Olde Hornet
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/magazine/men-college-enrollment.html
n the spring of 2021, about 2,000 students on the campus of Tulane University in New Orleans received an email they were expecting. They had filled out an elaborate survey provided by Marriage Pact, a matchmaking service popular on many campuses, and the day had come for each of them to be given the name of a fellow student who might be a long-term romantic partner. When the results came in, however, about 900 straight women who participated were surprised by what the email offered: a friend match instead of a love interest. The survey was a lark, something most Tulane students saw as an icebreaker more than an important service. But the results pointed to a phenomenon at the school — and at many other schools — that has only grown more pronounced since then, one that affects much more than just students’ social lives: Women now outnumber men on campus, by a wide margin.
Last year’s freshman class at Tulane was nearly two-thirds female. Tulane’s numbers are startling, but the school is not a radical outlier: There are close to three women for every two men in college in this country. (The way schools report gender may not yet reflect many students’ nonbinary understanding of it, but the overall trend is clear.) Last year, women edged out men in the freshman classes of every Ivy League school save Dartmouth, and the gender ratio is significantly skewed at many state schools. (The rising sophomore class at the University of Vermont is 67 percent female; the University of Alabama is 56 percent female.) Most small liberal-arts colleges are close to 60 percent female, and the discrepancy is even more pronounced at community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities. Colleges with powerhouse football teams or the word “technology” in their name, or elite schools known for engineering, like Carnegie Mellon, tend to be closer to parity or even have more men, but it is safe to say that a college graduate under 60 today is more likely to be female than male — especially since men also drop out of college more often than women.
The gender gap in educational achievement starts early: Girls are already significantly outperforming boys on reading and writing tests by the time they are in fourth grade, an advantage that is often attributed to differences in brain development, despite inconsistent findings in neuroscientific research to support that explanation. In high school, girls volunteer more on average, all the while getting higher grades, including in STEM subjects. By the time they graduate, they make up two-thirds of the top 10 percent of their class. Although men have historically performed better on standardized college-admissions tests, women have inched past them on the A.C.T. and almost closed the gap on the SAT.
That young women are better prepared to excel in college helps explain why more of them apply in the first place. But economic calculations are also affecting young men’s decisions about whether to enroll: Wages are higher for young people than in the past, which increases the immediate opportunity cost of paying tuition. The trade-off is especially relevant for young men, who tend to earn higher wages without a college degree than their female counterparts — they might find jobs in construction or technology, which pay significantly more than the ones young women often land in elder care or cosmetology. Conservatives have also steadily been devaluing higher education in ways that might be more salient for men; the critique that liberal-arts colleges are pushing “gender ideology” on students positions those institutions as threatening to traditional conceptions of masculinity.
Men’s relative lack of engagement in higher education is both a symptom and a cause of a greater problem of “male drift,” as it has been characterized by Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Reeves points to rising rates of suicide among young men as a distressing signal of a vicious cycle underway: Men without college degrees tend to be underemployed, and underemployed men are less likely to marry and benefit from the grounding influence of raising children. “These guys are genuinely lost,” says Reeves, who recently founded a think tank, the American Institute for Boys and Men, to focus attention on the issue. The gender gap in higher education has been a concern in education circles for decades, but as is true of so many trends, the pandemic seems to have only exacerbated the problem: Male enrollment plummeted more quickly than female enrollment and has not bounced back to the same degree.
Declining male enrollment has led many colleges to adopt an unofficial policy: affirmative action for men.
n the spring of 2021, about 2,000 students on the campus of Tulane University in New Orleans received an email they were expecting. They had filled out an elaborate survey provided by Marriage Pact, a matchmaking service popular on many campuses, and the day had come for each of them to be given the name of a fellow student who might be a long-term romantic partner. When the results came in, however, about 900 straight women who participated were surprised by what the email offered: a friend match instead of a love interest. The survey was a lark, something most Tulane students saw as an icebreaker more than an important service. But the results pointed to a phenomenon at the school — and at many other schools — that has only grown more pronounced since then, one that affects much more than just students’ social lives: Women now outnumber men on campus, by a wide margin.
Last year’s freshman class at Tulane was nearly two-thirds female. Tulane’s numbers are startling, but the school is not a radical outlier: There are close to three women for every two men in college in this country. (The way schools report gender may not yet reflect many students’ nonbinary understanding of it, but the overall trend is clear.) Last year, women edged out men in the freshman classes of every Ivy League school save Dartmouth, and the gender ratio is significantly skewed at many state schools. (The rising sophomore class at the University of Vermont is 67 percent female; the University of Alabama is 56 percent female.) Most small liberal-arts colleges are close to 60 percent female, and the discrepancy is even more pronounced at community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities. Colleges with powerhouse football teams or the word “technology” in their name, or elite schools known for engineering, like Carnegie Mellon, tend to be closer to parity or even have more men, but it is safe to say that a college graduate under 60 today is more likely to be female than male — especially since men also drop out of college more often than women.
The gender gap in educational achievement starts early: Girls are already significantly outperforming boys on reading and writing tests by the time they are in fourth grade, an advantage that is often attributed to differences in brain development, despite inconsistent findings in neuroscientific research to support that explanation. In high school, girls volunteer more on average, all the while getting higher grades, including in STEM subjects. By the time they graduate, they make up two-thirds of the top 10 percent of their class. Although men have historically performed better on standardized college-admissions tests, women have inched past them on the A.C.T. and almost closed the gap on the SAT.
That young women are better prepared to excel in college helps explain why more of them apply in the first place. But economic calculations are also affecting young men’s decisions about whether to enroll: Wages are higher for young people than in the past, which increases the immediate opportunity cost of paying tuition. The trade-off is especially relevant for young men, who tend to earn higher wages without a college degree than their female counterparts — they might find jobs in construction or technology, which pay significantly more than the ones young women often land in elder care or cosmetology. Conservatives have also steadily been devaluing higher education in ways that might be more salient for men; the critique that liberal-arts colleges are pushing “gender ideology” on students positions those institutions as threatening to traditional conceptions of masculinity.
Men’s relative lack of engagement in higher education is both a symptom and a cause of a greater problem of “male drift,” as it has been characterized by Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Reeves points to rising rates of suicide among young men as a distressing signal of a vicious cycle underway: Men without college degrees tend to be underemployed, and underemployed men are less likely to marry and benefit from the grounding influence of raising children. “These guys are genuinely lost,” says Reeves, who recently founded a think tank, the American Institute for Boys and Men, to focus attention on the issue. The gender gap in higher education has been a concern in education circles for decades, but as is true of so many trends, the pandemic seems to have only exacerbated the problem: Male enrollment plummeted more quickly than female enrollment and has not bounced back to the same degree.
