Number of Men Now Enrolled in College Trails Women by Record Levels
“Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year—3,805,978 to 2,815,810—by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year”
Higher education has been trending this way for years. This isn’t going to change any time soon.
Douglas Belkin writes at the Wall Street Journal:
A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’
Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year—3,805,978 to 2,815,810—by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.
“Men are falling behind remarkably fast,” said Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, which aims to improve educational opportunities for low-income, first-generation and disabled college students.
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Comments
I see this as an absolute win for men.
College is a bad economic proposition for any man not enrolled in a professional STEM program; there’s only so many men qualified for that and only so many such jobs available. Most men will be better served by learning a skilled trade or acquiring job skills through practical experience.
On the flip side, women who go to college choose pointless majors with no economic ROI – the lifetime ROI of many arts major programs is negative – and get indoctrinated into hating men, their families and their culture in no particular order.
The more men avoid college, the more financially and personally successful they’ll be, and the more they’ll avoid getting entangled with women likely to ruin their lives.
I agree. How many Doctors of Grievance Studies can replace a flush valve, lay flooring, frame a house, or change out a hard drive?
That would depend on how corporations and employment is structured. The more quota based hiring occurs the less actual competency will matter.
My own (non-STEM) field has spoken of the greying of the workforce for at least a decade or two and yet vacancies remain scarce. Whether that’s because staff don’t want to retire, organisations are shrinking staff numbers, backdoor or preferential treatment, or some combination thereof is unclear. Worse, professional and paraprofessional qualifications are increasingly devalued with the workforce split between ordinary staff – air hostesses, checkout chicks, the director’s totally unqualified son etc, and management which demands experience and (professional?) qualifications. How one is supposed to get experience in that field when one can’t get hired is unclear. Those with certificates i.e. not even paraprofessional qualifications, in theory don’t have a chance.
What a ridiculous generalization this comment is. Ugh.
The long-standing PC viewpoint has been that girls are discouraged throughout education. That statement is provably false. Most elementary, high-school, and college teachers are women, and they encourage girls more than they encourage boys. Most students who are disciplined are boys, and boys who refuse to behave are diagnosed as ADHD and given drugs so they will act like girls.
Things get worse in college. There are many support groups, counselors, etc. available to help girls adapt to college life. There are even majors available in “women’s studies” to help girls graduate who could not succeed in any other major.
In contrast to the girls, the boys are treated as potential rapists and likely rapist. Here is a good description:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/06/whats-in-store-for-your-sons
Education is now heavily biased against boys. I don’t expect that to change as long as the woke leftists remain in power, with the teachers’ unions encouraging teachers to see all boys as representatives of “toxic masculinity.”
“Education is now heavily biased against boys.”
A K-4 grades, that was true by the early 70s — though unintentionally so. Teachers were 80% female even then. (Now it’s likely 90-95% female today). Female teachers naturally prefer to read and discuss books with their children that are more oriented towards feelings and social interactions.
Male teachers, the few that exist at that level, are more likely to choose action/adventure. Example — for early third grade: “Adventures of the Greek Heroes” — still in print 50 years later, thankfully:
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Greek-Heroes-Anne-Wiseman/dp/0395137144
Third grade level Stories of Hercules, Perseus, Theseus, Jason and many more.
Captivating for male 8-year-olds — and girls enjoy it too. But such a title is not a likely choice of female teachers.
That statistic may be true of the “average” college due to continual devaluation of their curriculum. At schools where actual achievement is required to survive — like CalTech, MIT, RPI, even Colorado School of Mines — I wonder if the statistics show something quite different? 50 years ago, the enrollment in these schools ran about 10 males for every female, and it’s not because they were turning down the females.
It would be quite ironic if our modern colleges devalued themselves into Elizabethan-age “finishing schools,” where the idle daughters of the rich were sequestered to “learn” music, art, fashion design, and so on, until which time they could make a life for themselves as courtesans, the successful ones snagging a wealthy husband, the others doing whatever it took. Except instead of learning life-affirming fine arts, today’s schools would teach the women how to be not just unemployable, but unlovable.
I suggest that what we are seeing here is part of a deep cultural shift in which the world is being turned upside down. We are moving from a world where men and women had equally important but distinct roles to one of female hegemony in which cultural direction is set by the scapegoating of white, heterosexual males. If so, the jobs of the future will be built around such scapegoating and an education in Women’s Studies will be an indispensable qualification. Political correctness is the motive force of this shift. The World Upside Down New English Review, August 2021 Howard S. Schwartz
If I had entered a 4 year electrician apprentice program, I wouldn’t have had a student loan and would probably made more money.