Men’s rates of college enrollment and graduation are sinking, and it’s only getting worse. What’s the solution?
First, let me apologize for the frivolous (and dated) Cooleyhighharmony reference. Though I do have a soft spot for that song, this article is meant to address an eminently serious topic: namely, the widening gender disparity in education.
According to the Pew Research Center, female first outnumbered males in higher education in the year 1992 (page 2). Since then, the gap has become a gulf, with 36% of women completing a bachelor’s degree, compared to only 28% of men (page 10). What’s more, it’s only going to get worse. Among young people in 2009, 44% of females were enrolled in college, compared to 38% of males (page 9).
If you’re a man currently in college, or a senior in high school getting ready to matriculate next year, this statistic may seem like a good occasion to exchange a high-five with your buddies, rather than raising the alarm. Sweet ratio; am I right or what? Up top!
But grave social consequences can be expected from this seismic shift, especially in a bad job market where the gap between the successful and the hopeless is more deeply tied to educational attainment than ever before. I won’t dissect the figures here, as our focus is elsewhere, but your chances of being unemployed are the highest by far if you lack a high school degree, and go down dramatically with each degree you attempt or complete. Despite all the anecdotal horror stories, unemployment is tiny among Americans who have a master’s degree or more (whether their wages are adequate, especially considering student debt, is another question entirely).
We’re going to see vast, unsettling economic changes as a result of this educational gap between men and women. Indeed, we’re already seeing it. The massive increase in the number of women in the workplace over the past half-century, as laudable as it is as a sign of social progress, nevertheless corresponded with a period of wage stagnation that is still strangling America’s middle class.
To put it another way, even for women who would prefer to limit their participation in the workforce, a two-income household is no longer optional, but mandatory, because most men aren’t getting paid enough to finance a family themselves.
America also, despite our flattering self-image as land of the free, has the highest incarceration rate of any country on Earth (probably of any major civilization in history). These prisoners are disproportionately male and disproportionately black, and are not only cut off from nearly all forms of economic activity, they are expensive wards of the taxpayers. This situation too will need to be addressed if we’re going to give men a chance in our society.
The crisis with males is a serious problem. It’s the mirror image of the girl-heavy ratio seen in our colleges, and it’s bad news. A surplus of frustrated, unemployable men is a recipe for trouble … war, for instance. (I’ve often worried about this given the gender gap in birthrates in India and China.)
We absolutely must do something to keep guys in school longer. If we don’t, they’re not going to have jobs, they’re going to be more prone to suicide, criminal behavior, political extremism, and just general maladjustment. It’s wonderful that women are seizing the levers of power, economically and otherwise, and I would be the last person to concern-troll you with cries of “misandry,” but these trends are very troubling. We need to launch a concerted national effort to help our boys, or we’re going to have a deficit of men.
Read more in Education.
Image of high school graduation courtesy of Shutterstock
I think if we are going to solve the problem we will have to diagnose it properly. Firstly not all boys are failing…some of them are. Some are excelling. In the past what would have happened is that the boys who excelled would have gone on to college and the others would have gotten jobs. In my view its probably always been the case the women were better suited to school than men on average but that most women did not need to excel in school and so they didn’t. Now everyone must be well-educated because increasing levels of education… Read more »
Back when schools had strict disciplinary systems where students where explicitly told to be still and quiet at all times unless when given permission to do otherwise, boys used to consistently outperform girls. This was back then seen as evidence that girls are “just not as good at this school thing.” To some extent I feel people are bending over backwards to avoid admitting that this is exactly what were doing now, only in reverse. Pretty much every argument that was made as to why girls just can’t do as well in schools as boys back in the dark days… Read more »
“Boys, as a group, are no longer considered equally smart and mentally capable as girls in the western culture”. To add to this stereotype, boys are also considered more anti-social and devious than girls. The consequence is that laws are being interpreted by judges today based on these stereotypes. Today male adults are automatically assumed to be the perpetrators in domestic violence. Males are also considered as less nurturing and more abusive of children. These stereotypes are completely false, yet court judgements continue to show a significant bias in favour of women. Men are also considered violent by nature so… Read more »
The system is performing as designed at both the primary and secondary educational levels and in this political environment nothing of any substantive value is going to change. Classroom environments are not going to be made more accommodating to boys because powerful political lobbies would see that as a step back and stop it. Like it or not we are in a zero sum gain environment in education. Educational costs have risen an average of 9% per year for the last 15 years or so (don’t have real current data). That pie is not getting much bigger and reallocation of… Read more »
We need to launch a concerted national effort to help our boys, or we’re going to have a deficit of men.
