a strong, career-oriented feminist” start pressuring her daughter to get married?

..  She knew what few, if any, feminists would tell young women today: There is far more to happiness than career success.

It turns out academically gifted women value their careers less than similar men do.

Career success and relationships are both undoubtedly important to women’s happiness, but many young and ambitious women value their personal lives more than their career aspirations. And that feeling intensifies over time.

In a 2009 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, David Lubinski and his team at Vanderbilt found that in a sample of academically gifted young adults, women became less career-oriented than men over time. As they approached middle age, women also placed more value than men on spending time with family, community and friends. These differences became more pronounced with parenthood.

Some reasons to try for early marriage:

1. There is a larger pool of eligible men for younger women, given the historical patterns of assortative mating and hypergamy.
2. Finding the right husband is important whether a woman wants to prioritize career or family.
3. A good marriage can be personally fulfilling.

Some reasons to wait:

1. In some cases, early marriages are at greater risk of divorce.  (The more important factors correlating with higher divorce rates appear to be marriage at age 20 or younger and the lack of a college degree.)
2. Marriage may limit a woman’s education and career choices.
3. Some people need more time to develop and understand their values.

The middle ground:

… Don’t get married so young you don’t understand life, or too old that you can’t experience the joy of losing yourself in a loving spouse and family. I’d spend a couple years seeing the world after the Ivy League before making the leap.

Megan McArdle expounded on the topic, and made the point that the “age at which the right person comes along depends on luck, not some kind of calendar”.

In this annoying but slightly amusing video, Garfunkel and Oates sing about how things change for a woman between the ages of 29 and 31.

Related:

• SPECIAL SECTION: Responses to Susan Patton ’77 (thedailyprincetonian.wordpress.com)
• College-educated wives dropping out of the workforce (Cost of College)

Missing fathers are at the core of a ‘vicious cycle’ of poverty

Missing fathers are both a cause and an effect of poverty

The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades, and female workers, whose earnings generally increased, a prominent labor economist argues in a new survey of existing research.

MIT professor David H. Autor examined the poverty of single-parent families for Third Way, a center-left policy research organization.

In this telling, the economic struggles of male workers are both a cause and an effect of the breakdown of traditional households. Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so some women are choosing to raise children by themselves, in turn often producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners.

“A vicious cycle may ensue,” wrote Professor Autor and his co-author, Melanie Wasserman, a graduate student, “with the poor economic prospects of less educated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons, thus potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.”

Encourage marriage or pump up the economy?  Is it a chicken or egg scenario?

Conservatives have long argued that society should encourage stable parental relationships. A recent report by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia concluded that promoting marriage is the best way “to make family life more stable for children whose parents don’t enjoy the benefit of a college education.”

Liberals have tended to argue that the government should focus instead on improving economic opportunities. Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, said the paper underscored that addressing social problems was a means to improve economic opportunities.

Here’s an idea.

Instead of making marriage more attractive, he said, it might be better for society to help make men more attractive.

—————————

The chance of a child ending up poor declines by 82 percent when raised in a two-parent family.

Although correlation does not imply causation, there’s no doubt that a caring father adds tremendous value to a child’s upbringing.

According to the U.S. census, the poverty rate for single parents with children in the U.S. in 2009 was 37.1 percent. For married families the rate was only 6.8 percent. The chance of a child ending up poor declines by 82 percent when raised in a two-parent family. As the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector reports, “Some of this difference in poverty is due to the fact that single parents tend to have less education than married couples.” Even adjusting for that factor “the married poverty rate will still be more than 75 percent lower.”

————————–

Fathers have been disappearing from homes across America over the last 50 years.

… Fifteen million U.S. children, or 1 in 3, live without a father, and nearly 5 million live without a mother. In 1960, just 11 percent of American children lived in homes without fathers.

America is awash in poverty, crime, drugs and other problems, but more than perhaps anything else, it all comes down to this, said Vincent DiCaro, vice president of the National Fatherhood Initiative: Deal with absent fathers, and the rest follows.

Quick Links – College recommended but not marriage; record student loan write-off; minimal sequester effects; plus more

◊◊◊  Why Do Economists Urge College, But Not Marriage? (The Daily Beast)

Megan McArdle:

Both are good for you. Only one is viewed as a proper aim of society.

