55 ms·

Why Are So Many Young Men Giving Up on College?

84 points by edtechdev 5y ago

endisneigh 5y ago
School, and education and general have become too fixated on selection bias. Employers don’t train and schools don’t ensure people have necessary skills. Neither institution has any skin in the game. Furthermore things are becoming more zero-sum with respect to employment opportunities.
droopyEyelids 5y ago
The framing on this makes your head spin... "Abandoning college" Hard to imagine that language being used with other demographics.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  50 years of being told you're unwelcome will do that to you...
  - reilly3000 5y ago
    Could you elaborate on that? I am not personally aware of young men being unwelcome in a higher learning setting.
    - AustinDev 5y ago
      Boys are virtually despised through primary and secondary school. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/boys-bear-the-brunt-of-school-discipline%3fcontext=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/articles/20...
    - sidlls 5y ago
      Inclusion efforts for women have nothing to do with exclusion of men. This isn't exactly true. In a laudable attempt to help lift girls up from a young age, we've (likely inadvertently in most cases) neglected, or worse vilified, boys' learning needs.
    - blululu 5y ago
      Not sure of the OP’s sensation but when an institution creates highly visible programs supporting every single group except one, then it is a form of exclusion (albeit a negative form vs a positive form of exclusion). You could say that such policies are necessary or justified to redress historical inequalities. This is the traditional justification for such policies. Such an argument starts to break down over when those inequalities are less noticeable.
    - vcxy 5y ago
      I don't know if this has changed, but when I was an undergrad in math, all the summer REUs were for women and minorities. I applied to many all the same but never got to do any summer research, which definitely worked against me when applying for grad school. This wouldn't have pushed me out of college I suppose, but it made continuing beyond more difficult.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I remember the professors during my college orientation extolling the virtues of how Liberal Arts would mold us into superior citizens, able to think critically and holistically in a way we normally couldn't. Now I know some of this is just hype, but there was a sincere sense that the 'uneducated' were lesser people that weren't as capable of rational and enlightened thought. My actual college experience was informative, but I don't particularly feel like my two semesters of Rhetoric made me a sharp critical thinker.... because it was just slightly more difficult high-school English. College is sold as essential, when in reality it is not for everyone. And, not having a college degree shouldn't be a de-facto deficiency.
RappingBoomer 5y ago
I would say that there may be more opportunities in the blue collar world, as opposed to the white collar professional world, at least for the demographic that is "abandoning" college
- awkward 5y ago
  Conversely, there are less blue collar, uncredentialed jobs that are typically taken by women that pay well. Construction, plumbing, and extraction all remain low credential, while nursing, care industries, and education all require more credentials than they did before.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    Why can't women be in construction, plumbing or extraction? There are extraction jobs going unfilled that start at $800/day. They're long days and hard work, but none of them require you to bench 450lbs. Isn't it more that this is a cultural issue rather than there just aren't blue collar jobs for women because they're women?
    - VLM 5y ago
      > There are extraction jobs going unfilled that start at $800/day. They're long days and hard work, but none of them require you to bench 450lbs. Have you ever seen the work done on an oil drilling rig? Its a bit "upper body strength" intense. Some jobs will always end up categorized as the most intense upper body strength job; if not oil drill rig hand, it'll be drywall laborer or something else. And those jobs are too intense for most men, with the result that the supply is low and pay is very high AND the fraction of women strong enough to play along with the strongest guys in the world is essentially zero. And its politically unacceptable to point out that WRT some physical characteristics like upper body strength, the graphs of male and female strength very nearly do not overlap. Also there is intense societal/cultural pressure for women to be day care workers or whatever where 100% of women qualify at the skill of diaper changing. I think the closest analogy of "only the very top physical condition making tons of money" that apply to women bodies would be female clothing model. Women models at the physical peak of perfection, think like top 1% supermodels, actually make FAR more than oil rig hands make. Top 1% physical strength men only make $1000/day on oil rigs. The highest paid female model Kendall Jenner supposedly pulled in $22.5M/year in 2018. I don't think the problem is male sexism when women of similar physical quality to the men are making 10 times as much as the men...
redleggedfrog 5y ago
I literally could not get past the 6 to 4 ratio used in the first sentence. Why would you not use 3 to 2? Made me suspect that the rest of the article was similarly ill considered and I moved on.
- rizzaxc 5y ago
  people generally have a better mental image in base 10
  - redleggedfrog 5y ago
    Or that. Good point.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  I think Makes it cognitively easier to translate into "60 vs 40 percent".
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    It probably does. But if that was the intent, why not just say 60-40?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
NikolaNovak 5y ago
My take: First, depends on definition of "College" and "University" that differs from country to country. But overall, value of University education to improve your employability and skillset I think is being questioned by both employers and employees. 1. Some "Blue Collar" skills may withstand the test of automation better than many "White Collar" skills - e.g. I anticipate needing an electrician, contractor, plumber for the next few decades; but hopefully accountant, lawyer, travel agent etc less and less. 2. For "White Collar" skills, well... I went to ComSci university and it's not that it brought no value - but given the time, money, effort and commitment, it was very very low value proposition. I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning. (note I wasn't the one going to university for some "Party / Social Experience" - I found many better, more flexible methods than that:). Not going to university is not necessarily the same thing as not wanting to learn and educate and acquire skills. And there is a whole spectrum today between free online education (random Youtube videos, manuals, free university courses etc), bootcamps, practically oriented post-secondary education, and then university. Bottom line: I have two young kids, I want them to succeed, and I want them to be educated - and I don't know if traditional university is something I will encourage them to consider 10 years from now. I honestly don't know however how that translates into a gender gap discussed in the article though; and article doesn't really provide a satisfying answer either :-/
- the_only_law 5y ago
  > I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery I tried going back to school recently, hitting a complete brick wall at every step as a “non-traditional non traditional” applicant. Based on my experience with that I’m convinced out higher education system in the US is nothing except those two things.
- Forge36 5y ago
  >I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery Arguably this was the most valuable learning I did as it's the most applicable to my current job. :)
beervirus 5y ago
Maybe they're just doing the ROI math and deciding it isn't worth it.
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  I recently read The Case Against Education. It's very interesting, even if you don't buy the conclusion. From the book: > The Good Student, by definition, fits the profile of a typical B.A. who did not continue on to graduate or professional school. Now let’s define three more ability archetypes: the Excellent Student, the Fair Student, and the Poor Student. The Excellent Student fits the profile of the typical master’s degree holder. The Fair Student fits the profile of the typical high school graduate who does not try college. The Poor Student fits the profile of the typical high school dropout. Ideally, to repeat, “fits the profile” is all-inclusive, covering cognitive ability, character, background, and every other trait. In terms of measured cognitive ability, Excellent Students are around the 82nd percentile, Good Students the 73rd, Fair Students the 41st, and Poor Students the 24th. > Results closely match common sense. High school is lucrative for all four archetypes. Even Poor Students can reasonably expect the resources they invest in high school to out-perform high-yield bonds. College, in contrast, is a solid deal only for Excellent and Good Students. Largely owing to their high failure rate, Fair Students who start college should foresee a low 2.3% return on their investment. For Poor Students, it’s a paltry 1%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
