Boston ? I know that educated women have always made some people nervous.

In 1873, when less than 15 percent of the college students were female, Harvard’s Edward Clarke explained scientifically how expanding a woman’s brain would make her uterus shrink.

In 1889, when women still made up less than 20 percent of the college students, the eminent scientist R.R. Coleman warned college women, “You are on the brink of destruction. … Beware!! Science pronounces that the woman who studies is lost.”

Now it’s 2002. The fall semester opens with reports that 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees will go to women. And surprise! it’s being heralded as a national crisis.

Throughout the summer, there were dire headlines asking, “Where are the Guys?” Christina Hoff Sommers, author of “The War Against Boys” was everywhere saying that “we have thrown the gender switch,” and “girls have been getting strong and stronger and boys weaker in almost all the ways that count academically.”

Meanwhile, college presidents overseeing a female, um, dominated campus are working on what they do not call affirmative action recruitment plans for men. And the Business Roundtable, an organization of chief executives of the nation’s top corporations, is funding a study to figure out what’s happening to dare I say? their heirs apparent.

It seems that everyone in higher education is majoring in the same subject: the gender gap. The pop quiz has three questions: Are women winning? Are men losing? Is good news for the goose bad news for the gander?

Before you answer, a few facts. There are now about 8.3 million women and 6.4 million men in college. The gap is the latest phase in a long gradual trend that began after the Vietnam War, when men had a very strong incentive to stay in school college or combat. In the last couple of decades, the number of men with bachelor’s degrees has risen, but the number of women has increased much further and faster.

Jacqueline King at the American Council on Education calls this “more of a success story for women than failure for men.” Of course, “success” also has its limits. The gender gap reverses by the time you get to doctorates and goes into full-tilt retreat down the tenure track.

But even when we are counting bachelor’s degrees, gender is just the sexy part of the statistics. The real educational gap has a lot more to do with race and class.

For openers, there is no gap between traditional-age white male and female students. The real differences appear among minorities. In fact, most of the overall gap is due to a huge increase in the number of minority women. Among blacks, two women now get degrees for every man.

As for income, we know that low-income students of every ethnic group are less likely to go to college. But it turns out that more low-income women than men still find their way onto a campus.

This has a lot to do with the job market, says King. An undecided low-income male may look around and see a job that looks decent by an 18-year-old’s standard, she says. But a woman “can’t get a job in the traditional female worlds of health care or office work without some postsecondary school.” Indeed, the good/bad news is that a woman still needs a college degree to match the income of a man with a high school diploma.

I don’t want to minimize a real problem. We should worry about young people left behind in an economy that is increasingly dependent on education. And it’s worth asking why low-income and minority men are less successful academically than other populations.

But if there’s a crisis, it’s not a man vs. woman thing. As Jacqueline Woods, head of the American Association of University Women, puts it, “They’re saying that women are replacing men and isn’t this alarming. Those people are playing a zero-sum game, and I refuse to play.”

You don’t need a bachelor’s degree to pick up a subtext in the crisis reporting: Somehow or other, women are upsetting the natural order of things. Even, or especially, the marital order. As Thomas Mortenson at the Pell Institute told one reporter, “There’s 170,000 more bachelor’s degrees awarded to women than men. That’s 170,000 women that will not be able to find a college-educated man to marry.”

Hmmm. Was anyone alarmed when there weren’t enough educated women for the bachelors with bachelor’s degrees? College women hear this: “You are on the brink of destruction. … Beware!!” Get the degree, and you face a shrinking population of marriageable men.

Let’s see now, is that better or worse than a shrinking uterus?