College improves your earning prospects.  So does marriage.  Education makes you more likely to live longer.  So does marriage.  Yet while many economist vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married.  Why is that, asks Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry? His answer:

Meanwhile, economists’ “cosmopolitan perspective” (as Cowen puts it) makes them not feel good at the idea of public policy that would interfere with personal choices (allowing for a second that getting married is a “personal choice” in a way that going to college isn’t). Most economists think that government should not interfere or have a stance one way or another with decisions that feel intimate to people. That is a complete value judgement. And it’s a completely defensible one.

But at the level of the economics profession, this leads to bias: much more ink is spilled on, and thought given to the college wage premium than the marriage wage premium. One is mostly praised and interpreted in a certain way, while the other is mostly ignored. And, of course, the thing that academic economics focuses on has an effect on elite debate and public policy, especially when the socially liberal, pro-higher ed biases of economists line up well with those of the rest of the elite.

Another reason suggested by McArdle is that economists have typically been very successful in college, but perhaps not so successful in marriage.

◊◊◊  Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013 (Chicago Tribune)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013, up more than 36 percent from the year-ago period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped in a slow U.S. economic recovery, an Equifax study showed.

◊◊◊ The sequester happened and the sky didn’t fall.

Report: Most Colleges Not Hit Hard by Sequester

Most universities will face only minimal effects from the automatic budget cuts that went into effect at the beginning of the month, according to a report released Thursday by Moody’s Investors Service. The report looked at the projected financial effect of the 5 percent cuts to domestic discretionary spending, known as sequestration, and found that only 1 percent of colleges and not-for-profits stood to lose more than 3 percent of their annual revenue as the result of the cuts.

Research universities were most likely to be hit hard by the cuts because federal funding for scientific research is one of the areas affected. While some financial aid programs — particularly federal work-study and the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant — will also be cut, the Pell Grant, bedrock of need-based financial aid programs, is safe for the 2013-14 academic year.

◊◊◊  1 in 5 high school-age boys are diagnosed with ADHD, double the rate for girls.

Fifteen percent of school-age boys have received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, the data showed; the rate for girls was 7 percent. Diagnoses among those of high-school age — 14 to 17 — were particularly high, 10 percent for girls and 19 percent for boys. About one in 10 high-school boys currently takes A.D.H.D. medication, the data showed.

It makes me wonder if just “being a boy” is considered a disease.  Schools, pressure to succeed in academics  and the pharmaceutical industry are all getting blamed for what may be an over-diagnosis problem.

Long hours may explain why educated women quit the workforce – ‘the time divide’

Why do so many highly educated mothers drop out of the work force?  Probably because they can afford it and because the long hours they are required to work are tough on family life.

… Today, whether you’re male or female, if you’re taking home an upper-middle-class salary you’re expected to work an average of 50 hours, and probably more, a lot of it after you’ve gone home. As of 1997, the average workweek for a man with graduate education was 50 hours, and for a women 47—that three-hour difference can be accounted for, of course, by all the women who went on mommy tracks. Among American dual-career couples, in the 1990s, 15.2 percent of those with at least college degrees worked a joint 100 hours a week or more, whereas only 9.6 of couples without diplomas did that. Try to imagine what that 100-hour workweek looked like to a child: that’s five 10-hour days, plus commutes, for both parents. And those are just averages—for people at the top of their fields, the numbers were a great deal bigger.

That the workweek is ballooning for America’s educated, salaried classes, even as it’s shrinking for less educated, hourly workers, or turning into part-time work, has been called the “time divide”—the increasing inequality of time spent working, which tracks with the rise of economic inequality. As of 2002, for example, Americans in the top fourth of earners toiled an average of 15 hours more than earners in the bottom fourth….

Women currently enrolled in college do not fully realize the price of “leaning in” to their career, according to Judith Shulevitz writing in The New Republic.

When I meet young female undergraduates and graduate students today, which I do when I speak at universities, I don’t find them neo-traditionalist or lacking in aspiration. They don’t seem to want to stay home with their kids. They have every intention of using their formidable educations to achieve professional success, just as I did when I was in college. And like me back then, they don’t really grasp what that will require.

