More women borrowing money to finish school, more men seeking paid work over classrooms

Across the USA, you'll find many more women going back to school and giving up the job hunt, perhaps as a New Year's Resolution. Check out the December 29, 2011 Sacramento Bee article by Catherine Rampell of the New York Times, "Many women give up job hunt, boost skills in school."

For some women, turning to prostitution to pay off college loans is an unhealthy trend that may lead to diseases such as HIV or eventually being beaten and raped by clients or otherwise violently controlled. See, College students trade sex to pay off college loans, and Prostitution to Pay for College?

There are websites where college women ask for sugar daddies to pay off bills in exchange for being their mistress. Other women take out even more college loans and go back to school, for example, graduate school, hoping a job will open in a few years. Others go to community colleges seeking immediate career skills in fields hiring, but the competition is keen.

In Sacramento as well as across the nation, why are so many women dropping out of the work force? It's not always to have children or to be stay-at-home moms. It's a temporary drop-out to drop-in to school, that is, to learn career skills that make a better fit to the market that to the individual's interests, talents, and abilities.

Women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now – for the first time in three decades – more young women in school than in the workforce. In Sacramento, there's a plethora of women college graduates working fast-food eateries and coffee houses or as retail clerks and customer relations service workers.

Apparently the shrinking labor force is not so much caused by workers giving up on looking for jobs and going back home to live with relatives. The shrinking labor force includes more women going back to school to upgrade skills. Two generations ago, millions of WW II veterans went to college on the GI Bill instead of looking for jobs as soon as they came home from the war.

The situation in Sacramento as well as nationally focuses on more young males looking for immediate work while more females of the same age group--early to mid-20s--are going back to school to get career training and/or graduate degrees in subjects that hopefully lead to a job.

Is the deck stacked against Sacramento women? Or will more jobs really open in the type of graduate studies more women are taking, often at the expense of taking out more college loans. Some can't pay back loans already taken, which can amount to $80,000 to $100,000 for four years at a private college.

On one hand, women feel the need to compete in a wide variety of fields. But when they graduate, earnings are still less than men earn. The Labor Department's statistics say that in the 2 1/2 years since the recovery officially began, men ages 16 to 24 have gained 178,000 jobs overall, whereas their female counterparts have lost 255,000 positions, according to the Labor Department.

Statistics say that an unemployed female worker is 35 percent more likely to drop out of the labor force in the next month than an unemployed male worker. The sad news is that more women are turning to prostitution or seeking to become the mistress of a wealthy sugar daddy to help pay their college loans.

Men aren't turning to male prostitution to pay their bills such as college loans. Men are more willing to live more cheaply and take a job that pays a lot less than they'd expect with their skills. The male as breadwinner attitude is still prevalent. In the middle of this picture, the community colleges are seeing higher enrollments.

Where are the jobs? The areas where jobs are offered usually hire women, such as dental assistants, home health aides and dental hygienists. You won't see men willing to train for those jobs, at least not on a large scale. Men still get teased for preparing for jobs traditionally held by women, with the exception of hard-working chef.

Jobs that hired men in the past are on the decline, for example, the manufacturing industries hiring men to do manual labor. When a man ages, he may no longer have the strength or energy to keep up production in manufacturing on the line. And many of those jobs have no pensions or perks. Bodies age and energy saps. Meanwhile office jobs held by women where they can sit in front of a computer or phone are still there as office administrative assistants.

Women are going back to school and are not looking for the same type of work men want, at least in the short term. Why aren't men going back to school at the same rate looking for jobs where they won't get teased if there's enough of them, like there were in technology jobs in the early 1990s? Could it be those technology are now outsourced overseas?