Is College A Great Deal For Women?

Women may make up more than half of the student population in most American colleges and universities but there is some evidence that this arrangement is not working out for them. “Sixty percent of undergraduates are women,” Lindsey Burke, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said at a conference here last week. “We now have $1.5 trillion in student loan debt.”

“Two-thirds of that is held by women.” Moreover, they don’t stand much of a chance of making a dent in that debt after graduation when they get their first jobs.

Burke, who spoke at the Network of Enlightened Women (NeW) conference, noted that of the 10 highest paid college majors, men outnumber women in most of them. Correspondingly, at the other end of the pay scale, of the 10 lowest paid majors, women outnumber men.

The former grouping includes fields such as petroleum engineering. The latter includes such disciplines as counseling.

Believe it or not, only one-third of Americans hold Bachelor’s Degrees.

One way of getting out of the loan crisis, Burke suggests, is to get the federal government out of them business of subsidizing them. “The federal government subsidizes 93 percent of them,” she notes.

The government, she indicates, is crowding out this market.

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