In our interview, Jacobs told me about a recent class in which he and his students discussed a study done of graduates of the University of Chicago’s business school. After 10 years, the study’s researchers found, the female graduates were making half of what their male classmates were making; the 90^th percentile for women was where the median was for men. “Of course,” added Jacobs, “they’re all making a ton of money. It’s not like you could feel terrible for these women. But in terms of the disparity, it was pretty dramatic.” As the discussion continued, the young women in the class started putting their heads in their hands or on their desks. They hadn’t heard any of this before. But they’ll be hearing a lot more of it in the years to come.

I was clueless about all this when I was in college, mainly because my plans did not include children.  It was only after my first child was of school age and my job required me to be away from home 50-60 hours a week did I fully realize the challenges of balancing work and family.  My long commute, which contributed to the lack of flexibility, was a particular problem.  Even with good childcare, my husband and I could not escape the stress of trying to manage a family while dealing with a combined workweek of more than 100 hours.  So I simply quit working, grateful that I could afford it.  Other circumstances, including a major home remodeling project, also factored into my decision.

Another consideration in having one parent stay home with the children is the expanded flexibility it often gives the working parent to grow his career.  In our case, my husband no longer needed to factor in my availability when he had to work late or go out of town on business.  So in addition to lowering stress levels at home, it probably helped him in advancing his career.

Of course there are downsides to having one spouse drop out of the workforce.

Shulevitz thinks we need more government regulation so that professional mothers can stay in the workforce.

 Professional accomplishment shouldn’t and doesn’t have to look like this. The main reason white-collar workers can be driven to work 80-hour-or-so weeks is that very few of them have government protections. Most of them are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which mandates the 40-hour-week and overtime pay. American managers aren’t allowed to join unions. Other countries have laws that protect against overwork even for professionals, such as standard or maximum number of hours anyone can work in a week….

Related:  ’84% of working women want to stay home with kids’ (Cost of College)

Lack of college-educated men may be a reason for declining marriage numbers

The lack of college-educated men may signal more problems for the future of marriage.

The importance of marriage is on the rise among women while decreasing among men.

 … According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Gender imbalance may be creating an obstacle to marriage for college-educated women.

… Across the United States today, young women are much more likely to graduate from college than their male peers, a trend that’s been compounding itself for a few decades now. And because college graduates overwhelmingly tend to date other college graduates, that’s created an enormous imbalance in the national dating pool. In Portland, the situation is particularly dire. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 33 percent more women in Portland who are under the age of 35 and have at least a bachelor’s degree in than there are men. That’s on par with New York, which is notorious for its lopsided gender ratio.  

Marriage is on the decline, and the lack of college-educated men suggests a continuation of this trend for highly educated women, a group that has been most resistant to the trend so far.

Where to find college-educated men
Recently I was at local watering hole on one of their ladies’ nights, a practice I mistakenly thought had been ruled illegal.  By the looks of the crowd, I would say that young women looking for college-educated men of marrying age might want to check this place out.  Promoting itself as “definitely worth the 30 minute train ride from” New York City, this establishment might be especially attractive to NYC women who are experiencing the effects of that city’s gender imbalance.  But considering the long-term trend, I wonder if we’ll soon be seeing “men’s nights” at these types of places.

Related:

• College-educated women marry at higher rates (Cost of College)
• College Graduation Score: Women 30%, Men 22% (businessweek.com)
• The Worst Cities for College-Educated Women Trying to Find a Decent Date (The Atlantic)

Quick Links – fewer men want to marry; record average net worth

»»»  Women finding scarcity of men who want to get married

The battle of the sexes is alive and well. According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997 – from 28 percent to 37 percent. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Believe it or not, modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.

Women are the losers.

It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life. The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.

Suzanne Venker says women are to blame

So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.

The war on men (Fox News)

……

»»»  ‘American Households Hit 43-Year Low In Net Worth’

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The median net worth of American households has dropped to a 43-year low as the lower and middle classes appear poorer and less stable than they have been since 1969.

According to a recent study by New York University economics professor Edward N. Wolff, median net worth is at the decades-low figure of $57,000 (in 2010 dollars). And as the numbers in his study reflect, the situation only appears worse when all the statistics are taken as a whole.

Who’s to blame?

An August Pew Research Center study found that many in the middle-class are divided on how they believe this gap widened.

Fully 85 percent of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living. Of those who feel this way, 62 percent say “a lot” of the blame lies with Congress, while 54 percent say the same about banks and financial institutions, 47 percent about large corporations, 44 percent about the Bush administration, 39 percent about foreign competition and 34 percent about the Obama administration.

