Well, white women may not rule yet, but they will. Give them 25 years. Think of Hillary Clinton as a leading indicator: It doesn’t look like she’ll win the 2008 Democratic nomination, but she’s paving the way for the next generation.
I got a glimpse of the next generation at the Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony at William & Mary held in the Wren Chapel yesterday. One of my daughters, I’m proud to say, was among the 43 graduates honored. (Some 40 other students were inducted as well last fall, bringing the total to seven percent of the senior class.) Phi Beta Kappa represents the cream of the crop: students who demonstrated either outstanding leadership or academic abilities.
Two thirds of the inductees last evening were women. Nearly all were white. One young woman had a Vietnamese name; two honorees had what appeared to be Hispanic surnames but were pigmentally indistinguishable from the rest. (For those interested in regional disparities, out-of-state students were well represented among the group, but most of the Virginia students came from Northern Virginia.)
William & Mary is one of the nation’s leading universities, and its top-performing students are likely to ascend into the ranks of the business, professional and political elite (unless they pursue graduate degrees in arcane, dead-end fields like linguistics, grrrrr, but I won’t mention any names). Of course, W&M is only one school, and it may not be typical of what’s happening nationally. Virginia has a relatively small Asian population, and I suspect that students of East Asian and South Asian ancestry, like white women in Virginia, may be over-represented among the academic elite elsewhere.
Regardless, of the major demographic groups here in Virginia, white women are attending college in the greatest numbers. And, it appears, they are excelling in the greatest numbers. Young white women are entering the adult world best equipped with the cultural attributes and educational backgrounds required to succeed in an increasingly global, knowledge-intensive economy. Some people may take pleasure at the impending comeuppance for white males, who will be hard-pressed to maintain their traditional dominance, but for anyone hoping that Virginia’s top ranks will make more room for minorities, the Phi Beta Kappa indicator does not look promising.
