Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

T E X T

Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment. Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work.

    The coronavirus upended the lives of
millions of college students. The Wall Street Journal
reported this week that men have been hit
particularly hard — accounting for roughly threefourths of pandemic-driven dropouts — and
depicted an accelerating crisis in male enrollment.
    A closer look at historical trends and the
labor market reveals a more complex picture, one
in which women keep playing catch-up in an
economy structured to favor men.
    In many ways, the college gender
imbalance is not new. Women have outnumbered
men on campus since the late 1970s. The ratio of
female to male undergraduates increased much
more from 1970 to 1980 than from 1980 to the
present. And the numbers haven’t changed much in
recent decades. In 1992, 55 percent of college
students were women. By 2019, the number had
nudged up to 57.4 percent.
    While the shift in the college gender ratio
is often characterized as men “falling behind,” men
are actually more likely to go to college today than
they were when they were the majority, many
decades ago. In 1970, 32 percent of men 18 to 24

were enrolled in college, a level that was most
likely inflated by the opportunity to avoid being
drafted into the Vietnam War. That percentage
dropped to 24 percent in 1978 and then steadily
grew to a stable 37 percent to 39 percent over the
last decade.
    The gender ratio mostly changed because
female enrollment increased even faster, more than
doubling over the last half-century.
    Because of the change in ratio, some
selective colleges discriminate against women in
admissions to maintain a gender balance, as The
Journal reported. Generally, admissions officials
prefer to limit the disparity to 55 percent female
and 45 percent male. Their reason not to let the
gender ratio drift further toward 2 to 1 is
straightforward: Such a ratio would most likely
cause a decrease in applications.
    In a New York Times essay in 2006 titled
“To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” the dean of
admissions at Kenyon College at the time
explained: “Beyond the availability of dance
partners for the winter formal, gender balance
matters in ways both large and small on a
residential college campus. Once you become
decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and,
as it turns out, fewer females find your campus
attractive.”
    The raw numbers don’t take into account
the varying value of college degrees. Men still
dominate in fields like technology and engineering,
which offer some of the highest salaries for recent
graduates. Perhaps not coincidentally, the
professors in those fields remain overwhelmingly
male.
    Women surged into college because they
were able to, but also because many had to. There
are still some good-paying jobs available to men
without college credentials. There are relatively few
for such women. And despite the considerable cost
in time and money of earning a degree, many
female-dominated jobs don’t pay well.
    The fact that the male-female wage gap
remains large after more than four decades in
which women outnumbered men in college strongly
suggests that college alone offers a narrow view of
opportunity. Women often seem stuck in place: As
they overcome obstacles and use their degrees to
move into male-dominated fields, the fields offer
less pay in return.
    None of this diminishes the significance of
the male decrease in college enrollment and
graduation. Educators view the male-driven dive in
community college enrollment over the last 18
months as a calamity. The pandemic confirmed
what was already known. Higher socioeconomic
classes are deeply embedded in college and will
bear considerable cost and inconvenience to stay
there, even if it means watching lectures on a
laptop in the room above your parent’s garage and
missing a season of parties and football games.
    For other people, college attendance is far
more fragile. It does not define their identities and
is not as important as earning a steady paycheck or
starting and nurturing a family. In a time of crisis,

it can be delayed — but the reality is that people
who drop out of college are statistically unlikely to
complete a degree.
    Last year, women were less likely than
men to leave community college, despite their
disproportionate responsibility for caregiving and
domestic work, because they no doubt understood
the bleak long-term job prospects for women
without a credential.

www.nytimes.com/Sept.9,2021

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Brazilian Poet Manoel de Barros Dies Aged 97
11/14/2014 8h56
From São Paulo Contribution for Folha from
Campo Grande

     The author who wrote verses from the "depths of the trifling", as it features in a poem and one of his books, poet Manoel de Barros died on Thursday morning, November 13th, aged 97, in Campo Grande, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul - MS.

     Manoel de Barros was born in Cuiabá and throughout his life he wrote 18 poetry books, in addition to children's books and autobiographical accounts.

      He received a number of literary prizes, two of which were Jabuti prizes (Tortoise prizes) - one in 1989 for "O Guardador de Águas" and in 2002 for "O Fazedor do Amanhecer".

     Manoel de Barros used to say that "poetry is not supposed to be understood, it is supposed to be incorporated. Understanding it creates a wall. One ought to try to be a tree"

(Texto adaptado. Fonte: Disponível em: . Acesso em: 24 out. 2021)

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He was a big man with short curly hair, brown teeth and a flat nose. A scar crossed his right cheek from ear to chin.

Disponível em: http://teach.files.bbci.co.uk. Acesso em: 21/072021.

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Why do so many families make the difficult and dangerous journey to migrate to the USA?

I have spent much of the last decade conducting on-the-ground fieldwork along the migration paths through Mexico, seeking answers to this question. The region‘s extreme poverty and violent impunity are central factors that drive migration.

Yet every migrant‘s story is unique. Some simply seek the chance to earn enough money to ensure a better future for themselves or their children. Others flee persecution at the hands of gangs, organized crime or corrupt state officials. For others, insecurity and poverty are so intertwined that drawing them apart becomes impossible.

"Falling deeper into debt‟

Extreme poverty and inequality haunt the region. Today, about half of all Central Americans – and two-thirds of the rural populations of Guatemala and Honduras – survive below the international poverty line.

Meanwhile, throughout the 21st century, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have consistently counted among the most murderous nations in the world. Many Central American migrants are simply desperate to find work that pays enough to feed their families. U.S. asylum law provides no relief for these "economic refugees."

I met Roberto Quijones in a migrant shelter in the Mexican state of Tabasco, about 25 mile north of the Mexico‘s southern border with Guatemala. We spoke as he soaked his blistered feet and tried to mend his busted shoes with duct tape.

Roberto is from a rural town in northwestern El Salvador near the border with Honduras and Guatemala, and had been out of work for two years. For more than a year, he and his wife and their 2-year-old daughter had been living with an aunt. Their welcome had worn thin.

And even for those who can find work, extremely low wages cannot cover families‘ basic needs, destroying hope for a better future.

Ethics and survival

The images and stories of Central Americans caged at the border awaiting processing expose how the U.S. immigration system was never designed to deal with this many people fleeing these kinds of problems.

In the hopes of getting better treatment at the border, some migrants have resorted to pretending to be part of family units, or lying about their age. This kind of "gaming the system" may be ethically questionable, but viewed from the perspective of survival, it makes perfect sense.

Such strategies speak most of all of collective desperation, begging a question posed by many of the Central American migrants I have met over the years: "If you were me, what would you do?"

Disponível em: https://theconversation.com/migrants-stories-why-they-flee114725. Acesso em 21 Mar. 2022.[Adaptado]