mschuster91 5y ago
> The few neighborhoods where Black and white boys grew up to have similar adult outcomes were low-poverty areas that also had high levels of “father presence.” Call me surprised. That's the result of racist drug policies intended to go specifically after Black men (and hippies): https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-... The biggest problem - and one that the author conveniently and completely ignores - is that the US justice and incarceration system is set up for biblical an-eye-for-an-eye revenge with ludicrous sentencing ("three strikes", decades for nonviolent drug offenses, people getting summarily executed by police regularly, ...) and not, like in Europe, for real, measurable rehabilitation. Also, people in the US receive no education during their prison stay that helps them to gain useful employment after their release, they start with significant debts from the prison system and often enough from loan sharks, there is no meaningful assistance system to help them gain housing and jobs after being released, and forget about physical and mental healthcare - often, people will leave prison in a way worse state than when they entered: malnourishment, denial of healthcare, trauma from assaults both by fellow inmates and officers... And finally: When employers and even landlords are allowed to do routine comprehensive background checks and everything about a person's history is up for a google grab "thanks" to public record laws, it is no surprise that arrests for low level shit like petty theft or smoking weed sets up people for a life in poverty. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: if the US wants to fix their society, the process has to start with their attitude towards criminals, criminality and healthcare.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Well said. I wish our government leadership had the courage to emphasize rehabilitation for criminals, rather than just punishment.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  > US justice and incarceration system is set up for biblical an-eye-for-an-eye revenge with ludicrous sentencing Apart from financial crimes and financial restitution, there is little literal "eye for an eye" punishment, not to include capital punishment with which I disagree. Capital punishment is reserved for the most heinous of cases, though I think from a moral perspective we should stop it, since it involves state authorization to execute a citizen, and does not enable us to fix a wrongful execution if it already happens. The Innocence Project [1] has been able to overturn some wrongful convictions but I am not sure if that is possible after an execution. If we kill someone we cannot make restitution to that person. If you'd like to make that claim there is literal eye for an eye, please provide well sourced examples of convicted criminals having the violent crimes they enacted on victims (shootings/stabbing) perpetrated back on them > "three strikes" Here are the states with 3 strikes laws, and dates of enactment Arkansas (since 1995); Arizona (since 2005); California (since 1994); Colorado (since 1994); Connecticut (since 1994); Delaware (since 1973); Florida (since 1995); Georgia (since 1994); Indiana (since 1994); Kansas (since 1994); Louisiana (since 1994); Maryland (since 1975 but amended in 1994); Massachusetts (since 2012); Montana (since 1995); Nevada (since 1995); New Jersey (since 1995); New Mexico (since 1994); New York (since 1797); North Carolina (since 1994); North Dakota (since 1995); Pennsylvania (since 1995); South Carolina (since 1995); Tennessee (since 1994); Texas (since 1952); Utah (since 1995); Vermont (since 1995); Virginia (since 1994); Washington (since 1993); and Wisconsin (since 1994). Sourced at [2] I hope you are not claiming that these states implemented these laws for racist reasons. Is that your claim? > decades for nonviolent drug offenses Did you miss a qualifier on that, by selling a dealer amount of drugs the penalties increased also? The last I saw the amount for cocaine was around 180 grams. Are you saying that someone with 180 grams is doing this for personal use? There is a mistake in serious hard drug distribution, that delivery/supplying large amounts of people with drugs does not involve death. Due to the mistakes in cutting heroin/coke for example with fetanyl, people can regularly die from hot batches. A good example of that is the recent deaths of Fuquan Johnson and Enrico Colangeli [3] > people getting summarily executed by police regularly Please provide evidence of regular summary executions by police where the criminal did not have a gun, or use deadly force against the officer, where the officer has not been arrested and charged with a murder. > Europe, for real, measurable rehabilitation European prisons vary greatly. With fairly liberal prisons in Nordic countries, and a mixed bag elsewhere. > trauma from assaults both by fellow inmates and officers... I agree completely that we need to improve prison conditions. I don't think a sentence should involve assaults/sex assaults by other criminals, and I think the govt which is enforcing the sentence, also has a duty to protect the criminal, and to make restitution to the victims of crime, if it happens under the government's care. [1] https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ [2] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-strikes-laws-in-different-states.html https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-strikes... [3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9960699/Comedian-Kate-Quigley-shares-update-taking-fentanyl-laced-cocaine-killed-three.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9960699/Comedian-Ka...
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
Perhaps college abandoned them.
- Verdex 5y ago
  Yeah, the verbiage used here is kind of weird. Like ... you can abandon a kitten on the side of the road. But if you're not going to college, you're not abandoning something that needs you as a steward to watch over it and keep it safe. Why are men electing to not go to college? That's better. Of course your statement is interesting because I have a story to go with it. I went to a publicly funded university starting back in 2003. I had zero problem getting in. Meanwhile, I know a family friend who went to the same university after I had graduated. I want to say around 2011. He had some problems getting it. It wasn't grades or ability to pay. They wanted to try and get more out of state students because they could charge them more. So they sat on their hands until they got as many out of state students as they were going to get for that year. And after that when they still had some spots open they gave the green flag for the family friend. Kind of feels like college was threatening to do the abandoning in this particular instance.
lordgroff 5y ago
I have no idea what the situation is like in the United States, but in Canada, this "abandoning" (ahem) is a direct function of eroding performance of boys that starts right in elementary school and continues right through high school. This leads to obviously fewer male university students. The trend is clear and has been going on for two decades. Pointing this out, especially in terms of arguing that targeted interventions for boys may be in order or that the education system in some way may be suboptimal for them, is an absolute political no go zone though. It's not a discussion that can currently be had.
- martythemaniak 5y ago
  Canadian here. Is it a no-go zone? Because discussing targeted measures to help underperforming groups is very widespread and those programs exist. They also tend to be maligned and denounced with arguments like railing against equality of outcomes, vs equality of opportunity. I also can't help but notice that these arguments are usually made by the exact same people as the ones who complain about boys falling behind. That is to say, I don't see Pierre Poilievre types advocating for things like TDSB's Afrocentric Alternative Schools.
  - lordgroff 5y ago
    I can't get into too much detail because I've been historically involved in this research and I'd rather not have my identity public on HN. I do have to say that I was more than a little surprised that this would be such a controversial subject given the rather obvious patterns observed. But it very much was, and it still is. Frankly, this experience was not positive for me, since it showed me how politically charged these things are, something which makes no sense to me. I mean, even your comment strays off right into who-is-making-the-argument, rather than whether it might be a problem that half of the school kids are falling further and further behind. I know that if I had boys entering school, this would concern me, but it's hardly even acknowledged.
    - martythemaniak 5y ago
