Gospel v gown
More Mormon women are going on missions. Fewer may go to university
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The Mormon church promotes marriage as the perfect state of being and forbids sex outside it. The average woman in Utah, where Mormons are 60% of the population, marries at 24, younger than the national average of 27. The state also has the highest birth rate in America. The church stresses that women should be educated, but in practice combining children with full-time study is tricky. Some 70% of Utahn women start college, more than nationally, but less than 50% finish.
The result is that whereas in most of America women are more likely than men to have a degree, in Utah the opposite is true. The gap is particularly striking when it comes to higher degrees: just 8% of Utahn women between the ages of 25 to 64 have a master’s, doctoral or professional degree, a third less than the national figure. This gap shows itself in the workplace, too. The average woman in Utah earns 70% as much as the average man; across America, the figure is 78%.
It is too early to say whether the change in mission rules will affect female graduation rates. But since it was enacted, the number of young women studying at Brigham Young University has plummeted. In 2012, 14,500 female undergraduates were enrolled, almost as many as men. By 2014 that had fallen to 12,000. Whereas in the 1990s women made up 53% of undergraduates at the university, they are now just 45%. Academics are worried.
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More Mormon women are going on missions. Fewer may go to university
[...]
The Mormon church promotes marriage as the perfect state of being and forbids sex outside it. The average woman in Utah, where Mormons are 60% of the population, marries at 24, younger than the national average of 27. The state also has the highest birth rate in America. The church stresses that women should be educated, but in practice combining children with full-time study is tricky. Some 70% of Utahn women start college, more than nationally, but less than 50% finish.
The result is that whereas in most of America women are more likely than men to have a degree, in Utah the opposite is true. The gap is particularly striking when it comes to higher degrees: just 8% of Utahn women between the ages of 25 to 64 have a master’s, doctoral or professional degree, a third less than the national figure. This gap shows itself in the workplace, too. The average woman in Utah earns 70% as much as the average man; across America, the figure is 78%.
It is too early to say whether the change in mission rules will affect female graduation rates. But since it was enacted, the number of young women studying at Brigham Young University has plummeted. In 2012, 14,500 female undergraduates were enrolled, almost as many as men. By 2014 that had fallen to 12,000. Whereas in the 1990s women made up 53% of undergraduates at the university, they are now just 45%. Academics are worried.
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Yeah, too early to tell. The plummet in female undergrads may just be the surge of LDS women going on missions.
It seems the University of Utah may be in trouble, however...
KAITLYN BOURNE, a 21-year-old student from Salt Lake City, Utah, recently returned from 18 months as a Mormon missionary in Atlanta, Georgia. Before going on her mission, she was studying a pre-medicine undergraduate degree at the University of Utah with a full scholarship. But when the Mormon church lowered the age at which young women can go on missions from 21 to 19 at the end of 2012, the idea of going consumed her. “It was a huge commitment, a really hard decision,” she says. “But after months of prayer and thinking about it, I realised I had to do it.”
Ms Bourne’s decision was hard—she had to give up her scholarship. Since returning, she has made plans to go back to university, but instead of resuming her pre-medicine course, she plans to study music at the Hawaii branch of Brigham Young, a Mormon university.
Ms Bourne’s decision was hard—she had to give up her scholarship. Since returning, she has made plans to go back to university, but instead of resuming her pre-medicine course, she plans to study music at the Hawaii branch of Brigham Young, a Mormon university.
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