Zero Sum Games, Epiphenomenality and Political Correctness

Yesterday I attended a retreat for an organization I have worked with in higher education for a very long time. I presented some thoughts on two issues that seem to be evolving. First, at least among independent colleges, the middle class is not going to college. There is at least some annecdotal evidence that is also happening to the UC campuses - although the data is much less clear. The second issue relates to gender equity. In the last two decades the enrollments in higher education have shifted to a predominant female majority. Concurrently, the enrollments in basic and advanced programs in the science and math have declined. An OECD report last summer suggested that we compared to Mexico and Portugal among the developed countries in relation to our enrollments in the sciences and mathematics.

One of the errors of the liberal perspective is to think about the world as a zero sum game. Yet most of life is not organized in that fashion - my success does not often diminish your success. Yet liberals persist in seeing the world in these bimodal terms. About 25 years ago Julian Simon, in a demonstration of this principle, bet eco-doomsayer Paul Ehrlich that the world would not end in a decade. He offered Ehrlich the opportunity to establish some metrics to measure this issue and said let's bet the difference on the prices (of the market basket of scarce commodities). At the end of the decade Ehrlich was presented as the fraud that he has always been. He was simply wrong. He used a whole series of rationalizations to try to discredit the results but he looked even more foolish than he had in the start of the bet. Ehrlich looks at the world as a series of zero sum transfers, in the same way the Kyoto protocol drafters did. But that is not the way life works.

The gender problem in higher education is one that all of us should be thinking about - not in the zero sum sense. Currently about 57% of the students in higher education are female. When Harvard President Larry Summers raised the issue last summer he was derided into spending another $50 million in Harvard money to atone for his balsphemy. I wonder why a decreasing percentage of male students are choosing to go to higher education and to complete degrees. Is it because of the changes in curriculum in K-12 (as some have suggested)? Is it because this generation of young men have discovered that higher education does not matter? Is it because a large number of male students have been diverted from higher education because of other life commitments? I don't know. But it seems to me that we should be interested in trying to understand why this change has occured. One thinks that the problem was created inadvertently (epiphenomenality) but who knows. But the data looks to me as compelling - not in a sense that we should try to establish affirmative action or that we should reduce the number of women in higher education but more that we should think about why this generation of males is reacting differently than previous generations.

In the presentation yesterday one of the questions I got was about my sources. I have seen the data shifting for the last decade but an interesting article in the New Republic (Subscription Required but worth it) of January 23 the case is made that a series of factors has caused the shift. The first question I got was a political statement - my questioner said " The thought of you reading the New Republic boggles the mind." - this kind of question should not be limited by political correctness. But that may indeed be how we will handle the issue in the near future. That is a real problem for our society.