Very true. We’ve launched such an effort http://www.theboysinitiative.org. Check us out!
“The crisis with males is a serious problem. It’s the mirror image of the girl-heavy ratio seen in our colleges, and it’s bad news. A surplus of frustrated, unemployable men is a recipe for trouble … war, for instance. (I’ve often worried about this given the gender gap in birthrates in India and China.)” I don’t think that’s applicable to America. Unlike inner city blacks, most young unemployed men have access to video games and pornography. It’s opiate for the masses. I don’t think we’re going to have significant trouble. For this same reason, I don’t think the crisis with… Read more »
I think one part of the problem is that when comparing girls/women to boys/men it basically ends up being comparing all girls/women to the slim portion of men that are at the top and then declaring that all is well. I think another part is that the problem is that boys are left out of the equation until it’s close to college time. The numbers show that boys are lagging behind girls in the earliest levels of academia. But again a lot of the articles that make the comparisons seem to not look at boys until its almost time for… Read more »
The problem starts earlier than what you’re all saying. State mandated testing, No Child Left Behind, all of these “reforms” favor girls. Kindergarten is the new first grade! Academics are drifting down into younger and younger grades, including preschool. Men and women end up being equally good readers, but girls start off with an advantage. When literacy is pushed on kids earlier and earlier, boys are the most likely not to be able to keep up, to tune out and turn off, and never to catch up. We need schools that are ready for kids, not kids that are ready… Read more »
Great comment.
But surely you’ve heard that any assertion that the school environment has been modified in which that specifically hurt boys is just silliness from whiny men who couldn’t cut it?
I hereby nominate Lori Day’s comment for comment of the day. Lori, I agree with you completely. And if I could do one other thing, besides eliminating the narrowing of the curriculum and methods that comes with high stakes testing, it would be this: Literacy is the key to it all. Get boys reading. Every day. Ask grown-ass men to actually come into classrooms and read aloud to the kids from that man’s favorite book. Give the kids, all the kids, including the boys, the choice of whatever they want to read. Comics, magazines, sports stories, wilderness adventures, the transgender… Read more »
My favourite books are technical learning material, photography guides such as the bible I have on lighting. Kids might fall asleep learning about light’s angles and how to take a picture without a studio flash showing up in a reflection.
JustAMan, I could not agree more about literacy. Let boys read *whatever* they want when young. Don’t sweat about Captain Underpants. And let them read nonfiction. They will get to the classics later…if we don’t lose them first. I’ve worked in school administration for 25 years–7 of them in a boys’ school. There is no conspiracy about letting boys fail. No one wants them to fail. It’s not about modifying curriculum to favor girls. It was an unanticipated consequence that should have been anticipated when we went all out for high-stakes testing. And now, Most teachers can articulate what I… Read more »
Lori @ 8:01 am “…It’s not about modifying curriculum to favor girls. It was an unanticipated consequence that should have been anticipated when we went all out for high-stakes testing.” Here it very specifically WAS about changing curriculum to favour girls. The first change was in the type of reading material that was provided. In class, the reading lists in the elementary grades became very strongly focused on heroine oriented stories, and intrapersonal relationship focused books. Action stories were eliminated. There was almost no aspirational figures for boys in the reading list. The second change was a matching elimination in… Read more »
REZAM, where do you live and what schools do you refer to? Do you work in schools? Much of what you write bears very little resemblance to what is going on in the schools where I have worked. I agree with the last point about literacy being a part of most subjects and the effect this has on boys, and also agree that the organizational/executive functioning demands on boys are not developmentally appropriate. I am a HUGE advocate for boys when it comes to education, and have devoted a great portion of my career to this, and must tell you… Read more »
Do your schools do any robotics, Lego mindstorms for instance? They didn’t have any at my school and it pissed me off to no end. If I ever have kids I wanna give them robotics, and other science related stuff to learn from as well as art, woodworking, metalworking, photography (which is my passion). I’ll be teaching a daughter the same as a son and hopefully both will enjoy building stuff in the shed like I do, it’d crush me to see them simply never try something because it’s gendered. Hell I even sew sometimes, traditionally female craft but I… Read more »
Yes, absolutely, lots of that kind of stuff for boys, and an ongoing conversation of how to get girls more interested in it! Also, chess club, debate, many things boys tend to love. I personally started the science fair at my daughter’s elementary school and ran it for six years, and it still runs to this day. I was allowed to do that as a parent when the school didn’t have the resources to make it happen. And everyone did NOT get a ribbon. Some competition is healthy, and boys especially respond to it. I see many books geared for… Read more »
Global warming *being* a hoax…TYPO alert!