Just 8 percent put “a lot” of blame on the middle class itself.

An ominous sign for future prosperity

Wolff’s focus on total wealth not only measures how much money a household brings in, but also the amount it accumulates. This latter number is very significant — economically secure households are generally more comfortable spending their disposable income, and are less likely to become a drag on the social safety net.

’84% of working women want to stay home with kids’

According to a new partnered survey cosponsored by ForbesWoman andTheBump.com, a growing number of women see staying home to raise children (while a partner provides financial support) to be the ideal circumstances of motherhood.  Forget the corporate climb; these young mothers have another definition of success: setting work aside to stay home with the kids….

… according to our survey, 84% of working women told ForbesWoman and TheBump that staying home to raise children is a financial luxury they aspire to.

What’s more, more than one in three resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality.
Is ‘Opting Out’ The New American Dream For Working Women? (Forbes)

But a high standard of living is more important than staying home.

As one (working) mom of two told me, she may dream of leaving work to take care of her kids, but the (financial) reality of it is not so ideal. “Sure, if my husband made so much money that I could spend time with the kids, still afford great vacations and maybe the occasional baby sitter to take a class or go out with friends, I’d be the first to sign up,” she said. “So maybe while it’s a luxury I do think about, it’s not one I would want unless it was actually luxurious. I don’t want to be a stay at home mom who clips coupons or plans her weekly menu to make ends meet… If that’s the case, I’d gladly go on working to avoid that fate.”

This leads me to wonder if many men also aspire to stay home with the kids.  I doubt it, but maybe part of the reason is because they have lower expectations of what their wives could earn.  Or maybe there are other reasons.

Only about 20% of SAHMs think they’d be happier working outside the home.

Other highlights:

Very few SAHMs are sorry they left the workplace, but I’m intrigued by the odd way Forbes chose to relay this politically incorrect data.  I may be reading too much into it, but when every other percentage in their story is given as an exact number, there seems to be an attempt to inflate this measure.

More than 10% of stay-at-home moms regret giving up their career.

Their wish to be home with their children may be affecting productivity, especially since a happy worker is a productive worker.

Approximately half of working moms agree their overall happiness would increase if they didn’t work. More than a third (34%) of working moms admit that their work performance was slacking a bit and they wished they were home with baby after returning to work. In fact, 47% agree that their overall happiness would increase if they weren’t working. On the other hand, only nearly one in five (19%) of stay-at-home moms admit their overall happiness would increase if they worked outside the home.

Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist, advises women:

Pick your spouse carefully. 
If you want to stay home with kids, don’t marry a guy who can’t earn a living. If you want to stay home with kids, make it clear that even though you earn more than the guy, the guy will be the breadwinner. If you want to stay home with kids then you put all your financial hopes in the guy’s career. Whatever his earning ability is, then that is your earning ability, because you are a team, and he is the breadwinner.

With the declining “supply” of men who are college-educated, our daughters may find it difficult to follow this advice.  My advice would be to first make sure you can support yourself before you go looking for that male breadwinner.

HT Ann Althouse

Related:

• Trouble for some marriages where wives earn more than husbands (Cost of College)
• Bias Persists for Women of Science, a Study Finds (NY Times)

Trouble for some marriages where wives earn more than husbands

As women continue to outpace men in earning college degrees, some marriages in which wives make more money than their husbands are experiencing problems as they adjust to the dynamics of this growing trend.

Children complicate the situation
In marriages with children, 36% of women with higher earnings than their husbands reported this money imbalance had a negative effect.  Meanwhile, only 22% of wives in marriages without children reported this problem.

Two recent articles from the Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine  provided insight into some of the tensions in the marriages between “alpha women” and “beta men”.  It appears the income imbalance is not so problematic as long as the husband could still support the family if needed, has the right career, wasn’t forced to stay home or take the less powerful role, and retains a high level of confidence.

Pressure eases up—and perceptions seem to change—when husbands’ salaries are enough to support the family should the wives’ pay evaporate.

This seems right.  In cases where two professionals earn high incomes, a disparity between spouses would probably not create the tension that would exist where a husband earns only a small percentage of his wife’s salary.

Does it work better is the wife if “more testostoronic”?

