Why Girls Do Better At School Than Boys

It is unlikely to be a surpise to anyone that girls do better than boys in school. Many studies confirm this.  Girls outscore boys in nearly every subject in school and generally have higher grades.  Why is this?

The Economist reports from the OECD 5 reasons:

1. Girls read more
2. Girls spend more time on homework than boys, over 5 hours worth
3. Boys spend more time playing online games
4. Peer pressure for boys makes them value schooling less
5. Boys are being unfairly graded than girls – teachers are being very biased

The first two reasons are quite strong, the more a student studies the more likely they are to get high grades.  The last two reasons should be very troubling.  What is making boys pressure each other to value school less?  How strong of a factor is it and can it be reversed? Could the peer pressure be a self-fulfilling prophesy – a boy gets low grades for a period and then reduces his effort to do better in the belief that expending greater effort is futile?  Teachers need to be aware of this negative grading phenomena and work against it.  But how?  Certainly, inflating grades to make student feel better about themselves is a bad idea and shielding from failure is also detrimental to students.

Teachers engaging in biased grading is particularly damning against the profession and is worrying.  This is something that clearly needs to be highly guarded against in the profession.  A classroom is supposed to be a place of fairness and justice.  Performing biased grading shoots the teaching profession in the heart.  Are teaching colleges researching and discussing about how to properly assess work and avoid biased grading?  I do not believe so, I never had this discussion in college about this issue and was largely unaware of it before.  Having become a teacher I have had a few temptations to mark down students’ work (usually boys) for sloppy, messy writing.  How many teachers do not resist that temptation?

In any case, I have found that girls far outscoring boys in my economics class just .  Fortunately, I can say the grading is objective as the scores come from standardized tests being examined by outsiders.  The proportions for grades are shown below for the years 2012-2014.  I have found it perplexing why there is such a disparity.  Are there ways I can help the boys raise their scores to the level of girls?  Interestingly, the difference between the sexes in my classes are not as great as the same tests taken in England (the originator of the exams) where girls outscored boys by only 5% points in economics.  Additionally, in England more boys choose economics than girls by nearly 2:1, but where I have worked it was the opposite.  Not only were more girls choosing to study economics than boys but they also outscore them by wide margins.

Figure 1. Male/Female participation in Cambridge International Exams AS Economics, 2012-2014 at WHBC

Two girls for every one boy, the opposite of domestic England participation.

Figure 2. Grade distribution for Above Average/Below Average, 2012-2014 at WHBC; just under half score an A or B overall.

Figures 3. Distribution of males and females in Above or Below Average grades from 2012-2014 at WHBC.  Close to half of all girls earn an A or B while less than four out of ten boys do so.

 

Figures 4. Distribution of males and females between earning A or B grades within the group who earn above average grades from 2012-2014 at WHBC. For girls who earned above average grades over 60% earned an A, while for boys it is under 55%.

 

From my own experience girls not only outscored the average scores of boys but also in distribution within their own sex.  How to get the boys to do better in school?

The Price of Higher Education

Several prominent stories about the cost of college education have been making their waves in the news lately.  Two of the most prominent headlines include President Obama’s plan to make community college free, and Sweet Briar College announced it was closing.  The price tags of higher education has been becoming a greater national issue – as it should since the price is higher every year having outpaced inflation for decades with the toll of putting students out of reach for tertiary education and ironically some colleges out of business.

I maintain that Sweet Briar College closing should not be surprising, of which I do not mean on the individual problems of the college but on more general terms, as the college being a victim of the environment higher education has become situated.  The business model universities have created appears more and more unsustainable, as Jim Rogers explaines.  Unfortunately, we may see many more colleges close meaning the industry is shrink and consolidating.  All is not lost though, colleges can and have been changing their business model.  The creative destruction forces have been forcing their way into the ivory tower.  The price tag and costs of tertiary education have become destructive.  As Jim Rogers explains the sustainability of paying 6 figure salaries to those who only work 15 hours a week is a recipe for disaster.  To add, the only ones who can pull this off are the highly prestigious universities such as Columbia where Jim worked in which families had the means and willingness to spend enormous amounts of money for the degree, but clearly less prestigious universities can not do that.  Most students and their families are not of the financial means to pay whatever price a college wishes to charge.  Most must do so by taking out loans creating very expensive opportunity costs, the debt of which will have ripple effects to the wellbeing and economy for decades to come.  These debts will clearly impact the ability of generations to take on more positive debt such as getting mortgages.  When customers begin to refuse the exceptionally high price of a college education will colleges change and find ways to lower costs substantially (or else go broke!).  Given these forces I believe in the coming years parents will no longer need to fear how they will pay for college education because college will be cheaper in real dollar terms.

The topic of tuition price has been on my mind for some time, particularly since I completed my master’s degree after having paid $14,000.  That price can be considered cheap which was possible because the entire program was done online, but in the end was still a pretty penny to pay.  The following are my thoughts on the matter from my previous blog, posted in 2013:

“Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post wrote an article about the challenge MOOC’s, face in making higher education innovate to online learning.  Article found here.

Education seems immune from cost efficiencies as it is very labor intensive work.  Higher education greatly benefits from credentialing and tax subsidies.  There is bias with face to face learning and universities have found ways to co-op MOOC’s for a financial advantage.  MOOC’s have failed to make a serious dent in the costs of higher education as prices keep spiraling upward.  MOOC’s seem unlikely to change higher education.

The authors are correct about MOOC’s inability to force higher ed to innovate in the short-term but longer term I believe universities will be forced to change.
Higher education is largely sustained by credentialing (usually government forced) and employer bias.  Adding government subsidies to education with student loans and we have ballooning student debt with skyrocketing tuition prices.

Recent headlines stated student debt surpassing all other household debt at over 1 trillion dollars with a high default rate Articles here, here, here, and here.  Students incurred massive debt to pay for school that does not guarantee a job let alone a job that pays significantly more than the average debt load of $26,000.  Adding the average debt plus the opportunity costs of not working for four years at an annual salary of the same amount puts to total costs far north of $100,000, the benefits of going to college are therefore not so great.

In the last 20 years universities went on arms races building up infrastructure to attract more on-campus students but few engaged in online learning.  Unsustainable cost structures resulted.

The middle class is being priced out of the market, they will be forced to reconsider the value of a traditional college degree and experience.  Many universities are now learning the value of engaging with online learning and playing catch up from years of inertia.

Recall the hoopla of the 1990’s tech and Internet revolution, many said we will do nearly everything online from reading news to shopping and education!   Short term that did not happen but the long-term trajectory of consumer and cultural change with the Internet were in fact correct.

Education cannot stay immune from these forces forever.  The Internet has opened an information revolution.  The status quo of higher education in America is unlikely to last forever, universities will inevitably meet creative destruction and only the strong will survive”.

Blogging 101

Welcome to John Warner’s blog!  This is my first second attempt to get into blogging, this time on a more professional level.  My graduate work introduced me to using this form of medium to write about areas of interest/concern in short form and that is exactly what I intend to do.  I intend to comment about areas of interest/concern in (economic) life, education and so on.

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