Every year in my genetics class we play a little game. The first lab is dedicated to learning some basic rules of probability and running through some simple statistical tests, and one of the exercises is to look around the room and count male-presenting vs. female-presenting students, and test whether the distribution is close enough to 50:50. It never is. then we test against a 40:60 male:female ratio, which used to be the ratio for my university as a whole, and it’s always significantly different than that. This year I have closer to a 30:70 ratio.
Another anecdotal observation: all the men in the class spontaneously segregated themselves to one lab bench. I told them it looked like a high school dance with all the boys nervous and shy about asking someone to dance. The women also looked comfortable with the separation. I’ve long wondered what’s going on, why men are avoiding college, and today I found an article that ponders the same question.
In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.
By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.
Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.
The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?
Yeah, why is that? Let’s hear some hypotheses.
Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”
I call bullshit on that one. Do you think women don’t get negative, discouraging messages in k-12? The whole damn culture is rife with a bias that girls are supposed to be homemakers and squirt out babies.
Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.”
True, tuition is ridiculously high, but being a woman does not qualify you for a discount, so that’s a bad explanation.
Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school.“
I can confirm that! I’ve looked at final grade distributions in my classes, and typically the top 10% in the class are all women. However, that doesn’t explain why we have this difference in performance. I don’t think women are intrinsically smarter than men (I confess to being biased by my experience), and I struggled to understand where this performance difference might come from. Once I thought it might be that the men are all distracted by sports, but no…our male students are often engaged with our sports teams, but I’m more often seeing that women are putting in long hours with the swim team, the volleyball team, the soccer team. When there’s an away game it produces bigger holes in the women student audience than the men’s group (partly, of course, because there are fewer men in the first place.)
There are other suggestions bounced around.
• Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.
• Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.
• Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.
• Men join the military more than women.
• A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.
OK, but those disparities were just as great, or greater, in the 1950s as they are now. They don’t explain the 𝚫♂ at all. But the author proposes an interesting, if rather circular, explanation.
What has changed is an increase in girls.
When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.
We’re just not talking about it.
Here’s a phenomenon I have witnessed in almost 40 years of teaching: vocational choices have been shifting.
In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
That’s also true for med school. Every year I’m writing recommendations for vet school, med school, and grad school, mostly for women. It’s not for the usual annoying excuse I hear from some people, that those professional schools and those occupations have gotten easier, with reduced standards, to accommodate “the girls”* because, if anything, admissions have become even more competitive over the years. Probably the toughest school to get into is vet school, and that’s where the disparity between male and female applicants is highest, in my experience.
So one simple explanation is…cooties. Girls’ germs.
“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” – Dr. Anne Lincoln
For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.
Great. I’ll inform the administration that one way out of our enrollment and budget declines is to admit fewer women.
But seriously, there is something going on here: witness the spontaneous segregation of men and women in my genetics lab. I don’t understand why men are averse to working with women, but it’s a real phenomenon I’ve witnessed. There is no shortage of stupid explanations, at least!
Because the concept of school is feminine.
In Spanish, school is ‘escuela’, ending in -a, which is a feminine.
Think about what you do in school.
You sit down, you accept that you don’t know sh:t and you accept that your teacher is right and you have to shut up and listen.
Obedience is what school requires, which is a feminine trait.
What is masculine is standing up in the classroom and saying “Fvck this sh:t, I’m going to do it my way, you’re wrong, I’m right, I’m not gonna listen to you”, that is a very masculine thing to do, and that’s why men, who are on average, more masculine, essentially do that.
The concept of school is feminine…but never mind that women were often forbidden from attending college, until relatively recent decades.
In Spanish, ‘escuela’ has a feminine gender…damn, this is an argument from a man who has never studied languages, because the article attached to a word has no necessary association with sex.
Since when is good teaching and good learning a matter of rote memorization? My best students ask questions. I encourage them to ask me to clarify or explain why something I say is true. To assume that obedience is a feminine trait is straight up wrong and bigoted, and to think that the manly way to learn is to announce aggressively that you’re not going to listen, is antithetical to learning anything. That guy gets everything wrong.