Thanks for the reply, sounds like lucky kids to have such an engaged teacher/s to help them out. It saddens me that girls aren’t as interested in robotics as the guys, I think gendered toys and tv shows, etc have a big role to play there. My interest in robotics started from Transformers and my interest in construction n building was from lego (stayed up many nights building stuff!). You can find so many damn GI Joe n robotic beings for boys being limited to building, breaking, killing but girls are usually limited to some role of human polite interaction,… Read more »
Lori, by any chance can you post a link to your article about how to encourage reading / instill a love of reading for its own sake? Thanks in advance.
@ Lori @ 9:21 pm “where do you live and what schools do you refer to? Do you work in schools? ” Ontario, Canada, public school system; I am unclear that working in schools is the most objective perspective for analysis – having said that I was a 15 year work from home dad, well before it became common, and the changes I describe arose over the period from the 90s through 2004. “Much of what you write bears very little resemblance to what is going on in the schools where I have worked.” Which is why I said “Here”.… Read more »
I hated school. I even had a class where there was 2 males, I was one, with about 20 or so females. The females could talk heappppppsssss but us 2 guys would cop n earful is we spoke and were told to quieten down far far far more than the girls ever got. The teacher was female and I very much sensed this anti-male bias in her based on her actions, I had heard other guys in classes said the same too. I truly hope this is so rare that it’s just anecdotal evidence and no one else goes through… Read more »
http://theboysinitiative.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/the-10-issues-affecting-boys-today/ particularly numbers 1, 2 and 6 : 1. “that boys are on a different time clock than girls in reading and writing, . . . boys are learning to read and write at too young an age” 2. ” being highly organized is not only expected, it is demanded. But, we all know that this is not developmentally possible for most boys, even in their teens…” 6. “he is now sitting down to do his 3+ hours of homework at 8:00pm at night…” The high stakes testing around here is specifically designed to test THE SCHOOL, and not the… Read more »
I love your comment Lori. In an effort to help girls excel we have shifted cirruculum to really focus on a standardized learning system. People are not standardized. Boys learn differently than girls and children accross the board have different learning styles, e.g. touch or hearing or seeing. Its not a matter of having necessarily boys schools vs. girls schools, though that might make it easier. Our teachers need to be trained to teach to different learning styles. Education isn’t about just passing the test, its about applying the knowlege gained. Learning how to apply knowlege doesn’t come from a… Read more »
Here’s another unintended consequence: A husband shortage. As women tend to marry up in status, income, education, even height, (it’s called hypergamy) there are going to be a lot of unmarried women who can’t find husbands.
Oh, and voluntary single-motherhood is going to continue to rise.
…you’ve started to see the reverse in groups exhibiting the greatest gender gaps in income and educational attainment. Professional black women for example, have begun marrying down to secure a black male partner. That’s also a trend that is sure to continue (the consequence of this fact is less clear though)
I think there might also be a larger sociological effect that gives women reason to excel, and does the opposite for men. With the feminist movement the female social role has been transformed. Many women have abandoned their traditional roles in the home in favor of “empowered” ones in the workplace. Many more women try to accomplish both sets of roles and “have it all”. With the females accomplishing everything, the so-called “opposite” sex finds itself doing the opposite. There are many men who seek to become powerful alpha males, but there is a strong perception that powerful alpha males… Read more »
I read this article quite a while ago and it has stuck with me: http://www.esquire.com/features/the-state-of-the-american-man/ESQ0706SOTAMBOYS_94 One proposed solution is to encourage more men to mentor boys in the same way women have jumped up to mentor girls. One proposed ’cause’ of the problem is that school systems were totally revamped to help girls (maybe in the 80s?). Then we totally forgot about boys. As a relatively recent schoolgirl myself, I can totally see how biased the classroom is to girls. There are more female teachers and sitting still for longer periods is stereotypically relatively easier for “us” (nature or nurture?… Read more »
Pedophilia hysteria is directly harming adult male role models for children. I could teach kids photography for instance, but I won’t because I am very aware of how dangerous it is for me as an adult male in the climate we have in Australia for instance, it makes me quite nervous to be around kids these days simply because of the hysteria. I’d never let someone harm a kid but too often people seem to focus on the bad men do vs the good, so it’s just not a good idea to be a mentor anymore.
