Could the Title IX Expansion Be the College Bubble's Death Knell?

The Title IX expansion announced by the White House purports to "close the gender gap" in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, ostensibly by increasing female enrollment in these generally male-predominant fields.

There are, obviously, two probable results:

1. The number of females enrolling in STEM fields increases, and/or
2. The number of males enrolling in STEM fields decreases.

So which one is it most likely to be?

Looking Back

To get an idea of what this might mean, we turn to the implementation of Title IX as a whole, with particular emphasis on collegiate athletics.  We don't want to look at raw numbers, though, as there has been a general U.S. population increase concomitant with a college enrollment increase.

Rather, we want to look at what percentage of the student body is involved in student athletics.  This would minimize the effect of these secular overall enrollment trends.

Figure 1: Male (blue) and female (red) student-athletes as a percentage of male and female students enrolled.  Athlete data from the NCAA (http://www.ncaapublications.com/productdownloads/PR2008.pdf); 1972-75 and 1977-80 athlete data estimated by linear extrapolation.  1980, 1990, and 2000-09 student enrollment data from the National Center for Education Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98); 1971-79, 1981-89, and 1991-99 student enrollment data estimated by linear interpolation.  Years indicate the year of the autumn (enrollment) semester.

Approximately 3% of men attending college are involved in interscholastic sports, a percentage which has held largely steady since 1980 (looking at the trend from 1981 on, it is nearly zero).  For women the ncrease has been from about 1% to 1.7% of enrolled women over 30 years.  In both cases there is moderate correlation, but probably not enough to draw any significant statistical conclusion.

The ratio of the percentage of males playing collegiate sports to females playing collegiate sports has been steadily closing, though the correlation here is rather weak.  (A linear trend is also not particularly appropriate, given that there is a limit at 0 [only women play collegiate sports], though at the scale in question there is little difference between it and the exponential trend.)

Figure 2: Male athletes as a percentage of male enrollment divided by female athletes as a percentage of female enrollment.

Not sure what the spike in the 1986-87 academic year is - it corresponds to a decrease in female athletes per female student.  (Any ideas on what happened then?)  If you remove it, the R-squared value becomes about 0.45 - still not that strong.

So what does this mean for the expansion?

The overall tendency has been that both male and female involvement in athletics.  While we can't draw any conclusions about causation, it is reasonable to believe that female enrollment in STEM fields will increase.  Odds are against a decrease, except possibly in the short term, in male STEM enrollment.

This would be at the expense of non-STEM fields such as liberal arts, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest college majors of both genders will shift in that direction anyway - the idea of the liberal arts major working at McDonald's is a full-blown meme.  STEM job opportunities, and by extension the needs for STEM labor, are perhaps overstated (see e.g. 1 | 2, but counter-argument here), but even if so it's largely irrelevant as the meme persists.

Alternatively, they may choose to increase female STEM enrollment by accepting a greater number of marginal students and/or expanding scholarship or loan programs.  Because the student loan bubble has not yet burst, colleges would likely benefit financially from this as it would increase their tuition intake, further fueling the higher education bubble.

In other words, it won't necessarily be the college bubble's death knell, but it will likely accelerate the move from a "college bubble" as such to a STEM degree bubble.  At any rate, this seems to be more of a political ploy than anything, designed to get female voters.  The problem is that a Google Trends search indicates that interest in feminism and women's issues, while it may be bottoming, certainly isn't very high relative to, say, 2004 or 2005.

Will it work?  Well, we'll have to wait for November to know for sure.