[travisb]

I think the author is reversing cause and effect and so not coming to a terribly useful conclusion. It rather seems to me that fewer men (proportionally) are attending college because the value proposition has substantially declined. Similar things have happened in many other careers formally dominated by men.

In some cases this is simply due to oversupply leading to declining salaries. For example decades ago a Bachelors of Philosophy would qualify you for a number of high paying jobs. Now it qualifies you to be a checkout clerk. You can't expect to approximately double the number of candidates without reducing wages.

In the particular case of college it's been ever more clear for more than ten years now that college is mostly only valuable if you treat it as a trade school (ie. BSc of CS into software development), if you need it for immigration purposes (eg. the booster Masters), or if you are part of the academic or political elite where a PhD or two is table stakes. For everybody else college costs too much in time and treasure for the employment advantages.

In other cases the underlying market has changed. One interesting example of this is Science Fiction writers. Starting about a decade and a half ago a ton of mid-career mid-listers who wrote science fiction switched to other genres, mostly mystery, because the market for SciFi kind of dried up. You see many more female writers in SciFi than you used to, but they don't make the same kind of money SciFi writers would have thirty years ago -- the money simply isn't in the genre anymore.

If you look at the authors examples I think most of them fit this latter case. Being the tutor to the scion of a business magnate is probably just as good and competitive gig now as two hundred years ago, but 'teaching' as a market has filled out immensely since then and is now at least 25% day care -- something which cannot be prestigious because it is common and cannot command large wages.

[randomdata]

> It rather seems to me that fewer men (proportionally) are attending college because the value proposition has substantially declined.

That's exactly what the article is saying. It, however, argues that the presence of women is what has caused that decline in value.

> In the particular case of college it's been ever more clear for more than ten years now that college is mostly only valuable if you treat it as a trade school

Right, while it posits that the historical value of college was that it offered a higher social status to those involved, which for those not reading between the lines means that it offered improved mating opportunities for men. Now that women are going to college in droves, men are no longer seeing a higher social standing from attending college – with it placing them on the same social plane as women. So men are moving on to the "next big thing" that offers higher social status today.

> something which cannot be prestigious because it is common and cannot command large wages.

It seems you are essentially on the same page as the article. I suspect that it would suggest that money is only a proxy for status, while you seem to be suggesting that status is a proxy for money, but I'm not sure that makes any difference in the grand scheme of things.

[travisb]

The big difference between my position and the article is that I don't believe the presence of women is a significant portion of the cause. At the core I'm making an economic supply and demand argument where the number of 'certified workers' matter, but whether the additional 'certified workers' are women, previously uncertified men, or immigrants is immaterial.

It's entirely plausible to have a situation where more women attend college than men, but where the women are using it as a dating pool and don't apply their degrees in the workforce. That situation wouldn't have much of an effect on the value of a college degree for men.

Mating opportunities (proxied by prestige and money, which are only loosely correlated) is undoubtedly the predominant male driving force, but it's an optimization function on the landscape which does not shape the landscape itself.

Tangentially to that I'm noting that the entire discussion is somewhat muddy due to terminology creep over the decades -- eg. a "tutor" today is fundamentally not the same thing as a "tutor" two hundred years ago.

[randomdata]

The trouble with your position is that economic conditions haven't changed through the rise of college. Incomes have held stagnant as can be from when college was unheard of right through until today. While the labour market is certainly driven by supply and demand like any other, college doesn't have an impact on the supply or demand in any meaningful way.