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On September 6th, the Wall Street Journal published a pretty grim story called “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College.” In case you missed it, here are the choice bits:
“At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%.”
“U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.”
“In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues.”
The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
A few days later, the New York Times answered with their own column saying, essentially, “Nah, it’s not that bad.” The talking points:
“A closer look at historical trends and the labor market reveals a more complex picture, one in which women keep playing catch-up in an economy structured to favor men.”
“In many ways, the college gender imbalance is not new. Women have outnumbered men on campus since the late 1970s.”
“The gender ratio [has] mostly changed because female enrollment increased even faster, more than doubling over the last half-century.”
“The raw numbers don’t take into account the varying value of college degrees. Men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries for recent graduates. Perhaps not coincidentally, the professors in those fields remain overwhelmingly male.”
“There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college credentials. There are relatively few for such women. And despite the considerable cost in time and money of earning a degree, many female-dominated jobs don’t pay well.”
I encourage you to read both.
USA Today also penned an editorial on the subject. “Figuring out why men aren't enrolling in college must be a national priority,” they wrote. Richard Whitmire, a veteran journalist who wrote a book in 2011 called Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Education System That’s Leaving Them Behind, argued that both the Times and the WSJ overlooked the social implications of this trend — more women will have babies without partners; campus tensions will increase (??); income inequality will rise — as well as a political implication (men without college degrees will be more likely to vote for someone like Trump “who knew every lever to pull to exploit white male grievances.”) The Atlantic added perspective by observing that “the college gender gap is happening not just in the U.S. but in a range of upper- and middle-income countries, including France, Slovenia, Mexico, and Brazil. […] As a general rule, almost every country that gives men and women equal access to education discovers, within a few decades, that women are doing better.” The writer also explored the economic, social and biological origins of the gender gap in education; echoed Whitmire’s worry about political turmoil ahead (“The U.S. electorate is already polarized by college and gender: Women and college graduates strongly favor Democrats, while men and people without college degrees lean Republican. Those divisions seem likely to worsen if the parties’ attitudes toward each other calcify into gender stereotypes.”); and concluded with the usual grab bag of solutions we’ve all heard before: reduce childhood poverty, recruit more male teachers, create more jobs. Etc. Etc.
Well, I’m glad “we” had this “conversation” last week. Indeed, we seem to have it every couple years or so. Some new report or troubling chart about the gender gap in education comes out and the news outlets talk to each other about it for a few days, and I feel like I’m in high school again, watching from the back as the two or three smartest kids get into a vigorous debate in Mr. Milstead’s U.S. History class. It’s interesting for about fifteen seconds until you realize that what they’re arguing about won’t be on the test and so you just go back to trying to throw gum wrappers into Katie Zager’s open backpack.
But I might argue that college enrollment and graduation demographics are a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem in and of itself. As long as we treat it as such, we’re missing a larger opportunity to really change education outcomes for the better, and in turn, address the rapidly growing inequalities in this country.
And further, this might be more clear if we heard more in these biennial gender gap stories from the actual voices of teachers, administrators or guidance counselors who actually work in elementary, middle or high schools. But where are they? Why were they entirely absent from all of these stories?
The decline in college enrollment and graduation would be of zero surprise to anyone who has worked in a public school for even just a couple years, and I think many would agree with me that the solutions offered in the pieces are all wrong.
I hit upon this in the first post I wrote for this newsletter, called “Stop the School-to-Amazon Pipeline,” which also used depressed college graduation rates as a jumping off point for questioning public schools’ status quo. In the post, I wondered why so many of my former students, who I knew had applied to and gone to college, ended up dropping out and working at Amazon or Grubhub or some similar low-wage, low-skill job.I argued this pipeline disproportionately affected low-income minority students and predicted that, if we didn’t course correct, the pandemic would exacerbate those unequal outcomes.
In part II of the post (I encourage you to read both parts), I offered four solutions to stopping the school-to-Amazon pipeline, two of which were 1) re-examining graduation requirements — Why does every single student in America need to take Algebra? — and 2) expanding access to vocational programs.
Both of these were based on the apparently heretical idea (gasp) that school, as it is currently designed, is not for everybody.
Large numbers of people find school boring and irrelevant and simply aren’t interested in sitting in classes, listening to lectures and writing essays. There’s no getting around the fact that that’s what much of what school looks like from elementary school to college, and there’s no avoiding, as William James wrote, that there is “in all schoolroom work a large mass of material that must be dull and unexciting.” We educators love to talk about “student engagement” and “culturally relevant pedagogy” as a means to get kids excited about school, and I’ve noticed that those who pooh-pooh those ideas the quickest are almost always fantastically uninspiring teachers, addled by a deficit mindset or just in it for the summer vacations, but . . . there is a limit to what pedagogy and curriculum can accomplish, and teachers, particularly those with the savior mindset, sometimes deny that. I’ve turned somersaults trying to make certain lessons more relevant and engaging for my students, but in all of my years in education, I was never able to do it successfully for all of my students all of the time repeatedly and more often than not, I wasn’t even able to do it for most of my students most of the time.
This idea is one that I rarely read about, and one that was only really mentioned in the Atlantic piece. I’m not sure why we can’t talk more openly about it. Because, again, anyone who has worked in a public school for more than a couple years would easily know what I’m talking about. I think most educators would laugh about it if you even asked them because the idea’s so obvious and, at least at happy hours, not that controversial. Some people like school and some do not. And to suggest that we could dramatically change how K-12 school educate their students in no way diminishes opportunity for those students, or even denies the tangle of historical, social, racial, economic, cultural and biological factors that sometimes lead to someone putting their head down in Physics class.
In fact, it does just the opposite.
But as long as we have for the vast majority of American students just one single version of school — everyone taking pretty much the same classes, for the same amount of time, at the same time, in the same way, from kindergarten through 12th grade — then we will always have lots and lots of students who don’t flourish after high school, whether it’s on a college campus or not, whether they’re men or not, or whether they’re poor or not. No amount of classes on grit, or shifting college admissions requirements, or project-based learning, or campus support groups, or classroom differentiation, or fiscal policies, or restorative justice programs, or standardized testing, or reading strategies, or coding classes, or screen-time rules, or student-centered classrooms, or male teachers, or fathers, or sex education, or media literacy, or blended learning will ever, ever, ever change that. One size will never fit all. No matter how much we want it to.
Read part I of “Stop the School-to-Amazon Pipeline” here, and part II here.
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Image above: “Brooklyn Gang” by Bruce Davidson