Mind the Gaps
Girls’ success in education over the past 50 years has not come at the expense of boys
At the beginning of the month, education website The 74 published a story by Joshua Bay with the following headline:
The new data is from a report published by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center in October.
Meanwhile, these are the headlines from NPR’s All Things Considered, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Axios, and Forbes, who also ran stories on that report:
Notice the difference?
Same data, different lens. None of those stories mention the female drop in enrollment. Not because it’s wrong -- female freshmen did in fact decline at the rate of 3.2% vs. male freshman’s 1.3% since last fall -- but because it doesn’t show readers the whole picture, which isn’t half as bleak for women as The 74’s story declares.
Here are the reasons why, in no particular order of importance.
Mind the Gaps
The NSCRC report only reflects enrollments at 62% of post-secondary institutions in 42 states. State by state, the volume of reporting varies quite a bit, too. California includes data from only 47% of its schools. New York, 66%. Texas, 70%. Florida, 60%. Virginia, 74%. Ohio, 80%. Also worth mentioning: there are 101 Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the U.S. This report includes data from just 28 of them.
The limited coverage of the data is not so limited as to obviate the data’s conclusions, but it bears mentioning if fully one-third of schools are omitted from the data . . . and if state reporting varies as much as it does . . . and if enrollment info from two-thirds of HBCUs are absent. Otherwise readers are left with the false impression that this data is comprehensive and thus The Truth.
Freshmen enrollment is not the same as overall enrollment
This female drop in enrollment is for freshmen enrollment, and the NSCRC data distinguishes overall enrollments from freshmen enrollment.
Freshmen enrollment fell across the board and, yes, the female freshman rate declined 3.2% vs 1.3% for men, but overall enrollment slowed to pre-pandemic rates. (College enrollment has been declining since 2012.) Additionally, when you widen the time window to compare fall ‘20 to fall ‘22, and slice up the data by institution selectivity, the enrollment disparity almost entirely disappears: “highly selective” public and private schools, “very competitive” public schools and “competitive” public schools actually saw greater declines in male enrollment.
More women still attend college than men
Nevertheless, the overall enrollment rate for men between this fall and last fall fell 0.7%. For women, it fell 3.2%, which is three times the rate of men -- even greater than the freshmen enrollment decline.
This seems to confirm The 74’s headline, yes? But these numbers obscure three basic facts about the gender dynamics of college that The 74 for some reason omits:
Colleges lost more men at the beginning of the pandemic than women.
Over the long term men are skipping college at a faster rate than women.
Most importantly, far more women attend college than men. At last count, 58% of undergraduate students were female and 42% were men. (See figure.)
This discrepancy holds true across all race/ethnicity groups that the U.S. Department of Education identifies, and here’s a fact I’d wager most people aren’t aware of: there are now more Black female undergraduates and Hispanic female undergraduates than white male undergraduates. No, not combined. (See figure.)
When viewed in this context, the recent drop in women’s enrollment does not exactly, as the story declares, put women’s “long term economic security” at risk (especially when they are matriculating at faster rates at super competitive schools.)
The dip is an aberration, not a pattern, and the article ignores the laudable progress women have made in education over the last 50 years. Pick almost any measure of achievement at any level -- reading levels, attendance, graduation rates -- and you will find women succeeding at higher rates than males, or rapidly on their way to closing the gap.
The 74’s story ignores this by dramatizing the enrollment disparity with an interview with a female undergraduate at Texas A & M majoring in engineering who “discovered that only a fraction of her classmates were female.” As a result, she struggled in her classes.
Men are overrepresented in STEM fields. This is a fact. But, as Richard Reeves points out in his excellent 2022 book, Of Boys and Men, a decades-long push to achieve gender parity in those fields has been a remarkable success, with “women now account[ing] for 36% of all undergraduate degrees in STEM subjects, including 41% of those in the physical sciences and 42% in mathematics and statistics.”
This isn’t total parity, but consider that, in 1970, women were a paltry 8% of all STEM workers. Quite impressive progress.
This alone does not nor should not negate any discomfort the Texas student felt in her engineering classes, but to use her story to corroborate an already specious claim is, quite frankly, emotionally manipulative.
Statistics are snapshots. Focusing on individual numbers alone, without context, leaves the reader with false impressions which, in this case, masks the stunning progress we’ve made closing the gender achievement gap since we passed Title IX in 1972.
Bright spots
Lastly, The 74 ignores the good news nestled in the enrollment data. If you look close enough, this is what you’ll find:
Enrollment in degree certification programs is up.
Community colleges saw the smallest decline, with a rate of 0.04%.
Enrollment at HBCUs grew 6%. (But remember, fewer than a third of HBCUs reported data, so this could be much higher.)
Enrollment among Hispanic students increased.
Enrollment among 18-20 year-olds increased.
A few of the other outlets make note of these in passing, but you have to read pretty far down. You could picture any number of positive headlines resulting from these bright spots -- COLLEGE ENROLLMENT DECLINE SLOWING; NON-TRADITIONAL STUDENTS GROW or NEW ENROLLMENT DATA SHOWS PROMISING NEW TRENDS DESPITE DECLINES -- but only the Wall Street Journal’s headlines finds the silver lining.
The stories are not only (yet more) evidence of journalism’s tiresome negativity bias but also its blinkered view on post-secondary education pathways. The unstated assumption in these stories is that a bachelor’s degree obtained on a campus with well-kept lawns is superior to any number of alternatives that many students and their families now prefer (or only have available to them) and which, more importantly, the labor market has been begging for. (Read this for more on that, but briefly: most jobs don’t require a B.A. and many that do actually shouldn’t; it is no longer guaranteed that a B.A. results in higher wages; college costs too much fucking money.)
Declining enrollments may look like bad news if you’re a provost, but to believe that an individual is destined for a life of privation if they forgo a traditional B.A. is as snobby as it is ill-informed.
Beyond that, stories like The 74’s that eschew context, cherry pick data and disregard positive trends create false narratives that confirm the pessimistic view that the world is bad and getting worse. Education stories that spin data or isolate single statistics to overstate or misrepresent achievement gaps treat academic achievement like a zero sum game. This runs the risk of vindicating readers’ beliefs about society’s greatest injustices.
It’s also not overstating the case to say such stories incite tribal resentments at the exact moment when, thank the good lord in heaven above, they appear to be ebbing in this country. As Reeves points out in his book, conservatives will tell you there’s a war on boys while liberals will tell you there’s a war on girls, and depending on where you get your news, it’s not terribly difficult to find a story that confirms the position you most hold true.
Girls’ outstanding success in education over the past 50 years has not come at the expense of boys. Neither does it appear to be in jeopardy.
We do not have to rob Peter in order to teach Paul(a). Stories that give that impression are irresponsible, and stories which claim that a brief dip in enrollment puts women in peril are inaccurate.
Above image: Young Woman's Graduation Photograph. 1905. Smithsonian.