      I don't know you, nor your views, but consider that the reason this happens is that the people pushing this are acting in complete bad faith. They are not interested in using objective measures to help struggling groups succeed, they are merely using this fact to reinforce and promote their reactionary politics. Solving the problem will weaken these groups and their views which is why actually doing anything is out of the question. As you can see from the rest of the replies to your comment, it is merely a convenient launchpad for advocating incel-derived views of men's "rights", white supremacy etc. Maybe you don't see anything odd about this, but the reactions you're seeing in the real world happen because normal people don't want to be seen advocating for these views. I worry far, far more about boys falling into black hole of cynicism and victimhood. I've seen it happen to adult friends of mine and it's tragic.
scohesc 5y ago
Colleges and Universities have been used as research churns, using professors, graduates and undergraduates to further influence research through a combination of tuition, good-will, and the promise of a paper after 4 years of hard work that says you can do what you spend 4 years doing. Combined with the ever-increasing costs of college education with ever-decreasing return on investment (have fun getting a job involving the gender studies doctorate (or any other vague, wishywashy, non-practical education) you got that's functionally useless) You can get the exact same level of education online for 90% of the courses that universities offer. Trades are a different story when there's practical skills to learn however but is the exception to the norm. Why would men spend the time going to college if it's been ensured that they're going to be in debt for the rest of their life due to the inflated ego of these institutions, thinking they can charge so much for degrees that really have no practical value. But then again, why blame the institution if there's thousands of people still lining up willingly?
gred 5y ago
It's interesting to consider whether we are entering a period of time in which young men will "fail" at a higher rate than young women, but we will maintain early-age support structures that prioritize women over men because men continue to dominate in late-age power structures.
martythemaniak 5y ago
There is a large online network of communities that have dedicated themselves to making outcasts out of boys for their own ends. Sometimes it's for clear ends (like Bannon's work on Gamergate) and sometimes it's an intuitive growth instinct. Places like ZH need attention and they're not going to get it if boys grow up to go college. They need them angry, cynical and isolated. I think HN is one outpost of this network. Imagine a 12-16 year old happening upon HN and becoming a regular. Do you see this person coming away with a positive view of higher education and being encouraged to pursue it? Or are they more likely to develop a cynical, contrarian view?
- krrishd 5y ago
  > Imagine a 12-16 year old happening upon HN and becoming a regular. Do you see this person coming away with a positive view of higher education and being encouraged to pursue it? Or are they more likely to develop a cynical, contrarian view? This precise thing happened to me years ago, and yes I did develop a cynical/contrarian view about it. I still went to school, but in net think I benefitted from not taking it too seriously. But I don't think HN made me an outcast; I was on here because I was already an outcast and it was a place where there were other people into similar things that I was. I feel the same way about your broader point; I think the cynicism/isolation comes first (even if the internet might reinforce it).
- fullshark 5y ago
  Chicken or egg thing going on there though wouldn't you say? Are these networks accelerating and finding ways to verbalize emotions/thoughts these boys already have due to a social environment they find themselves in and are unhappy with?
- merpnderp 5y ago
  This could be true if it weren't for the data showing that boys aren't just underperforming in college, the division begins far earlier in primary school. It isn't that these boys don't have a positive view of higher education, it's that they don't have a positive view of any education. And this view is based on their lived experience.
adolph 5y ago
Previously on HN: A generation of American men give up on college (wsj.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment. Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work (nytimes.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472274
wikidani 5y ago
I believe that in the western world, specially in the countries that have free (or subsidized) universities there has been a lot of societal pressure that makes young people want to go to college but no idea why or for what. Now, one of the smartest decisions I made was going for the sort of equivalent of a trade school in my country, it's not a replacement of college but an alternative for what I believe americans call High School, so three years from fifteen to eighteen years old and I truly believe that the rest of the world would benefit massively from such a concept. I also believe we should stop viewing the preparation for university as universal and provide young people with a trade from the beginning. (edit) thanks martzy13 for your comment about vocational schools, I didn't know about them
- jmeister 5y ago
  Can you please tell us more about your career trajectory? I wouldn’t normally expect someone who went to trade school from 15-18 to be so proficient in a foreign language(English) like you.
  - wikidani 5y ago
    Sure! First of all, thanks for saying I am proficient in english, it's something I am a bit insecure and always try to hide that english is a second language to me. I also must clarify that I am extremely fortunate to have parents that were both polyglots so language learning was kind of a given in my household, specially english. Right now, I am working in my second year in a big consultancy firm doing nearshore web development for a big healthcare provider in the US. Although right now I am working as a tester, my school taught us how to do (nearly) fullstack development, so I have been rotating duties in my work, ranging from normal, run of the mill web dev to backend in nodeJS and a bit of cosmosDB. I did learn a lot of stuff for myself before going to trade school but I did learn the basics of working in a development team while doing my third year thesis, which simulates the design, production and release of a real world, fullstack application with an actual use case.
- martzy13 5y ago
  To be clear, that's an option in America as well. They're usually called a "Joint Vocational School" or a "Career Center", and they offer a variety of options. For example the one I went to had: * Public Safety to learn firefighting and Emergency Medical Services * HVAC to learn a heating and cooling * Building trades to learn electrical, carpentry, plumbing * Software development * Medical Assisting (a pre-nursing route) * Cosmetology for hair stylists and makeup artists * Engineering and Precision Machining Technologies There are plenty of other options at that specific career center as well. A lot of my peers 'looked down' on this choice, as they viewed the "college path" as the only option to be successful in America, and considered this an inferior education.
oh_sigh 5y ago
The title gives you one impression, but in the article you find that college attendance for men is higher than it was 10 years ago - it is just that attendance for women has grown even more.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Is that merely a result of population growth?
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    No, there are not only more people attending college, but also a higher percentage of people - different source so the date range differs, but per NCES [0] in the year 2000 the percent males/females in college was 33/38, and in 2018 it was 38/44 [0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cpb.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cpb.pdf
eplanit 5y ago
Maybe it's the result of telling 2+ generations of boys that "males", especially "white males" (predominant in Canada) are the root of all problems in society and the world, coupled with ever-present emphasis and promotion of girls (most recently manifested in Trudeau's absurd references to "she-cession" and "she-covery").
- endisneigh 5y ago
  I’m curious - who is saying this? Have an example? Seems like an exaggeration. I’m sure it’s happened in some isolated cases, but I’m skeptical that this is a prevailing attitude
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Have you walked on a college campus? It's always days for Feminists, days for LGBTQ, days for the Environment, days for minorities, days for women, days for everything - but a man's day is never mentioned. And these days are advertised everywhere - on bulletin boards, in the bathrooms, on TV screens.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Days for minorities and lgbtq include men though - are you implying men cannot be in any of the other groups you mentioned?
      - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
