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.
American colleges, which are embroiled in debates over racial and gender equality, and working on ways to reduce sexual assault and harassment of women on campus, have yet to reach a consensus on what might slow the retreat of men from higher education. Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention.
[Image: March 29, 1993, Newsweek cover, “White Male Paranoia,” “Are they the newest victims or just bad sports?” Michael Douglas in movie, “Falling Down”]
The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high,
Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher
percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and
women.
“Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer
Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant who previously led the
admissions offices at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis &
Clark College in Portland, Ore. “The question is, is that right or
wrong?”
Ms. Delahunty said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has
become “higher education’s dirty little secret,” practiced but not
publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter.
“It’s unfortunate that we’re not giving this issue air and sun so that we can start to address it,” she said.
At Baylor University, where the undergraduate student body is 60% female, the
admission rate for men last year was 7 percentage points higher than
for women. Every student has to meet Baylor’s admission standards to
earn admission, said Jessica King Gereghty, the school’s assistant vice
president of enrollment strategy and innovation. Classes, however, are shaped to balance several variables, including gender, she said.
Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended
to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure
transcripts are delivered. Baylor created a “males and moms communication campaign” a few years ago to keep high-school boys on track, she said
Among the messages to mothers in the campaign, Ms. Gereghty said: “
‘At the dinner table tonight, mom, we need you to talk about getting
your high school transcripts in.’ ”
Race and gender can’t be considered in admission decisions at California’s public universities. The proportion of male undergraduates at UCLA fell to 41% in the fall semester of 2020 from
45% in fall 2013. Over the same period, undergraduate enrollment
expanded by nearly 3,000 students. Of those spots, nine out of 10 went
to women.
“We do not see male applicants being less competitive than female applicants,” UCLA Vice Provost Youlonda Copeland-Morgan said, but fewer men apply.
The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.
Rich or Poor, Men Fall Behind
College enrollment rates by family income level, October 2019
No college wants to tackle the issue under the glare of gender politics, said Ms. Delahunty, the enrollment consultant. The conventional view on campuses, she said, is that “men make more money, men hold higher positions, why should we give them a little shove from high school to college?”
Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”
The pandemic accelerated the trend. Nearly 700,000 fewer students were enrolled in colleges in spring 2021 compared with spring 2019, a Journal analysis found, with 78% fewer men.
The decline in male enrollment during the 2020-21 academic year was highest at two-year community colleges. Family finances are believed to be one cause. Millions of women left jobs to stay home with children when schools closed in the pandemic. Many turned to their sons for help, and some young men quit school to work,
said Colleen Coffey, executive director of the College Planning
Collaborative at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, a program
to keep students in school.
“The guys felt they needed to step in quickly,” Ms. Coffey said.
It isn’t clear how many will return to school after the pandemic.
Over the course of their working lives, American college graduates
earn more than a million dollars beyond those with only a high-school
diploma, and a university diploma is required for many jobs as well as
most professions, technical work and positions of influence.
Yet skyrocketing education costs have made college more risky
today than for past generations, potentially saddling graduates in
lower-paying careers—as well as those who drop out—with student loans they can’t repay.
Social science researchers cite distractions and obstacles to
education that weigh more on boys and young men, including videogames,
pornography, increased fatherlessness and cases of overdiagnosis of boyhood restlessness and related medications.
Men in interviews around the U.S. said they quit school or didn’t enroll because they didn’t see enough value in a college degree for all the effort and expense required to earn one. Many said they wanted to make money after high school.
Daniel Briles, 18 years old, graduated in June from Hastings High
School in Hastings, Minn. He decided against college during his senior
year, despite earning a 3.5 grade-point average and winning a $2,500
college scholarship from a local veterans organization.
He took a landscaping job and takes home about $500 a week.
Mr. Briles, a musician, also earns some income from creating and
selling music through streaming services, he said, and invests in
cryptocurrencies. His parents both attended college, and they hope he,
too, will eventually apply. So far, they haven’t pressured him, he said.
“If I was going to be a doctor or a lawyer, then obviously
those people need a formal education. But there are definitely ways to
get around it now,” Mr. Briles said. “There are opportunities
that weren’t taught in school that could be a lot more promising than
getting a degree.”