“Kurt has never been someone who defines himself by his job,” says Jami Floyd, a correspondent with ABC’s 20/20, of her stay-at-home husband, Kurt Flehinger. “Nor does he care much what people think about him. He’s not a Master of the Universe type. I am much more testosteronic. I’m much more driven, much more traditionally male.”…

Some careers for lower-earning men are more acceptable than others.

“I think women earning more than men can be devastating to relationships unless the guy is doing something the wife regards as having cachet, such as academia,” says Betsy, even though she still speaks fondly of her ex-husband and sends him the occasional check….

“An academic person might get a ‘waiver,’ ” he adds. “Or a serious, published writer. A primary-school teacher wouldn’t get a waiver. We may think, What a great thing we have men teaching! However, we’re not giving waivers yet for men teaching primary school.”

It works better if it is a conscious choice, not the result of a failure.  Male or female, a successful person does not want to be married to a “loser”.

But the relationship works well, they report, because Laura’s admiration for Jeff, whom she met when they both worked in finance for a giant West Coast media conglomerate, seems complete. “Jeff was never laid off,” his wife explains. “There’s not that feeling that my husband is a loser. We made a conscious decision—he’s got the creative talent—to play to each other’s strengths.

Young women considering marriage may fail to anticipate how they will feel later on.

It’s not as if these women ever expected their husbands to support them completely—at least a lot of them didn’t. It’s just that it never occurred to them that they might be the ones doing all the heavy lifting. And as hip and open-minded as they like to think they are, they were, after all, raised on the same fairy tale as the rest of us—the one where Prince Charming comes to the rescue of Sleeping Beauty….

Among the reasons these women were originally attracted to their husbands—sex appeal, sense of humor, charisma—earning power may not have been high on the list. But that could be because it was a given. Unfortunately, the other qualities start to fade over time if the husband isn’t adding something tangible to the equation.

Related:

• College-educated wives dropping out of the workforce (Cost of College)
• More women are earning more than their husbands (Mother Nature Network)

College-educated wives dropping out of the workforce

College-educated wives married to similarly educated husbands are leaving the workforce in increasing numbers, creating a trend that may hinder an already weak economic recovery.  But will young men’s lower college graduation rates reverse this trend?

… between 1993 and 2006, there was a decline in the workforce of 0.1 percent a year on average in the number of college-educated women, with similarly educated spouses.

That contrasts with growth of 2.4 percent a year between 1976 and 1992.

The result: the labor force in 2008 had 1.64 million fewer such women than if the growth rate had kept up its earlier trend, slightly more than 1 percent of the total workforce in that year….

May have a negative effect on economic growth

Stefania Albanesi, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one of the study’s authors, said the loss may hurt economic growth at a time when the nation can ill afford to have highly skilled workers on the sidelines….

Dropping out of the workforce is not just for the super-wealthy, and babies are not the reason these women are staying home.

But the trend is not limited to top earners. It has been detected among households earning around $80,000 per year….

… it’s not the tug of looking after young children that makes most educated women give up their career.

“These women usually give up their jobs when their children are school-age and not babies any more,” Albanesi said.

This doesn’t surprise me.  I know I’m not the only mom who found that juggling babies and work was a lot easer than caring for older, school-aged children while working full-time.  As they grow older, the logistical, disciplinary, and emotional needs of children can become more complicated.  For me, out-sourcing childcare for my pre-teens proved more challenging than finding a good caregiver for my babies.

Will the more women than men graduating from college, will this trend be affected?

Educational homogamy, the tendency to marry someone of the same educational level, is a decades-long pattern particularly strong among college graduates.  With the declining “supply” of men who are marriage material for educated women, what will happen?  Will female college graduates change their behavior and join their less-educated sisters in the growing trend of having children outside of marriage?  Or maybe they will begin to marry down in greater numbers.  In this case, quitting work to care for children may not be such a good option for wives out-earning their husbands, and we may see more men staying home to care for children.  That would be a significant shift in traditional gender roles, with unpredictable effects on families.

Add in the higher education bubble to these possible scenarios and anyone’s prediction about the next 30 years starts to look very fuzzy.  All I can think to do is advise my children to be ready for anything and be careful what you wish for.

Related articles:

• Non-marital births by education level as part of the growing class divide
• US Economy: Women Leaving Workforce Over Past 20 Years (wire.kapitall.com)
• Decline in Labor Force Participation Reflects Demographics, May Not Be as Bad as Reported