Posnerian Paradise: Law Schools Without Women?
Judge Richard Posner has taken that assinine article in the NYT about The Changed Attitude, and used it as a launching pad for his theory that fewer women should be admitted to elite graduate and professional schools. Men, he argues, do a better job "maximizing the social value of their educations" by not taking time off to have children, or working part time, or dropping out of the labor force. He has a brilliant idea for discouraging women from attending graduate school, too:
"Raise[ing] tuition to all students but couple[ing] the raise with a program of rebates for graduates who work full time. For example, they might be rebated 1 percent of their tuition for each year they worked full time. Probably the graduates working full time at good jobs would not take the rebate but instead would convert it into a donation. The real significance of the plan would be the higher tuition, which would discourage applicants who were not planning to have full working careers (including applicants of advanced age and professional graduate students). This would open up places to applicants who will use their professional education more productively; they are the more deserving applicants."
Yep, apparently he wants to discourage as many smart, talented middle class and poor people as possible from enrolling in elite schools and taking slots away from less well-credentialled rich people. And he has every hope that most of the people who buy their way into elite schools will be male! And graduates will get such high paying joys, they will donate their "tuition rebates" back to the elite schools! Who won't need the money for operating costs, because they will have all that tuition cash! So they can afford things like hefty speaker honorariums! For federal judges! Economics is such a grand science.