Many young men who dropped out of college said they worried about their future but nonetheless quit school with no plan in mind.
“I would say I feel hazy,” said 23-year-old Jay Wells, who quit
Defiance College in Ohio after a semester. He lives with his mother and
delivers pallets of soda for Coca-Cola Co. in Toledo for $20 an hour.
“I’m sort of waiting for a light to come on so I figure out what to do next,” he said.
Jack Bartholomew, 19, started his freshman year at Bowling Green State University during the pandemic, taking his classes online. During the first weeks, he said, he was confused by the course material and grew frustrated. Finally, he quit. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I just feel lost.”
Mr. Bartholomew’s parents and one older sister have college degrees. He was a solid student in high school and was interested in studying graphic design. Yet while working online from his second-floor bedroom, his introductory courses seemed pointless for how much he was paying, he said.
He works 40 hours a week, at $15.50 an hour, packing boxes at an Amazon warehouse
not far from his house in Perrysburg, Ohio. It isn’t a long-term job,
Mr. Bartholomew said, and he doesn’t know what to do next.
“College seems like, to me at least, the only logical path you can take in America,” he said. But for now, he said, it is too big a struggle, financially and academically.
Men dominate top positions in industry, finance, politics and
entertainment. They also hold a majority of tenured faculty positions
and run most U.S. college campuses. Yet female college students are running laps around their male counterparts.
The University of Vermont is typical. The school president is a man and so are nearly two-thirds of the campus trustees. Women made up about 80% of honors graduates last year in the colleges of arts and sciences.
One student from nearly every high school in Vermont is nominated for a significant scholarship at the campus every year. Most of them are girls,
said Jay Jacobs, the university’s provost for enrollment management. It
isn’t by design. “We want more men in our pipeline,” Dr. Jacobs said,
but boys graduate from high school and enroll in college at lower rates
than girls, both in Vermont and nationwide.
The young men who enroll lag behind. Among University of Vermont undergraduates, about 55% of male students graduate in four years compared with 70% of women. “I
see a lot of guys that are here for four years to drink beer, smoke
weed, hang out and get a degree,” said Luke Weiss, a civil engineering
student and fraternity president of Pi Kappa Alpha at the campus.
Female students in the U.S. benefit from a support system established decades ago, spanning a period when women struggled to gain a foothold on college campuses.
There are more than 500 women’s centers at schools nationwide. Most
centers host clubs and organizations that work to help female students
succeed.
Young women appear eager to take leadership roles, making up 59% of student body presidents in the 2019-20
academic year and 74% of student body vice presidents, according to
W.H. “Butch” Oxendine, Jr., executive director of the American Student
Government Association.
“Across all types of institutions, particularly two-year
institutions, but also extending into public and private four-year
institutions, women dominate student government executive boards,” Mr. Oxendine said.
Many young men are hobbled by a lack of guidance,
a strain of anti-intellectualism and a growing belief that college
degrees don’t pay off, said Ed Grocholski, a senior vice president at
Junior Achievement USA, which works with about five million students
every year to teach about career paths, financial literacy and
entrepreneurship.
“What I see is there is a kind of hope deficit,” Mr. Grocholski said.
Young men get little help, in part, because schools are focused on encouraging historically underrepresented students. Jerlando
Jackson, department chair, Education Leadership and Policy Analysis, at
the University of Wisconsin’s School of Education, said few campuses have been willing to spend limited funds on male underachievement that would also benefit white men, risking criticism for assisting those who have historically held the biggest educational advantages.
“As a country, we don’t have the tools yet to help white men who find themselves needing help,” Dr. Jackson said. “To be in a time when there are groups of white men that are falling through the cracks, it’s hard.”
Keith E. Smith, a mental-health counselor and men’s outreach
coordinator at the University of Vermont, said that when he started
working at the school in 2006 he found that men were much more likely to face consequences for the trouble they caused under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
In 2008, Mr. Smith proposed a men’s center to help male students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who asked, “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus,” he said.
Funding wasn’t appropriated, he said, and the center was never built.
The University of Oregon has one of the few college men’s centers,
which offers help for mental and physical health. “Men don’t need to
pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” said Kerry Frazee, director of
prevention services, who works with the center. “No one can do it all by
themselves.””
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