What I'm Reading (Oct. 24)

This week, I begin with a bit of shameless self-promotion. This week’s Atlantic has a great article by Rose Horowitch on how free tuition impacts medical school graduates.

“The school’s shift to a tuition-free model has no doubt been a tremendous boon to those students fortunate enough to gain admission. But judged against the standards set out by the Langones and NYU itself, the initiative has been a failure. …Despite the lackluster results, bankrolling tuition-free medical education has become a popular social cause of the über-wealthy.”

The self-promotion comes from the contribution ACSH and I made to the article, The Perverse Consequences of Tuition-Free Medical School 

And now, a video moment from The Incidental Economist, entitled Sex Testing in Sports: Does it Make Sense? Hosted by Dr. Aaron Carroll, it is an evidence-based report on controversial health issues – and what could be more contentious, at times, than whether or not a given woman athlete has an unfair advantage because of hormonal alterations, from Lia Thomas, an NCAA swimmer to Caster Semenya who we have written about at ACSH. 

Men are pursuing a college education less and less across nearly all demographics. Could it be “male flight?”

“Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school, for example:

In 1969, almost all veterinary students were male at 89%. …By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln, says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that …For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!”

From Matriarchal Blessing, Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?

Child care remains expensive, costing the average family 8% to 20% of their income. However, in terms of financially supporting childcare, Sweden is taking a slightly different path from many other countries. Here is Tyler Cowen’s take: 

“If the grandparents can be paid to take care of your child, all of a sudden the extended family as a whole doesn’t lose the money by having the parent go back to work. Instead, that money is transferred to the grandparents, so the work disincentive is diminished.”

Here is an ungated version of Cowen’s Bloomberg article, Why is Sweden paying grandparents to babysit? It’s worth a try, courtesy of Stars and Stripes! For those who do not know, Stars and Stripes is an independent military newspaper whose first edition was published in November 1861. I believe it has been in continuous publication since WWII, and, as with most newspapers, it now has a digital rather than paper imprint.