OK, so let’s do look at this wrong-headed piece point-by-point:
- She will attract the wrong types of men. I share the common concern addressed to us, again mainly by angry women, that there are so many lazy men in our society… This seems to imply that young men who go to college are more lazy than men who don’t (!!!), or else that Catholic men who go to college will naturally seek out Catholic women who did not. Those are both false.
- *She will be in a near occasion of sin. Just think of the environment that college-age students live in. You have a heavy concentration of young people all living together without the supervision of parents at the most sexually charged state of life they will experience. * Hmmmm…and exactly what kind of woman will tomorrow’s male Catholic doctors and lawyers be marrying, then? Are they going to go back to their home parish and find a nice Catholic girl who’s been–doing what, exactly?–since graduating from high school, or are they going to marry one of those non-Catholic near occasions of sin they meet at school? Is it not hard enough for good Catholics to meet each other, we have to take all the Catholic women out of college, too? Oh, and the Catholic men who didn’t go to college? Guess what? They’re not getting paid a family wage, so most of their wives have to work outside the home!!
- She will not learn to be a wife and mother. Nothing that is taught in a college curriculum is geared toward domestic homemaking… If you did not teach both your sons and your daughters the basics of home economics before they left high school, you failed. If you think that the modern homemaker has no need of anything she learned in college, you’re much mistaken. The bigger danger is that she’ll go to college but fail to take the coursework that would help her and her husband competently manage a 21st household.
- The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup. Like anything that is subsidized by the government, the cost of a college degree is inflated.
This is so wrong-headed, I don’t know where to start. Think of where this country would be without the GI bill. It is the public universities that make and affordable education available to those who aren’t independently wealthy already.
- You don’t have to prove anything to the world. Often the reason for a girl going to college is the pressure of the society around her, including her parents. There is no reason to make this point to girls only. There are many young people who would be happier in technical degrees. Still, even most of the men I know who go into logging and farming went to college for at least two years–and these were guys who earned their own way working in the woods!
- It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents. In our culture many parents feel an unnecessary obligation to pay for the children’s college tuition. They’re saying that wanting to send your children to college is a wrong-headed reason to use NFP. Why that means that only boys get sent to college is unclear. One also has to consider that a Catholic woman who marries a college-educated man is more likely to be able to support a large family while she stays home and still get them through college. Well, the chances that a woman is going to marry and stay married to a college-educated man when she has not been to college herself are not that high. The college-educated tend to marry the college-educated, and the non-college-educated tend to marry the non-college-educated. College-educated women also have a lower divorce rate. (The worst rate, not surprisingly, is in women who dropped out of either high school or college. Could be lots of confounding variables there…)
- She will regret it. The more we talk about this prudent option for girls, the more we have women who are willing to admit to the regret they possess for having bought into the lie of the dual-career family. Yes, because no one ever regrets that they could have gone to college, but didn’t. The lie buried in this one is that the college-educated are required to be in the workforce from graduation until retirement, which is sometimes true, but not always by any means. Besides, of all those dual-career mothers going to work every day, how many have their houses cleaned and their groceries rung up and their twice-a-week at the restaurant dishes cleared by other dual-career mothers who are working at lower pay and perhaps longer and less flexible hours away from home than they are, because those dual-career mothers* don’t *have a college education? A woman with a college education is also more likely to be able to substantially help her family while only working part-time.
College isn’t for everyone, but the people who wrote this piece don’t seem to have done the research a college-educated person is capable doing concerning whether any facts actually support their thesis.
It would be better to encourage Catholics, both male and female, to consider what family trade-offs they will make depending on what post-secondary course to take and what degree and what university they choose if they do choose college: that is, how will I pay off these loans, will I be able to maintain my credentialing while parenting our children, what are the career demands in this field for parents, and so on. That is where I hear regret from the college-educated: That is, that they only considered what they’d enjoy the most–I mean both what they learned and where they learned it–during their four years of college, and not what college and what degree would best help them reach their life goals after college.