        Try to organize a day for white heterosexual men and see what happens.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        We have days for LGBTQ, women, and minorities because they are historically disenfranchised groups still dealing with societally systemic problems oriented against them. That is not true of white heterosexual men. It'd be like trying to organize a day for people from multimillionaire families. It doesn't make any sense.
decasteve 5y ago
The absence of physical labour, of meaningful work, and learning to work with your hands, are aspects of childhood development completely abandoned over the past half-century. Kids are now confined in comparison, where primarily-seated quiet busywork and one-way non-socratic lecture is the norm, where anxiety and depression are afflicting over one third of all children, it seems absurd to me we keep doubling down on this educational direction.
slowhand09 5y ago
Expect to get flagged for this. Skimmed Youtube titles for Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson - Why Men Are Bailing Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH16ympCb7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH16ympCb7Q
trynumber9 5y ago
>Men are also less likely to be fixtures of boys’ elementary-school experience; about 75 percent of public-school teachers are female. >The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades. I'm not saying this is the cause, but it may contribute to poor schooling results of some boys. I really didn't do well in school until in the 5th grade when I had a male teacher who I saw as something of a role model.
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
I wonder if it wouldn't help if colleges/universities fissioned into more specialized institutions. By building gigantic clumps of education a single approach or philosophy drives too much of the bus. A sample set of new schools. . Work oriented, basically four year versions of junior college. Teaches EE, nursing, CSc, accounting, etc. Higher quality (and cheaper) than current for-profit versions. . Research institutions. STEM masters and up. . 'Soft' disciplines. Not just history, cultural anthropology, and the like but also the newfangled xxx studies, diversity equity stuff, etc. . Traditional old school 'classical' college. Essentially the classwork from Harvard in 1900. You don't need too many of these. . Highly specialized schools like Berklee although there was a time when music was learned the old-fashioned way, at bordellos. What we probably don't need is a world where most of the state-funded institutions are huge lumbering megaschools.
onionisafruit 5y ago
> “Historically, men have been more likely to drop out of school to work in hot economies, whether it’s in the factories of World War II or the fracking mines of the Dakotas,” In WWII were men really dropping out of school to work in factories or were they dropping out to join the military? I thought that American factories during WWII were largely staffed by women and men who weren’t eligible to fight. Also, I don’t think that guy knows what fracking is.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Yeah, that's kind of a strange statement, almost talking-out-of-ass quality research, and this is The Atlantic
- trynumber9 5y ago
  We only drafted a small portion of the working age, male population compared to other countries. The vast majority of working-age men were still in the workforce. Less than 1/5th of those registered were conscripted, the target rate of the War Manpower Commission. Furthermore Executive Order 9279 closed voluntary enlistment for working age men aged 18-38 to prevent factory labor shortages: >After the effective date of this Order no male person who has attained the eighteenth anniversary and has not attained the thirty-eighth anniversary of the day of his birth shall be inducted into the enlisted personnel of the armed forces
Factorium 5y ago
You can make a better living as a tradesperson: 1. Start earning money right away as an apprentice. No massive student debt. 2. Live outside of high-COL cities. 3. Skills valuable everywhere, instead of specific industries (eg. finance jobs only in certain cities). 4. Optimise/minimise your own taxes. 5. Housing is our single biggest expense in life, so build it yourself and save. 6. Easy to hire employees and start a medium-sized business if you want. Maybe men are just 'smarter' and have realised this?
- eNTi 5y ago
  Colleges are propaganda machines at this point. Men just don't like to be told they are the root all evil. Also... who thinks gender studies are real?
djoldman 5y ago
The article touches on a lot of issues but one I find interesting is: why does it matter? It provides the following answers, which seem weak to me: 1. "[historian and economics professor at Harvard]: 'I worry they’ll come to severely regret their choice if they realize the best jobs require a degree they never got.'" 2. "...further delays in marriage and childbirth may ensue. That would further reduce U.S. fertility rates, which worries some commentators, albeit not all." 3. "The most severe implications, I suspect, will be cultural and political. The U.S. electorate is already polarized .... Those divisions seem likely to worsen" I'm not sure this is convincing. It seems to boil down to a historian worrying, fertility rate changes that some people may view badly, and a possibility of increased political polarization... meh?
- kesselvon 5y ago
  It's gonna lead to bad times when men start seeing education as effeminate.
eNTi 5y ago
Write states that he dismisses feminism as a culprit... and goes on to describe how feminist talking points are the most likely reason... It's cognitive dissonance all the way down.
- vivab0rg 5y ago
  I can't believe no one else is pointing this out. The reckoning will hit them like a freight train.
gjhh244 5y ago
It's not just US thing, similar widening gender gap can be seen also here in Finland (probably rest of Europe as well), despite us having free education. As far as I can see, many master's degrees are not worth today it even if you pay no tuition fees. Many blue-collar jobs like plumbing pay better nowadays than your average humanities, social sciences etc job, with equal or better job security and only 3 years of studying instead of 8. So, avoiding higher education can be the rational choice. In addition, there are major flaws in how students are handled nowadays. Teachers simply have no authority to punish bad behavior, and it seems restless boys suffer the most from this in educational outcomes. The system is increasingly designed only for kids who enjoy school and perform well even without supervision. Personally I had no trouble with school, but I'm still not convinced that CS degree was the right choice instead of plumbing or something similar. The job market sucks for everyone except senior software devs.
VLM 5y ago
Outcomes don't matter as much as expectations WRT planning and higher ed is all about planning far in the future. There's no "just in time" higher education economic model LOL. In my state, where $20/hr buys you a pretty nice lifestyle, union building trades ALL pay $30 to low forties per hour and are essentially sausagefests WRT being "boys future jobs" and these jobs pay you around half pay to learn as an apprentice for a couple years, and require absolutely no college or student loans. A "journeyman" experience level "girls future jobs" such as day care worker, which is 99% female employment, pays $13.64/hr average in my state at that experience level and absolutely requires either a K12 ed degree (we produce twice as many degree holders as we have jobs, so optimistically the "bottom half" of degreed teachers end up as bartenders, day care, real estate saleswomen, etc). There is an associates degree program in early childhood education at my local tech school so young women can pay about $10K plus room and board and food, to eventually get a job that might eventually pay as much as $25K/year. Like I wrote, most kids plans fall apart upon contact with reality much like the famous military aphorism about military plans not surviving contact with the enemy. However, the situation boils down to boys "know" they can get a great high paying career in the manly manual labor fields without a degree, whereas women "know" they need a degree and immense levels of debt to make less than McDonalds is willing to pay them, although at least their job is to literally hug babies all day. Maybe half the boys can't actually work construction due to drug use or weakness or just plain old laziness, but when they were planning they "knew" they could get those jobs. Whereas women know that even to change diapers for less than fast food pay, they "knew" they need a degree to compete. The real story is very low paying, very low functioning jobs defined as "for women", require degrees and the supply/demand curve is such that they get away with it and the women hired will show up with expensive degrees and lifetime debt. Men's jobs that don't require degrees do not get away with demanding degrees.
notjes 5y ago
