> Did they really all need 3 years of full-time education?

Higher ed has become extremely top heavy with administration, and those people DO need the women to take those classes.

Consider: The more women whom graduate with K-12 degrees, the better of a job the executives and administrators at my state U system have done. They get incredibly high salaries, in fact. The problem is they've done such a great job that they produce twice as many qualified educated K-12 young teachers as the statewide market can absorb. So my favorite Denny's restaurant waitress has a K-12 education degree and is making more money off tips at Dennys than her competitors whom got a job in public schools, where the average career length is only 6 years so they're already onto their second careers, selling real estate or working with her at Dennys. But having a K12 education degree doesn't make her a better waitress, it just makes her poorer.

The microeconomic solution to her problem is if only the top 50% in her graduating class get hired, she should have worked harder to be in the ever shrinking fraction of successfully people. The macroeconomic solution is to stop sending two times too many girls to K12 degree granting schools, which will kill the careers of the executive management at those schools so thats sure as hell never happening.

So its the usual American thing where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The president of our stateside uni system gets a payraise from $700K to $750K because he did such a great job producing more K12 diplomas. Meanwhile the poor girl is worse off than her mother, financially, because she has enormous loans to get a vocational job ticket for a job field she never worked in.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, this is very frequent in my country where, about two thirds of the women I know do some kind of university career without actual job prospects because of some preconceived notion that it will give them an employment as soon they graduate. Most of them started around 2019 and now face an uncertain future because of the economical consequences of the pandemic affecting their parents, which are almost always their main source of economical support. The widespread rejection of regular, "not educated" jobs (I think you could say blue collar?) is creating this university diploma inflation effect that will probably pop in the next five to ten years

I also do believe that one of the main things that allow people to get into university is the support of middle class parents who wish their sons achieve anything in higher educaction because of a preconceived notion about the relationship between employability and a university diploma.