It’s a useful example of the problem, though. It tells me that the problem is a deep cultural bias, where loud-mouthed, ignorant men are shouting out their sexist biases and indoctrinating other men into a dumb attitude that reinforces their bigotry even further. Somehow, men can acquire authority by being loud and aggressive, no matter how stupid their views are, and that just generates more loud, aggressive, stupid men, enshittifying whole generations of young people.
That’s my perspective from the world of education. I can’t think of any examples from the world of politics, for example, can you?
* One thing that bugged me about the article is that it uses men/women, boys/girls, male/female interchangeably. I’m working with college-aged students, and I can’t think of them as boys/girls — they’re adults, or nearly so — and as a biologist male/female has connotations of sex, which I avoid with students. They’re men and women in my classes, that’s it.
Video games.
Boys play video games at a much higher rate than girls. Excessive use of video games correlate with poor performance, attendance, and interest for the middle tranche of boys (most noticeably). Playing video games on the computer looks a lot like doing schoolwork these days, so for anyone attempting to force their kid to do schoolwork that’s a complication. This time suck creates a disadvantage/weakness in performance in high school, and fuels the trend toward passivity, negativity, and failure.
In high school classrooms now women significanty outperform men. Part of this is that the previous generations’ biases against women are much reduced. For example, teachers have been coached to avoid favoritism and to avoid calling on certain students more than others; the problem is much less common now. Being conscious of subtle gender differences in group behavior has improved a lot. (I know I was slow to accept that these habits needed work but then came to see my own biases and did my best to remedy them.)
An excellent place to study these trends is in certain universities where mens and womens schools have been merged or combined. This created an ideal environment to study the trends. There’s one not far from you: the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University. The schools are separated by a few miles but close enough to associate, and they’re administered by the same Catholic orders. They began combing certain classes (for economy of scale mainly) as far back as the 80’s. In recent years they noticed many of these gender differences, which in some cases were striking–and always favored the women. It was this example that cued me to one big difference: Boys are more confident answerers even while they’re more likely to be wrong.
In my direct experience with boys going to/applyingto/thinking about college (40 years in the classroom teaching upper level English in suburban high schools) the preponderance of women in college is viewed as a positive, or enough of a positive to come close to balancing out any resistance boys have in any given class that’s mostly women. But most boys have learned that women work harder, focus better, and know more coming in so they tend to stick together and do what boys do best: become hostile when cornered or threatened.
Yeah, my money’s on man-children being scared of womens’ cooties. Male privilege is making a lot of men fragile, and if they don’t go to college, it’s only going to get worse.
Do I remember a period when studious African-Americans were accused of ‘acting white’? Could it be that there is a variety of machismo at work here? I almost wrote ‘stupid machismo’ but I suspect that that would be a tautology.
That last explanation, as dumb as it is, does make me wonder if the same thing is happening Latin America with its supposed “machismo” culture. Are fewer men than women attending higher education in non-English speaking countries?
In short, the dumb jocks won the culture war.
Only anecdotal experience and more than 30 years ago in Germany, but from my time at school I definitely remember being studious, curious and maybe even smart was rather uncool for a guy. Being loud, athletic (or just act like your big and strong) and a bully was considered cool, including bragging about bad grades, but that might have been acting tough.
The class bullies definitely avoided working with girls on stuff, not sure about the average guy. I preferred to be in a group with girls – with few exceptions I found the company of girls much more pleasant and doing school stuff with girls increased the chance I wasn’t the only one doing all the work!
Which made me extra uncool in the eyes of most guys and a depressingly large number of girls. And possibly gay. (Even when I finally found a girlfriend…)
…at university I studied Physics and CompSci, so very few women around, though I hung out a lot with the weirdest and coolest woman in the Physics department!
