I’m sorry @9101transfermum . I think sometimes a gap year or two can be very helpful. I hope your son will be able to find his path forward.
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What it might also be doing to women is to limit the pool of available men for college-educated women looking for a husband (mate? life partner?) who broadly shares their level of education, earning potential, and other various commonalities of people with college degrees.
I think of this because my daughter found it hard at her college (60% female when she started five years ago) to find and date men who weren’t gay or in the frat-boy category – she had excessive amounts of competition for the available candidates! If colleges will be producing fewer and fewer male graduates as time goes on, then statistically that will limit the choices she has unless she wants to wade into the “slacker” pool.
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My daughter and son go to the same HBCU and the gender numbers are so skewed that my son’s class is 72% female. It has been interesting to watch how my “loner son” has made more female friends in one month of college than in 19 years at home. My daughter on the other hand (her class was 69% female 3 years ago) has made very few male friends despite being an outgoing person and a top student in her STEM major.
I agree with posters who have mentioned how males are dealt with in our K-12 educational complex as a possible cause. I see no end in sight for the current trends, and have no quick fixes on how to get more young men enrolled in college. Does this trend affect our society’s long-term prospects? That is the Million Dollar question.
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During the 20th century, the tendency was for women to marry men* who had an equal or greater education level than they had. This was, in part, the result of simple demographics: Men tended to attain a higher level of education than women did. And, logically enough, this meant that men tended to marry women with an equal or lower educational level than they had.
Now that the demographics of educational attainment are shifting, we will presumably develop a new norm with the opposite happening—it will simply have to become the norm for women to marry men with an equal or lower level of educational attainment, and for men to marry women with an equal or higher one. It’s just numbers.
However, demographic shifts and the attendant cultural changes are difficult, as evidenced by the comment that this means women will have to “wade into the ‘slacker’ pool”. This is intriguing, the idea that a man with lower educational attainment is inherently part of the “slacker pool”**—and I am curious whether one would think that a man who married a women with a lower educational attainment than his was marrying into the “slacker pool”? If not, there are some really interesting attitudinal issues about gender at play here.
* For simplicity, given that we’re talking about differences in educational attainment between men and women in this thread, I’m limiting myself to heterosexual marriages here, and using a simplified gender binary. However, particularly from the 1980s onward, unmarried heterosexual marriage-like relationships should be considered part of what I’m referring to, as well.
** Worth remembering that there are a number of non-slacker educational outcomes that don’t involve a baccalaureate degree.
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My reference to the “slacker” pool was based on the common characteristics of many of the young men who dropped out of college or never made it to college, as described in the article – spending too much time and energy on video games, pornography, and/or smoking pot. (At least, that’s the type of person who I visualize as a “slacker”.) It is not necessarily a description of all men who don’t go to college. Nor do I think that a man who married a woman with a lower educational attainment was marrying a “slacker,” which is a term that for me carries a certain meaning (see my comment above). It comes down to whether the person with a lower educational attainment has the requisite shift and feck; the young men described in the WSJ article don’t.
Or not marry at all.
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To me, this is a non-issue. Girls have always matured earlier on average, both physically and cognitively, since the existence of humanity. Boys seem to catch up by the time they’re in college. Gender balance has historically been even more skewed in certain majors. It may have some impact on students’ social life but didn’t really affect their education.
But the point is that far fewer men are going to college to be with the women at the point when they catch up maturity-wise. It addition to impacting men’s educations, that’s the prime age when people meet their spouses.
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My point is that there has been greater gender imbalance in some majors/colleges historically. It isn’t ideal socially but the students in those majors/colleges managed to do just fine.
I think that is debatable, but even if true, it would be because overall there were a comparable number of men/women who attained similar education levels. Or it was when gender roles and marriage was designed around women not being college-educated.
But if overall the ratio is 2/3 women v 1/3 men in college, that is a whole different ball game.
