Category Archives: Economics

According to a reported just issued by the Council of Graduate Schools, as of last year women got more Ph.D.’s than men for the first time since these numbers have been recorded. (That’s no longer than about a 100 years, I’d guess.) What more significant, I think, is that women are now poised to play a dominant role in several fields, including “health sciences (70 percent), in public administration (61.5 percent), social and behavioral sciences (60 percent), arts and humanities (53 percent) and biological and agricultural sciences (51 percent).”

Men dominate “mathematics and computer sciences, in which 73 percent of doctorates awarded in the United States went to men; physical and earth sciences (66 percent male PhDs) and business (61 percent).” This is an important landmark, but its meaning will not be clear any time soon and its impossible to predict how this might change research or education agendas. A patriarchal bias underlies much current research, of course. No one studied women’s heart attacks, for example, for much too long becuase it was assumed that men were an adequate model.

The historical and sociological question is whether women will simply correct the historical patriarchal bias or if they will begin to create what amounts to a matriarchy. Feminist history, I think, provides theoretical and practical models for either, and for a wide-range of reasons. That sort of impact is generations away, though. Meanwhile, as long as men dominate business, match, and engineering the partiarchy reigns. I wonder, if, in the long run, the ongoing rise of women will create a society in which these fields, no matter which gender is dominant, no longer matters nearly as much as it once did…

One of the best things about distance education is the way it can be used to fill all sorts of gaps left by the traditional education system. Despite all of the problems in my industry– it’s been an ugly, messy birth– we do reach students that were not being reached otherwise. One day, I think, this will be something that the public universities do as well. That’s a necessary part of the puzzle, although the slowness of the public response to these possibilities is, well, bizarre.

This lethargic response is both economic– public systems don’t have cash reserves that allow them to keep up with rapid technological change– and ideological. After three decades or more of anti-government propaganda the ideals of public service, or of public services, has eroded beyond all recognition. There’s a thick vein of corruption ruining through the higher education system, rooted in an administrative culture not unlike the corporate culture at large.

Administrations preserve their perquisites like any other corporate executives. In this environment, innovations arise from the periphery rather than the center. Wall Street works on financial con games, while alternative energy folks slowly build a new industrial system. The public universities focus on making their athletic programs even more marketable, while the military builds a flexible school system (“Virtual High School Opens ‘Doors’ to Learning“).