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12. Women’s Movement into Technical Fields: A Comparison of Technical and Community Colleges
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287 12 Women’s Movement into Technical Fields A Comparison of Technical and Community Colleges Regina Deil-Amen Most historically male colleges and universities had charters that forbade the admission of women. In other institutions of higher education, however, the absence of women has been assumed rather than enforced. The two for-profit technical colleges considered in this chapter fall into this category. The programs they offer, such as electronics, engineering, information technology, and various other computer-related technical fields, were originally designed for men students. It was not until the enormous growth in the labor market demand for people trained in these areas, and the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1970s, that these technical colleges experienced a significant enrollment of women students. Enrollments in for-profit colleges nearly quadrupled in the last two decades of the twentieth century, rising from 111,714 students in 1980 to 430,199 students in 1999.1 Much of this increase is due to the growth in the number of forpro fit institutions, which has far out-paced growth in the public and nonprofit sectors. During the 1990s, the number of two-year degree-granting for-profit colleges rose 78 percent, while the number of two-year public institutions grew only 9 percent and the number of two-year private nonprofits declined by 6 percent. Among four-year colleges, the number of for-profits increased 266 percent, while the number of four-year public and private nonprofit colleges grew by only 3 and 4 percent, respectively. For-profit colleges now represent 28 percent of the two-year college market and 8 percent of the four-year market.2 For-profit students have always been more likely to be women, since, historically, many of these schools have tended to specialize in training in female-dominated service occupations such as cosmetology, health support, CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 287 5/26/04 4:54:28 PM 288 Coeducation beyond Liberal Arts and office support.3 The more technology-oriented for-profit colleges continue to enroll predominantly men, and only recently have women’s enrollments in these programs become substantial. Working and lower-class women have been especially eager to enroll in order to gain access to traditionally male technical fields. This chapter compares women’s recent experiences in two for-profit technical colleges with women’s experiences in comparable vocational fields in six community colleges. Community colleges have always had a high enrollment of women, but not in technical programs. The chapter discusses how women’s experiences in these educational institutions support, extend, or contradict existing theories about gender and the integration of women into traditionally male educational domains. The particular question addressed is whether female students’ confidence about their ability to do schoolwork and to get a degree varies with institutional context and whether staff activities explain this institutional influence. The focus on these colleges is distinctive in three ways. First, it examines gender integration issues for middle- and lower-achieving students, many of whom come from lower-class backgrounds. Second, it considers the integration of women into applied technical support fields via technical colleges and community colleges—segments of higher education that have been largely ignored in academic discussions about the inclusion of females in postsecondary education.4 Third, unlike frameworks that tend to apply either a psychological or a sociological perspective to the study of gender, this approach incorporates both psychological theory and institutional analyses to study the experiences of women in historically and majority-male technical colleges. The For-Profit and Community College Sectors: Histories of Transformation For-profit colleges, commonly referred to as “proprietary” or “trade” schools, suffer from a negative image caused by past scandals. The majority of these private, profit-motivated institutions traditionally offered programs of one-year or less in business, marketing, cosmetology, and crafts in urban areas, serving mostly low-income students who qualified for Pell Grants and guaranteed student loans. These schools developed a reputation as degree mills, offering a poor education at a high price and churning out thousands of students into saturated markets where job salaries were too low for the graduates to pay back their student loans.5 Yet recent changes in Title IV federal student loan assistance programs have resulted in drastic improvements among colleges in the for-profit sector. Tighter regulations prompted the for-profit...