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First of all, I don’t think gender balance will become so skewed. If the number of college educated women were to far exceed the number of college educated men, men would have to adapt, as women had historically.
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From the wsj article, currently the rate is 59.5/40.5 now, and it is anticipated to reach 2/3 v 1/3.
What that adaptation looks like is the question.
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This article touches on so many issues - the cost and value of higher education, the “war of boys” in elementary and secondary schools, men “opting out” in general (college, marriage, etc.), colleges instituting programs to meet demographic goals even if it requires lowering standards for favored applicants, and the unhealthy fixation Americans have on college educations. The article fails, however, to delve into different choices men and women make regarding majors. STEM majors like CompSci, EE, Petroleum Engineering and MechE are still overwhelmingly dominated by men, despite efforts over the past couple decades to recruit more female students to these fields. Meanwhile, women are over-represented in social science and humanities majors like Social Work, Education, Psychology and English Literature. In majors that skew overwhelmingly to one gender (where men or women comprise over 80% of students) men dominate high paying fields that focus on understanding and working with things, and women own relatively low paying fields that focus on understanding and working with people. In the center are fields populated by both men and women like business and accounting.
The article is a bit misleading in that it overlooks the fact that the number of both men and women going to college has been increasing for decades (omitting the COVID crunch of the last two years), but the number of women has been increasing at a higher rate. In other words, the number of men attending college has not been dropping; it is just that so many more women are attending college today than in the past.
Finally, the article avoids the academic elephant in the room: humanities and social science programs at many US colleges have become so politicized and academically neutered that they not only provide no net benefit, but they actually diminish their students’ ability to think rationally or process facts and ideas that do not conform to their worldview. I realize this may be an unpopular claim, but sadly, I believe it is true. An English Lit major at Yale can graduate without reading William Shakespeare after students signed a petition calling for the department to be “decolonized” by white Europeans. My niece was advised to take “American History from a Marxist Perspective” and “Women’s Gender Studies” as a Freshman at Bowdoin. Patrick Deenan of Notre Dame Law School lamented that incoming students - almost all with undergraduate liberal arts degrees from prestigious universities - lacked even basic knowledge about western philosophers or American history. Meanwhile, professors from Sociology, Anthropology, History and even Journalism departments at US universities encourage their students to shout down and silence speakers on campus with whom they disagree. I could give more examples, but you get the idea.
Unless they plan to enroll in a STEM program that will result in a high paying job and is free (for now) from the worst of the PC madness that infects the humanities departments at US universities, the rational choice for men is to avoid college. A Social Work or English Lit major makes in the mid $30s - if they can find a job in their major. A machinist from the vocational program in my son’s school district makes $100k within two years of graduating, and their placement rate is in the high 90s. The math is pretty simple. Add to this the crushing debt of college, and the decision to pursue a less prestigious, but more lucrative, trade or technical certification only makes sense.
One could easily turn this around and make a strong argument that women are the ones in trouble here. Many of them take on mountains of debt to earn degrees in low paying fields from liberal arts colleges that are becoming indoctrination mills. Sadly, many of the the same women who earned degrees in English Lit or Social Work and earn $35k look down on electricians, network administrators and millwrights who earn close to six figures. Mike Rowe is on to something.
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Objection, several assertions made without evidence.
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While the article seems to focus on men who opted not to attend college and seem rudderless, I know many men who bypassed college and are very successful. One wanted to be an architect, but could not afford college so he started a landscaping business and was able to buy his first house when he was 22. He then plowed his profits into residential real estate and he now owns multiple rental properties. Another started as a carpenter and now runs a GC firm specializing in home renovations where he has a huge backlog of work and he is making money hand over fist. Both are in their 30s now, and have nice homes in areas with good schools. They are able to provide for their families, grow their businesses and fund their retirements. I know many college grads of both genders who are not nearly as successful.
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Not necessarily.
