Women Are Finally Taking Over College Campuses
The trend has been there for decades. More and more women have been enrolling to attend college and more and more of them were graduating. Within the past decade, women comprised the majority of incoming freshmen at most schools. There is little doubt that the vast majority of these women and the schools they attended did not regard this trend as a zero sum game. In other words, the gains being made by the women did not need to come at the expense of the men. But could it be that is exactly what is happening?
Peter Gardner of Michigan State conducts some of the best research in this area and his recent findings are startling. Although women comprise about 55 percent of college freshmen, they are now comprising about 75 percent of the graduates. So where are all of the men going? Are they being forced out by the women? Are the colleges forcing out the men through the application of hostile policies which used to be directed against women but are now directed against men? While those are possible explanations, Peter has a far more logical explanation: the men are leaving to start their own businesses.
"We've got a generation coming up that has a very different outlook on life than the one before it," said Jeffrey Cornwall, an entrepreneurship professor at Belmont University in Tennessee, to CollegeJournal.com. "They're more interested in balancing their work with their family life, and that makes entrepreneurship attractive to them."
As an entrepreneur, I see little wrong and a lot very right about the creation of more entrepreneurs. When I was in college in the 1980's, it seemed that everyone wanted to be a lawyer and society lamented how American schools were turning out more and more lawyers while Japan and other countries were turning out more and more engineers. This difference was of legitimate concern because engineers create wealth. The vast majority of work done by lawyers does not create wealth. I've heard the practice of law compared to the breaking of a window. Businesses pay lawyers and people pay to have broken windows replaced but once that money has been paid the people who paid the money are rarely left with anything better than they started with. The lawsuit is settled and the window is repaired but the money that they've spent will not generate additional wealth for them.
Entrepreneurs are much more akin to engineers than lawyers as entrepreneurs create wealth for themselves, their employees, their vendors, and their partners. So if our Millennial males are turning their backs on professions such as law and turning towards entrepreneurship, that's a good thing. If only they would stay in school so they can complete their undergraduate education and more fully develop their minds, then it would be a great thing.
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