I agree completely. It seems that even today women are stereotyped as being inherently motherthly, and thus more qualified to help younger children. Also men are still stereotyped as sex maniacs a lot of the time. For many people it is easier to imagine a male sex maniac than to imagine a man who is just as good with kids as a stereotypical woman.
Woah, interesting, thanks for the replies, guys.
“Women excel at school, but still don’t do as well, financially or leadership-wise, as their similarly-educated (with lower grades, probably) male counterparts in the workplace.”
The wage gap is a hugely debated topic and you can get really any result you want depending on how you segment the stats or define income, work, and hours worked. I will add though, that the usual measures are showing a persistent emerging wage gap favoring women among young unmarried persons. Give it time, and I’m sure the wage gap will inverse in a generation.
Interesting that you chose as the first words in your title, “Boys to Men.” After President Obama took office, he quickly established a White House Council for Women and Girls. By this time, of course, girls and women were far outperforming boys and men in school, from early grades through college (and within a few years, they’d be earning more graduate degrees as well). Two years later, a group of well-known scholars and practitioners (including Warren Farrell, Michael Gurian, and Leonard Sax) urged the White House to establish a Council for Boys to Men (http://www.theboysinitiative.org/images/Study_and_Proposal_to_Create_a_White_House_Council_on_Boys_to_Men.pdf) As far as I know,… Read more »
“A surplus of frustrated, unemployable men is a recipe for trouble … war, for instance.” Unemployable people cause wars, that statement sounds a bit sexist…People need the ability to find work, get work, and earn their keep. Without income, desperation will set in and if enough are out of work whilst a few elites hold a huge amount of wealth….then I won’t be surprised if we see civil wars break out, quite frankly I’m a lil surprised there hasn’t been any major violent protests in the U.S recently. “and I would be the last person to concern-troll you with cries… Read more »
Thanks for the thoughtful responses, fellas. Diogenes, I must confess that I share you and your namesake’s cynicism, especially in context, regarding the dehumanized flotsam we’ve written off in our prisons. Other two guys: you both make some good points, but there’s a slight hint of this devolving into the inevitable partisan quarrel, a prospect that always makes my heart sink a little. I think we can stipulate that not everything is about, as Donahue might put it, mulatto presidents and the right-wing culture warriors who love them 🙂 What I’m trying to say is, all of us have skin… Read more »
“although electorally there’s a gender gap too, of course” That’s a whole other topic that I’d like to explore. I’ve often seen that fact used as a means of tearing at the political legitimacy of a particular bill or as a threat against a political movement deemed counter to the interest of women. What get’s me is the rather cavalier acceptance of this fact as though its not itself a symptom of a deeper social problem. In a world where men and women are born 50/50 (actually boys are born at a slightly higher rate), the only way we find… Read more »
Solution #1. Care. It is politically incorrect to protect boys and young men, or even acknowledge that there is an education gap. Solution #2. Get a President in office that doesn’t believe that the gender education gap is a “great accomplishment for our country”, as Barack Obama stated. Solution #3. Stop blaming the victims. When girls/women were on the short end, they weren’t blamed. Neither should boys and young men be blamed. Solution #4. Imagine the reaction if boys/young men were 60% of the graduates and girls/young women were 40% of the graduates. Do what you would do for girls/women… Read more »
Patricia, when you say ” This situation too will need to be addressed if we’re going to give men a chance in our society,” you’ve missed the point; we’re not going to give men a chance in our society.
A quick Google search and read-thru is surprisingly vague about what’s causing the decline of men in higher education. There is speculation, of course, but nothing really stands out as a leading cause. A few make sense: – better opportunities for non-college men than non-college women – continued dominance of men in the workforce (see above) – less institutional help for men/boys than for women/girls (in areas such as literacy, where boys trail girls) A few have a ring of hooey about them: – “PC” anti-boy behavior in elementary & secondary education – Title IX cutting men’s scholarships in nondominant… Read more »
@Peter Von Maidenburg
Hmm…I’d don’t think this can be right. I’d hazard to guess that the hard sciences have tended to select men at disproportionate rates. If we we’re seeing a decrease in the overall appeal of and enrollment in LA degrees relative to the hard sciences, then the proportion of men enrolled in college would rise relative to women, but the opposite has happened. Unless your saying the forces eroding the value of a LA degree somehow don’t affect women’s decision making in enrolling the program which seems unlikely.