American men are shunning college in spades. According to the Department of Education, women earned 57.3 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 2016, which reflects a “whopping 25.6 percent gender college degree gap for men, who earned only 816,912 bachelor’s degrees in 2016 compared to 1,098,173 degrees earned by women,” notes Mark J. Perry of AEI. My own daughter is experiencing this right now at her college freshman orientation, where the girls outnumber the boys 59 percent to 41 percent.
What does this mean for the future of marriage and families?
Until still very recently, it has always been understood that women, whether they obtained a college degree or not, would one day be home with their children for some indefinite period of time. It was equally assumed that men, when they became husbands, would provide the means that allowed women to do so.
Today, we assume the opposite: that women will enter the workforce and never come out.
Problem is, that’s not what happens. The majority of married women actually don’t choose to work full time and year-round once they have kids. On the contrary, most college-educated women plan their work lives around the desire to care for their children. No matter — modern men get the clear message that they’re not needed as breadwinners.
They’re also told they’re the enemy. “You definitely get the sense you are the problem,” says John Maxwell, who dropped out of Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colo., after one semester. James Shelley, director of a men’s center at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio, notes that date rape prevention programs “welcome young men to college by essentially telling them they are potential rapists.”
Indeed, and life is no better for men when they enter the real world, when they’re repeatedly told that masculinity is “toxic” and that women and children don’t need them. So I ask: Where is the incentive for a man to work hard or to better himself in any way? Why should he go to college?
What many people don’t see coming is that the more and more educated women become, the more they’re going to want an equally or better-educated man. Hypergamy, or the action of marrying someone of equal or higher status, is a stubborn reality. It makes sense, too, due to the priority shift that occurs in most women once they become mothers.
But the rise of the overeducated woman and the undereducated man undermines this natural symbiosis. Today, when most women marry and have children, they’ll have no option to care for those children — ever, not even for a few short years.
I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like progress.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, Fox News contributor, and trustee of Leading Women for Shared Parenting. Her fifth book, The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage: HOW LOVE WORKS, was published in February 2017.