I didn’t read one example that was present when I went to Nursing school in the early 80s. The average age of the college women was 30 to 35, divorced and looking to support a family without the full support of a male counterpart. This may be biased as nursing was/is a predominantly female occupation. Increasingly there is a need for women to be able to adequately support themselves and/or a family. There is a cultural paradigm shift happening. For women, having to rely on a male for financial support may be a thing of the past.
These factors jump out at me based on what I see in my community.
• Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.
• Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.
• Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right. –> This on may fit the cultural bias explanation.
• Men join the military more than women.
• A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.
I think this graph of undergrad enrolment by gender, from 1970 to 2022 (plus projections) is useful;
https://www.statista.com/statistics/236360/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-by-gender/
From around 2011 to 2022, enrolments for men and women have dropped by a bit more than a million each, with the gap remaining about the same.
I would say that girls are conditioned to listen and to do what they are told and don’t make a fuss. It is more expected and I would argue, more respected for men to buck and make their own way. Not saying I agree with that attitude.
Boys aren’t raised to think they will meet a woman who will take of them and their debts, so $100,000 on a degree makes less sense then a trade school or to join the military.
For a woman, who are, generally speaking for most cultures looked after by their fathers and encouraged to find a man with a well paying job, it makes sense to gamble on a high priced education.
For men who are generally not looked after and expected to make their own way, it makes less sense to get a $100,000 education and enter an over saturated market for employment.
It doesn’t matter if we want to admit it or not, boys and girls are raised differently.
Based on my experience, a man who chooses to “sit with the girls” is just a loser trying to get a girlfriend, and would be looked down on/resented by both sexes. In other words, once sexual segregation starts, it becomes self-reinforcing.
Geez. Perhaps the “loser” is just trying to find a, I don’t know, friend, in a “man’s world”?
Men outnumber women 9 to 1 in our nation’s prisons. It is hard to get a college degree in prison.i had 2 sisters who dropped ouit of high school, got their GEDs, went to community colleges and went into nursing. They did very well for themselves there.
A lot of people are trying to create retroactive justifications for why the percentage of men in college is decreasing, but the more interesting thing to consider is why the de-valuing of education (too expensive, degrees don’t mean anything anymore, too many useless subjects in the humanities, etc) is coinciding with the increase of women attendants (this isn’t the only field where this happens btw)
A slightly sideways view: Potential mothers are conditioned, from a very early age, to appreciate delayed gratification more than potential fathers are. (Society at least at present tries to ignore any conditioning it does for/to the non-reproductive-role-oriented, certainly among early- and mid-teens.) And higher levels in academé are nothing but delayed gratification.
Of course, there’s delayed responsibility in there, too (thirty seconds versus nine months… although in reality a couple decades for both, but that’s too far in the future for teen social conditioning to contemplate!), but — as the last couple generations of political and business leaders have all too visibly demonstrated — contemplating “future responsibility” isn’t something that the West does particularly well. Consider the proportion of tech bros that started but didn’t finish what one might otherwise think are “essential” levels of education for the field at the time they were “innovating,” ranging from Bill Gates, an undergrad dropout, to Elizabeth Holmes, another undergrad dropout, to more early-in-grad-school dropouts than I can count.
In Trumpian times education is rubbished, science is opposed, expertise is rejected, knowledge is sneered at. People can tell millions of lies and it is the road to success along with bowing down to Trump and being racist and misogynist. Why on earth would bros bother going to university and wasting time?
Army.
Where are the men going?
I’m going to go with the simplest answer : money. When young guys hear about staggering, sometimes lifelong college debt, coupled with low wages (I know lawyers who are renting), they tend to look to alternative choices like the trades. I was talking to a young (30?) plumber recently. As he installed my new water heater, he told me he once considered going to college, but two things stopped him, the high costs and the fact that he simply never enjoyed going to school. He was a B student at best. So, he decided on plumbing as a career. He said in a good year he could make over 100k. After what I paid for my new water heater, I could easily believe it wasn’t an idle boast. When was the last time anyone here saw a female plumber? Or roofer, electrician, auto or aircraft mechanic, HVAC tech, and so forth.
I won’t even try to guess why the trend continues now, but it may well have started when the draft ended.