The Bell Curve dictates that only about 15% of humans should go through higher education. But our society decided force everybody into HE with various "incentives". And now everything is distorted. Young men know this is all bullshit, so they drop out. Young women don't drop out. They stay and consume Xanax, Prosac and are financed by sugar daddies and/or only fans.
imbnwa 5y ago
Summary of the points therein: * Men accounted for 70% of the 1.5m decline in college enrollment last year * Women have outpaced men in bachelor attainment since the 80s * Women have been told to get college degrees in order to secure independence and freedom for decades * Men were 57% of college enrolled students in 1970 but since Title XI passed barring gender discrimination, the rates have been getting more lopsided for women * Girls outperform boys generally in high school and elementary long before college * Blaming "the feminist dogma of the education system and the inherently distracting presence of girls in classrooms" is dubious * A better explanation is that up to the 1970s, men could secure middle-class wages on blue-collar work, but afterwards, that labor demand dried up and these types of men are adrift, and marry less since they also don't attend church anymore, and so live 'haphazard' lives detached from traditional responsibilities * This has the effect that young boys don't have stable male role models, as men are more likely to be incarcerated, and aren't present enough in early schooling as teachers or as fathers in low-income areas * The college gender gap is also occuring in "France, Slovenia, Mexico, and Brazil". * Perhaps a blend of biological and cultural differences are at play * This will have broad implications for marriage rates, delayed marriage, delayed childbirth * This may have the cultural implication that education be seen as a identified with effeminacy, barring more men still * "The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades.” This gender gap is an economic story, a cultural story, a criminal-justice story, and a family-structure story that begins to unfold in elementary school. The attention-grabbing statistic that barely 40 percent of college grads are men seems to cry out for an immediate policy response. But rather than dial up male attendance one college-admissions department at a time, policy makers should think about the social forces that make the statistic inevitable."
falcolas 5y ago
One thought: If you're a male, not an athlete, and not an academic star, you're going to be on the hook for your entire college costs. You'll be eligible for few (if any) scholarships, low-interest loans, grants, etc. No idea if there's actual causation there, but given the high cost of college (compared to previous generations), it's certainly a consideration.
HelloMaties 5y ago
No one going to point out the elephant in the room meaning feminism. Feminists have been attacking boys since the 1970-1980 on and thus we are now reaping what the man hating misandrists weaved? Lets not forget how Title IX was literally weaponised against male students.
ngngngng 5y ago
I'm surrounded by this, and I can't help but feel like I'm part of the cause for people I'm close to. About the time I was beginning my CS degree I got a job doing tech support at a web hosting company. Within one semester the skills I'd gained on the job had far outpaced my university classes as far as providing me with real world problem solving abilities. Debugging shared webhosting servers was a far better learning exercise than writing sudoku solvers. Maybe it's not true at other universities, but at the two universities I attended it takes literal years for the majority of students to understand how to take the skills they're learning in a CS degree and solve real world problems. So, I dropped out. And you all know the story, now I write code and makes lots of money, woohoo. Now my father and father in law, both highly educated and financially successful people, look at me and wonder why they did so much schooling and worked so hard when uneducated programmers are making more than they made in their whole career. They're vocally questioning the value of higher education to people around them. Where it gets messy though is that I have family members and friends that have completely or partially used my situation as justification to ditch education, and none of them have gone anywhere as of yet. I've tried to teach some of them programming but I've given up on that, because the motivation and drive they need to teach themselves is the primary determining factor of their success (in my opinion), and I can't change that. I know I'm far from special in this community of overachievers, but whatever it took for me to get myself in this position isn't exactly common among the general populace, and it took me years of watching my friends and family members trying to mimic my path to appreciate that. So now I just tell them to go to college.
thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
We have a student debt crisis. This means, categorically, many degrees proper are bad investments. To pass on a bad investment is smart. There exist good degrees but not everyone is fit for them. We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices. I speak not of education or the humanities in abstract but rather the degree proper; the piece of paper. An expensive document should be understood as a certification with concrete numerical price that can be compared to its effect on your earnings. My advice to my daughter, who is working actively to become an artist, is very clear; stay far from college.
- rndmind 5y ago
  You said it better than I could. To pass on bad investments is smart, modern day universities charge an arm and a leg, and a bachelor's degree is not very useful. Lawyers, Doctors, require at least 6-7 years of 10k-50k Per Year. That's a lot of dough. When you involve that much dough... greed, scams, and predatory behavior are inextricably bound. Greed and education should never mix, I think it's contradictory. Community colleges are where the real education happens, imo "We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices." It's not just young women, it's young people bro
motohagiography 5y ago
Simply they do not desire to become like the people they see in it, or the ones they see graduating. > “That’s why we need both parties to offer a positive vision of college and a positive vision of masculinity. If male identity is seen, by some, as being at odds with education, that’s a problem for the whole country.” The question should be, how did college repel young men? That's pretty obvious in the last decade and 90% of it barely merits an article. However, the conseqeunce is likely a milennial middle class baby bust that is just building momentum as this cohort of women who graduated into professional careers ages out of child bearing years and the scramble for donors intensifies. Men who don't graduate are in effect mostly ineligible as partners for women who do, then other factors like poor fitness levels, choice paralysis, unsecured debt, housing bubbles, and lately a virus of political polarization are reducing the likelihood of durable matches for all involved. I'd be less concerned with maintaining retroactive continuity on the college narrative and asking what is to be done, and instead, being prepared for handling the consequent bust this dynamic has set us all up for.
dang 5y ago
The article that this article reports on was discussed here: A generation of American men give up on college - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 - Sept 2021 (776 comments)
Jensson 5y ago
It is simple. Girls outperform boys in every subject up until high school. This isn't seen a problem, boys are just lazy. But in high school boys starts to outperform girls in math. This is treated as a huge problem and lots of resources has been spent and girls only programs has been created to try to get girls to outperform boys in high school maths as well. Do people really think that this doesn't affect boys view of the education system? They see this, take the hint that they aren't welcome and go do other things in life instead. And the worst thing is that getting boys to learn more in school is trivial. Instead of a mostly female curriculum why not focus on reading action books, learning about the inner workings of bombs and guns, looking at how a car engine works and similar? Put that in the curriculum and you will have the boys attention and they will learn lots of chemistry, physics, reading etc. But that will never happen as long as women are designing the curriculum. Edit: Clarified the second sentence so it doesn't look like I actually believe boys are lazy.
sys_64738 5y ago
Maybe it's also the garbage you need to do to get in like all those extracurricular activities which are pure bogus crap. In the old days you could get in by your high school qualifications alone. Now you can't tell two students apart due to grade inflation.
France_is_bacon 5y ago
What man in his right mind would want to go to university, when you KNOW that you are going to get 24/7 hate on men, with the whole patriarchy thing, and white men suck the most, in particular? And just all the hate on men in general, in the media and elsewhere. For men, it's just time to drop out and play video games all day and live at your parent's house. I know about 10 guys in my immediate circle who are doing that.