In the US, median age at first marriage for women hovered around 20 from 1950 to 1970, but that’s the lowest it’s been—before that it was higher (e.g., 22 back in 1890), though still around “traditional college age”, but it’s been above 25 since 1990.
For men, median age at first marriage also hit a low from 1950 to 1970, at around 23 (upper end of “traditional college age”), but before that it was quite a bit higher (around 25 or 26 from 1890 to 1940), and since 1970 it’s shot up and has been at or above 26 since 1990.
Admittedly longer engagements are a thing now, but even taking that into account it would appear that most Americans (remember, these are medians, so half the population is higher) don’t meet their first spouse in college anymore. (In fact, when limiting ourselves to those who go to college that might be even more so, since higher educational attainment is associated with higher age at first marriage.)
The idea that people meet their spouses in college may stem from behaviors in the mid-20th century, but that’s sheer speculation based on the overall medians. In general, though, the numbers point to a conclusion that that is more a cultural assumption than a reality.
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There are now many programs and organizations who’s raison d’etre is to promote women’s empowerment both in education, and in the workplace. That is fine. My question is, when was the last time you saw programs in place to encourage men and boys specifically to encourage academics, and to attend college? Where are the “Men’s Centers” on University campuses? About the only thing I see promoting men’s accomplishments in a big way on campus is when it concerns sports.
If the article is the same one I read, it appears that White Men are losing the most ground percentage wise in terms of college admissions, though Latin and Black men’s numbers are continuing to suffer. That’s fine, to me, if those guys are enrolling in a trade school and getting a tradesman’s ticket, as you can do very well if you are a licensed Carpenter, Cabinetmaker, Electrician, Plumber, etc… I would like to see if the numbers of those attending trade schools are increasing, but something tells me that they are not, because there appears to be a labor shortage among those jobs.
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I was afraid my post was too long as-is, without footnotes and links to sources.
For which assertion would you like evidence?
Well, it would be off-topic for this thread, so probably worth starting a new one (feel free to tag me if you do so I know to come over), but the following are questionable, at best, claims about humanities and social sciences programs:
- That they have become “politicized”. (I am guessing you don’t mean like political science, where the study of politics is central to the enterprise itself, but rather that you’re buying into the whole “liberal indoctrination” nonsense, yes?)
- That they have become “academically neutered”. (Of course, part of this may be that it’s an ill-defined claim, though you did mention something about not having to read Shakespeare later in the post, which if that’s what you mean, is simply silly. Why not complain about the lack of Chaucer? Marlowe? Margery Kempe? There isn’t enough time in a college curriculum to read everything, after all.)
- They they reduce students’ abilities to “think rationally”. (Again, there may be some definitional sleight of hand here. How does one define rational thought? In many contexts, of course, the people talking about rational thought actually mean “agreeing with me”.)
- That they reduce the ability of students to “process facts and ideas that do not conform to their worldview”. (Unless you mean in the sense that human beings aren’t good at dealing with stuff that doesn’t fit into our worldview, but in that case you need to demonstrate that there’s something about the humanities and social sciences specifically, since otherwise it’s only trivially true.)
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Although there has been a great deal of hand-wringing over the content of humanities courses, I’d argue the content is merely the vehicle by which students learn useful and applicable skills – how to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in arguments, evaluate and understand the biases and limitations of sources, formulate research questions and develop sound arguments, and so on. Students can learn these things whether they are reading Shakespeare, the Shahnameh, or Harry Potter. This is why colleges like my alma mater offer a wide variety of writing-in-the-disciplines courses – whether the topic is ancient sports or biogeography is irrelevant since students develop their writing skills regardless.
One can say that certain works are key for an understanding of the subject matter – is it possible to understand ancient Greece without at least a basic knowledge of the Iliad? – but that is a separate issue from claiming that a student’s capacity for evaluating ideas and arguments has been diminished because of the texts they have read (or not read).
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