Lower mission age for YW, lower education levels

It’s like waves on a beach. At first there was such an inflow of missionaries the church was scrambling where to put them and there were multiple stories in the Utah press about drop in college enrollment for both sexes. Then it settled out and now missions are doing a little contracting and colleges in Utah have relaxed with the return of elders and sisters. With women going after a year post graduation from HS some are likely working and saving so it will take a little time to what will happen. With the change in age to go I can see an increase in marriage or at least earlier marriages for returned sisters since they’ll be so close in age to returned elders. Back in the day there was always a cluster of older unmarried women in singles branches and I think that phenomenon will go away now.

Just gonna say that I’m really glad I didn’t choose to go on a mission until well past college graduation. I was a very different (and immature in both personality and thought process) person before the last few years of college.

I’d give it a few more years and see what the numbers are there. I’m not sure if they’ll change, but should be interesting once we get past the big influx of missionaries from the past few years.

BYU is not quite as secretive about some stats as the church as a whole is, but I don’t have time to go searching right now. My freshman son in campus housing says his ward is 2/3 female if that’s an indication of anything.

BYU is not quite as secretive about some stats as the church as a whole is, but I don’t have time to go searching right now. My freshman son in campus housing says his ward is 2/3 female if that’s an indication of anything.

Grandkids in the near future?

Maybe I’m an outlier but the mission had a profoundly positive effect on my studies. My grades went up after I got home, my study habits were much better.

Lower mission age for missionaries and lower education levels I believe has also lowered quality of missionaries. I haven’t spoken with a missionary who has a modestly nuanced view of doctrine in a long time. It will be interesting to see if level of education goes down for either YM or YW. I could see the % of youth finishing college after missions potentially decreasing for not only YW but also for YM. Although it could go up if missionaries see firsthand how important a college education is.

As a WML I know this is very true, maybe it’s the set we have, however, it is making my calling very difficult.

I am curious how this will result in the long run, wondering how the unintended consequences will play out.

From reading this article, you might think that married women, or indeed mothers never go to universities or continue higher education.

Well, that’s a pile of do-do, but I agree, it’s less common.

And of course, you will see enrollment drop initially, but when the sister missionaries return, and get their money together for college, you will see a resurgence in enrollment.

Exactly. This one’s just still in the early phase. But female graduation rates have long been an issue at BYU – due to marriage, not due to missions. At least if it’s due to missions, these women are gaining independence, leadership skills, spiritual equality with their future spouses, opinions, and life experience outside the domestic sphere. Mark my words, returned sister missionaries will expect more equality than the generations of women who mostly did not serve. They will expect it, and they will get it. And weirdly enough, I think that’s what’s behind the change…I think there was some sense among the men that with women not having served missions, they were in fact on unequal footing with the men spiritually and in terms of authority, so how to remedy that? Well, this helped…Now, reducing the men’s age to 18 was purely because it was done that way outside the US for years due to the graduation age being 17 in places like Australia and England. They probably also figured they lose fewer men this way. Men need less independence, women need more. Men need to be domesticated, women need to be exposed to new ideas.

I don’t know, if equality was really that much of a motivating factor behind this then it seems like they would have just made the age limits and mission lengths the same for both genders. My guess is that most Church leaders would still rather see women consider marriage as the first option before and instead of missions at all but they don’t necessarily want to come right out and say it and they probably saw that more women were serving missions and/or not getting married until their mid-twenties compared to the past anyway so that’s why they thought it wouldn’t hurt for women that aren’t planning on getting married anytime soon and want to serve a mission to go ahead and get it over with so they can move on to the supposedly more important task of getting married having babies.

For men missions are still completely different than they are for women in the sense that they are an expected rite of passage whereas no one will second-guess LDS women that don’t want to serve a mission the way they typically do for young men. To me the age change for men looks like it was mostly about trying to improve retention and maximize the number of young men that go on missions because they probably liked the idea of having them go directly from living with their parents that can typically keep an eye on them and provide some influence to encourage them to toe the line to being around other missionaries 24/7 while being constantly indoctrinated in the Church’s program instead of being around some of the typical “bad” influences at college and/or work.

As far as the impact on education levels for women, obviously some of it is temporary because it simply means that many women that would have been in college are now on missions but by itself that doesn’t mean they can’t go to college when they return. What I don’t think is temporary is that my guess is that a significantly higher percentage of LDS women will serve missions now compared to before the age change. Then when you combine that with some of the pressure to get married relatively young, not wait to have children, and be stay-at-home moms I could easily see an increased number of women basically directly replacing time that would have been spent in college before with time for missions as a side-effect of this age change.