84 points by edtechdev 5y ago

School, and education and general have become too fixated on selection bias. Employers don’t train and schools don’t ensure people have necessary skills. Neither institution has any skin in the game. Furthermore things are becoming more zero-sum with respect to employment opportunities.

droopyEyelids 5y ago

The framing on this makes your head spin... "Abandoning college" Hard to imagine that language being used with other demographics.

commandlinefan 5y ago
50 years of being told you're unwelcome will do that to you...
- reilly3000 5y ago
  Could you elaborate on that? I am not personally aware of young men being unwelcome in a higher learning setting.
  - AustinDev 5y ago
    Boys are virtually despised through primary and secondary school. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/boys-bear-the-brunt-of-school-discipline%3fcontext=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/articles/20...
  - sidlls 5y ago
    Inclusion efforts for women have nothing to do with exclusion of men. This isn't exactly true. In a laudable attempt to help lift girls up from a young age, we've (likely inadvertently in most cases) neglected, or worse vilified, boys' learning needs.
  - blululu 5y ago
    Not sure of the OP’s sensation but when an institution creates highly visible programs supporting every single group except one, then it is a form of exclusion (albeit a negative form vs a positive form of exclusion). You could say that such policies are necessary or justified to redress historical inequalities. This is the traditional justification for such policies. Such an argument starts to break down over when those inequalities are less noticeable.
  - vcxy 5y ago
    I don't know if this has changed, but when I was an undergrad in math, all the summer REUs were for women and minorities. I applied to many all the same but never got to do any summer research, which definitely worked against me when applying for grad school. This wouldn't have pushed me out of college I suppose, but it made continuing beyond more difficult.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I remember the professors during my college orientation extolling the virtues of how Liberal Arts would mold us into superior citizens, able to think critically and holistically in a way we normally couldn't. Now I know some of this is just hype, but there was a sincere sense that the 'uneducated' were lesser people that weren't as capable of rational and enlightened thought. My actual college experience was informative, but I don't particularly feel like my two semesters of Rhetoric made me a sharp critical thinker.... because it was just slightly more difficult high-school English. College is sold as essential, when in reality it is not for everyone. And, not having a college degree shouldn't be a de-facto deficiency.

RappingBoomer 5y ago

I would say that there may be more opportunities in the blue collar world, as opposed to the white collar professional world, at least for the demographic that is "abandoning" college

awkward 5y ago
Conversely, there are less blue collar, uncredentialed jobs that are typically taken by women that pay well. Construction, plumbing, and extraction all remain low credential, while nursing, care industries, and education all require more credentials than they did before.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Why can't women be in construction, plumbing or extraction? There are extraction jobs going unfilled that start at $800/day. They're long days and hard work, but none of them require you to bench 450lbs. Isn't it more that this is a cultural issue rather than there just aren't blue collar jobs for women because they're women?
  - VLM 5y ago
    > There are extraction jobs going unfilled that start at $800/day. They're long days and hard work, but none of them require you to bench 450lbs. Have you ever seen the work done on an oil drilling rig? Its a bit "upper body strength" intense. Some jobs will always end up categorized as the most intense upper body strength job; if not oil drill rig hand, it'll be drywall laborer or something else. And those jobs are too intense for most men, with the result that the supply is low and pay is very high AND the fraction of women strong enough to play along with the strongest guys in the world is essentially zero. And its politically unacceptable to point out that WRT some physical characteristics like upper body strength, the graphs of male and female strength very nearly do not overlap. Also there is intense societal/cultural pressure for women to be day care workers or whatever where 100% of women qualify at the skill of diaper changing. I think the closest analogy of "only the very top physical condition making tons of money" that apply to women bodies would be female clothing model. Women models at the physical peak of perfection, think like top 1% supermodels, actually make FAR more than oil rig hands make. Top 1% physical strength men only make $1000/day on oil rigs. The highest paid female model Kendall Jenner supposedly pulled in $22.5M/year in 2018. I don't think the problem is male sexism when women of similar physical quality to the men are making 10 times as much as the men...

redleggedfrog 5y ago

I literally could not get past the 6 to 4 ratio used in the first sentence. Why would you not use 3 to 2? Made me suspect that the rest of the article was similarly ill considered and I moved on.

rizzaxc 5y ago
people generally have a better mental image in base 10
- redleggedfrog 5y ago
  Or that. Good point.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
I think Makes it cognitively easier to translate into "60 vs 40 percent".
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  It probably does. But if that was the intent, why not just say 60-40?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

NikolaNovak 5y ago

My take: First, depends on definition of "College" and "University" that differs from country to country. But overall, value of University education to improve your employability and skillset I think is being questioned by both employers and employees. 1. Some "Blue Collar" skills may withstand the test of automation better than many "White Collar" skills - e.g. I anticipate needing an electrician, contractor, plumber for the next few decades; but hopefully accountant, lawyer, travel agent etc less and less. 2. For "White Collar" skills, well... I went to ComSci university and it's not that it brought no value - but given the time, money, effort and commitment, it was very very low value proposition. I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning. (note I wasn't the one going to university for some "Party / Social Experience" - I found many better, more flexible methods than that:). Not going to university is not necessarily the same thing as not wanting to learn and educate and acquire skills. And there is a whole spectrum today between free online education (random Youtube videos, manuals, free university courses etc), bootcamps, practically oriented post-secondary education, and then university. Bottom line: I have two young kids, I want them to succeed, and I want them to be educated - and I don't know if traditional university is something I will encourage them to consider 10 years from now. I honestly don't know however how that translates into a gender gap discussed in the article though; and article doesn't really provide a satisfying answer either :-/

the_only_law 5y ago
> I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery I tried going back to school recently, hitting a complete brick wall at every step as a “non-traditional non traditional” applicant. Based on my experience with that I’m convinced out higher education system in the US is nothing except those two things.
Forge36 5y ago
>I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery Arguably this was the most valuable learning I did as it's the most applicable to my current job. :)

beervirus 5y ago

Maybe they're just doing the ROI math and deciding it isn't worth it.

