If you're a woman

Heads up that this chapter is specifically about discerning a degree as a woman, and the next one is the same conversation for men. If this one isn't yours, feel free to skim or skip ahead, though I'd still recommend reading because the underlying logic is going to apply either way.

Okay, so.

The question of what to study is a slightly different question for women, and I think it's worth being honest about that, even though the culture would prefer we pretend it isn't.

Here's the thing. There are a few different lives you might be discerning toward, and the right degree, if any, really depends on which one you're actually called to.

If you're a woman who genuinely just wants to be provided for by a husband, and to live a simple life raising your children, that's a beautiful vocation, and it's a valid one. But if that's actually the life you want, then the question you should be sitting with isn't really about your degree at all. The question is about how picky you can afford to be about who you marry.

And here's where I have to be a bit blunt, because nobody else is going to be.

How picky you can afford to be is going to depend partly on what you bring to the table, and that's a sentence the culture really doesn't want anyone to say out loud anymore. But it's true. Some women are going to have a relatively easy time finding a man with the means to comfortably provide. Some women aren't. And if you're more in the second camp, that doesn't mean the vocation isn't yours, it just means you might have to widen your idea of what being provided for actually looks like.

Maybe it's not a man who can fund a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle on his own. Maybe it's a good, hardworking, faithful man with a stable trade, and a small house, and a quiet simple life with a couple of kids. And honestly, that's a beautiful life, and probably a much holier one than the one most women are out there chasing.

So the discernment, really, is twofold. How picky can you afford to be, and how picky do you actually need to be to be content. Because if you can be genuinely happy with a simple life, then the pool of men you could marry well is a lot bigger than if you've decided you need a six figure husband to be okay.

And tied to all of this, please be honest with yourself about whether a degree even makes sense for you in this scenario. Because it isn't really fair to want to not work, and then take on a hundred thousand dollars of student debt that your future husband is going to inherit responsibility for. That's a decision he should be part of, ideally before the debt is taken on, and not after.

Now, maybe you want a slightly different version of that. Maybe you want to be home with your children when they're young, but you want to be able to step into something meaningful once they're older. That's also a beautiful and valid vocation, and a degree might genuinely make sense in that case. But you have to be careful about what you pick, because the world is changing fast, and you need to choose something whose value will hold up fifteen or twenty years from now.

A solid, timeless choice that has worked for generations of women is nursing. It's a real skill, it's in high demand, it's stable, and a lot of the things you learn actually carry over into motherhood in really useful ways. Education is another one, especially if you're thinking about homeschooling. There are others too, but those are two that tend to age really well.

The principle here is, don't take on stupid debt. Ask yourself if it's actually going to be worth what you're going to owe, because if your end goal is to step out of the workforce eventually, then debt becomes a much bigger problem than it would be for someone planning to work for forty years.

And then there's the third version, where you do want a full career, the whole "have it all" path. If that's you, the rest of this course basically applies to you the same way it applies to the guys, so you can take the men's chapter and apply most of it to yourself.

The only thing I'd add, gently, is to be honest with yourself about which of those three you actually want, and not which one you've been told you should want. Because they're three really different paths, and they ask really different things from your degree, and pretending you want one when you actually want another is how you end up resentful at 35.