Everyone knows women are smarter than men. Anyone who says differently is, well, probably a man.
I’m only partly kidding. A new report found that young men are dropping out of higher education at an alarming rate and trailing behind female college students by record levels. According to the Wall Street Journal, female enrollment in colleges and universities had surged to an all-time high of 59.5% by the end of the 2020-21 academic year. Male enrollment, however, dropped to 40.5%. And although there were far fewer students attending colleges in general because of the pandemic, men represented 71% of those who chose not to go.
For the past 40 years, there has been a noticeable gap between female and male achievement in higher education, but this past year’s numbers suggest men might never close it. Douglas Shapiro, the executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse’s research center, predicts there will be twice as many female college graduates as male college graduates if this trend continues.
There are several reasons women have a better chance at going to and succeeding in college than young men. First, women tend to pay closer attention to the requirements they must complete to go to college in the first place. Their grades are better, their resumes are longer, and their college applications are complete. High school boys — God bless them — struggle with this a lot more. Maybe they’re less self-motivated, or they don’t have someone to get on their case. Either way, they’re more likely to fall off the map — sometimes by choice, sometimes unknowingly.
But these young men aren’t always lazy. In many cases, they’re making tough but smart choices about the costs and benefits of a college education. College is expensive, the cost is only going up, and unfortunately, two-year or four-year degrees no longer guarantee graduates an automatic job the way they once did. Many of the young men who said they chose not to go to college said they did so because they didn’t see enough value in the degree to justify the expenses. They’d rather find a trade skill that pays well immediately and figure out the rest later.
I bet there are a lot of men (and women!) with a lot of student loan debt and a long corporate ladder left to climb who wish they would have done the same thing.