dharmaturtle 5y ago
I recently read The Case Against Education. It's very interesting, even if you don't buy the conclusion. From the book: > The Good Student, by definition, fits the profile of a typical B.A. who did not continue on to graduate or professional school. Now let’s define three more ability archetypes: the Excellent Student, the Fair Student, and the Poor Student. The Excellent Student fits the profile of the typical master’s degree holder. The Fair Student fits the profile of the typical high school graduate who does not try college. The Poor Student fits the profile of the typical high school dropout. Ideally, to repeat, “fits the profile” is all-inclusive, covering cognitive ability, character, background, and every other trait. In terms of measured cognitive ability, Excellent Students are around the 82nd percentile, Good Students the 73rd, Fair Students the 41st, and Poor Students the 24th. > Results closely match common sense. High school is lucrative for all four archetypes. Even Poor Students can reasonably expect the resources they invest in high school to out-perform high-yield bonds. College, in contrast, is a solid deal only for Excellent and Good Students. Largely owing to their high failure rate, Fair Students who start college should foresee a low 2.3% return on their investment. For Poor Students, it’s a paltry 1%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

mschuster91 5y ago

> The few neighborhoods where Black and white boys grew up to have similar adult outcomes were low-poverty areas that also had high levels of “father presence.” Call me surprised. That's the result of racist drug policies intended to go specifically after Black men (and hippies): https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-... The biggest problem - and one that the author conveniently and completely ignores - is that the US justice and incarceration system is set up for biblical an-eye-for-an-eye revenge with ludicrous sentencing ("three strikes", decades for nonviolent drug offenses, people getting summarily executed by police regularly, ...) and not, like in Europe, for real, measurable rehabilitation. Also, people in the US receive no education during their prison stay that helps them to gain useful employment after their release, they start with significant debts from the prison system and often enough from loan sharks, there is no meaningful assistance system to help them gain housing and jobs after being released, and forget about physical and mental healthcare - often, people will leave prison in a way worse state than when they entered: malnourishment, denial of healthcare, trauma from assaults both by fellow inmates and officers... And finally: When employers and even landlords are allowed to do routine comprehensive background checks and everything about a person's history is up for a google grab "thanks" to public record laws, it is no surprise that arrests for low level shit like petty theft or smoking weed sets up people for a life in poverty. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: if the US wants to fix their society, the process has to start with their attitude towards criminals, criminality and healthcare.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Well said. I wish our government leadership had the courage to emphasize rehabilitation for criminals, rather than just punishment.
OrvalWintermute 5y ago
> US justice and incarceration system is set up for biblical an-eye-for-an-eye revenge with ludicrous sentencing Apart from financial crimes and financial restitution, there is little literal "eye for an eye" punishment, not to include capital punishment with which I disagree. Capital punishment is reserved for the most heinous of cases, though I think from a moral perspective we should stop it, since it involves state authorization to execute a citizen, and does not enable us to fix a wrongful execution if it already happens. The Innocence Project [1] has been able to overturn some wrongful convictions but I am not sure if that is possible after an execution. If we kill someone we cannot make restitution to that person. If you'd like to make that claim there is literal eye for an eye, please provide well sourced examples of convicted criminals having the violent crimes they enacted on victims (shootings/stabbing) perpetrated back on them > "three strikes" Here are the states with 3 strikes laws, and dates of enactment Arkansas (since 1995); Arizona (since 2005); California (since 1994); Colorado (since 1994); Connecticut (since 1994); Delaware (since 1973); Florida (since 1995); Georgia (since 1994); Indiana (since 1994); Kansas (since 1994); Louisiana (since 1994); Maryland (since 1975 but amended in 1994); Massachusetts (since 2012); Montana (since 1995); Nevada (since 1995); New Jersey (since 1995); New Mexico (since 1994); New York (since 1797); North Carolina (since 1994); North Dakota (since 1995); Pennsylvania (since 1995); South Carolina (since 1995); Tennessee (since 1994); Texas (since 1952); Utah (since 1995); Vermont (since 1995); Virginia (since 1994); Washington (since 1993); and Wisconsin (since 1994). Sourced at [2] I hope you are not claiming that these states implemented these laws for racist reasons. Is that your claim? > decades for nonviolent drug offenses Did you miss a qualifier on that, by selling a dealer amount of drugs the penalties increased also? The last I saw the amount for cocaine was around 180 grams. Are you saying that someone with 180 grams is doing this for personal use? There is a mistake in serious hard drug distribution, that delivery/supplying large amounts of people with drugs does not involve death. Due to the mistakes in cutting heroin/coke for example with fetanyl, people can regularly die from hot batches. A good example of that is the recent deaths of Fuquan Johnson and Enrico Colangeli [3] > people getting summarily executed by police regularly Please provide evidence of regular summary executions by police where the criminal did not have a gun, or use deadly force against the officer, where the officer has not been arrested and charged with a murder. > Europe, for real, measurable rehabilitation European prisons vary greatly. With fairly liberal prisons in Nordic countries, and a mixed bag elsewhere. > trauma from assaults both by fellow inmates and officers... I agree completely that we need to improve prison conditions. I don't think a sentence should involve assaults/sex assaults by other criminals, and I think the govt which is enforcing the sentence, also has a duty to protect the criminal, and to make restitution to the victims of crime, if it happens under the government's care. [1] https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ [2] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-strikes-laws-in-different-states.html https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-strikes... [3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9960699/Comedian-Kate-Quigley-shares-update-taking-fentanyl-laced-cocaine-killed-three.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9960699/Comedian-Ka...

OneEyedRobot 5y ago

Perhaps college abandoned them.

Verdex 5y ago
Yeah, the verbiage used here is kind of weird. Like ... you can abandon a kitten on the side of the road. But if you're not going to college, you're not abandoning something that needs you as a steward to watch over it and keep it safe. Why are men electing to not go to college? That's better. Of course your statement is interesting because I have a story to go with it. I went to a publicly funded university starting back in 2003. I had zero problem getting in. Meanwhile, I know a family friend who went to the same university after I had graduated. I want to say around 2011. He had some problems getting it. It wasn't grades or ability to pay. They wanted to try and get more out of state students because they could charge them more. So they sat on their hands until they got as many out of state students as they were going to get for that year. And after that when they still had some spots open they gave the green flag for the family friend. Kind of feels like college was threatening to do the abandoning in this particular instance.

lordgroff 5y ago

I have no idea what the situation is like in the United States, but in Canada, this "abandoning" (ahem) is a direct function of eroding performance of boys that starts right in elementary school and continues right through high school. This leads to obviously fewer male university students. The trend is clear and has been going on for two decades. Pointing this out, especially in terms of arguing that targeted interventions for boys may be in order or that the education system in some way may be suboptimal for them, is an absolute political no go zone though. It's not a discussion that can currently be had.

martythemaniak 5y ago
Canadian here. Is it a no-go zone? Because discussing targeted measures to help underperforming groups is very widespread and those programs exist. They also tend to be maligned and denounced with arguments like railing against equality of outcomes, vs equality of opportunity. I also can't help but notice that these arguments are usually made by the exact same people as the ones who complain about boys falling behind. That is to say, I don't see Pierre Poilievre types advocating for things like TDSB's Afrocentric Alternative Schools.
- lordgroff 5y ago
  I can't get into too much detail because I've been historically involved in this research and I'd rather not have my identity public on HN. I do have to say that I was more than a little surprised that this would be such a controversial subject given the rather obvious patterns observed. But it very much was, and it still is. Frankly, this experience was not positive for me, since it showed me how politically charged these things are, something which makes no sense to me. I mean, even your comment strays off right into who-is-making-the-argument, rather than whether it might be a problem that half of the school kids are falling further and further behind. I know that if I had boys entering school, this would concern me, but it's hardly even acknowledged.
  - martythemaniak 5y ago
    I don't know you, nor your views, but consider that the reason this happens is that the people pushing this are acting in complete bad faith. They are not interested in using objective measures to help struggling groups succeed, they are merely using this fact to reinforce and promote their reactionary politics. Solving the problem will weaken these groups and their views which is why actually doing anything is out of the question. As you can see from the rest of the replies to your comment, it is merely a convenient launchpad for advocating incel-derived views of men's "rights", white supremacy etc. Maybe you don't see anything odd about this, but the reactions you're seeing in the real world happen because normal people don't want to be seen advocating for these views. I worry far, far more about boys falling into black hole of cynicism and victimhood. I've seen it happen to adult friends of mine and it's tragic.

scohesc 5y ago

Colleges and Universities have been used as research churns, using professors, graduates and undergraduates to further influence research through a combination of tuition, good-will, and the promise of a paper after 4 years of hard work that says you can do what you spend 4 years doing. Combined with the ever-increasing costs of college education with ever-decreasing return on investment (have fun getting a job involving the gender studies doctorate (or any other vague, wishywashy, non-practical education) you got that's functionally useless) You can get the exact same level of education online for 90% of the courses that universities offer. Trades are a different story when there's practical skills to learn however but is the exception to the norm. Why would men spend the time going to college if it's been ensured that they're going to be in debt for the rest of their life due to the inflated ego of these institutions, thinking they can charge so much for degrees that really have no practical value. But then again, why blame the institution if there's thousands of people still lining up willingly?

gred 5y ago

It's interesting to consider whether we are entering a period of time in which young men will "fail" at a higher rate than young women, but we will maintain early-age support structures that prioritize women over men because men continue to dominate in late-age power structures.

martythemaniak 5y ago

There is a large online network of communities that have dedicated themselves to making outcasts out of boys for their own ends. Sometimes it's for clear ends (like Bannon's work on Gamergate) and sometimes it's an intuitive growth instinct. Places like ZH need attention and they're not going to get it if boys grow up to go college. They need them angry, cynical and isolated. I think HN is one outpost of this network. Imagine a 12-16 year old happening upon HN and becoming a regular. Do you see this person coming away with a positive view of higher education and being encouraged to pursue it? Or are they more likely to develop a cynical, contrarian view?

krrishd 5y ago
> Imagine a 12-16 year old happening upon HN and becoming a regular. Do you see this person coming away with a positive view of higher education and being encouraged to pursue it? Or are they more likely to develop a cynical, contrarian view? This precise thing happened to me years ago, and yes I did develop a cynical/contrarian view about it. I still went to school, but in net think I benefitted from not taking it too seriously. But I don't think HN made me an outcast; I was on here because I was already an outcast and it was a place where there were other people into similar things that I was. I feel the same way about your broader point; I think the cynicism/isolation comes first (even if the internet might reinforce it).
fullshark 5y ago
Chicken or egg thing going on there though wouldn't you say? Are these networks accelerating and finding ways to verbalize emotions/thoughts these boys already have due to a social environment they find themselves in and are unhappy with?
merpnderp 5y ago
This could be true if it weren't for the data showing that boys aren't just underperforming in college, the division begins far earlier in primary school. It isn't that these boys don't have a positive view of higher education, it's that they don't have a positive view of any education. And this view is based on their lived experience.

adolph 5y ago

Previously on HN: A generation of American men give up on college (wsj.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment. Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work (nytimes.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472274

wikidani 5y ago

I believe that in the western world, specially in the countries that have free (or subsidized) universities there has been a lot of societal pressure that makes young people want to go to college but no idea why or for what. Now, one of the smartest decisions I made was going for the sort of equivalent of a trade school in my country, it's not a replacement of college but an alternative for what I believe americans call High School, so three years from fifteen to eighteen years old and I truly believe that the rest of the world would benefit massively from such a concept. I also believe we should stop viewing the preparation for university as universal and provide young people with a trade from the beginning. (edit) thanks martzy13 for your comment about vocational schools, I didn't know about them

jmeister 5y ago
Can you please tell us more about your career trajectory? I wouldn’t normally expect someone who went to trade school from 15-18 to be so proficient in a foreign language(English) like you.
- wikidani 5y ago
  Sure! First of all, thanks for saying I am proficient in english, it's something I am a bit insecure and always try to hide that english is a second language to me. I also must clarify that I am extremely fortunate to have parents that were both polyglots so language learning was kind of a given in my household, specially english. Right now, I am working in my second year in a big consultancy firm doing nearshore web development for a big healthcare provider in the US. Although right now I am working as a tester, my school taught us how to do (nearly) fullstack development, so I have been rotating duties in my work, ranging from normal, run of the mill web dev to backend in nodeJS and a bit of cosmosDB. I did learn a lot of stuff for myself before going to trade school but I did learn the basics of working in a development team while doing my third year thesis, which simulates the design, production and release of a real world, fullstack application with an actual use case.
martzy13 5y ago
To be clear, that's an option in America as well. They're usually called a "Joint Vocational School" or a "Career Center", and they offer a variety of options. For example the one I went to had: * Public Safety to learn firefighting and Emergency Medical Services * HVAC to learn a heating and cooling * Building trades to learn electrical, carpentry, plumbing * Software development * Medical Assisting (a pre-nursing route) * Cosmetology for hair stylists and makeup artists * Engineering and Precision Machining Technologies There are plenty of other options at that specific career center as well. A lot of my peers 'looked down' on this choice, as they viewed the "college path" as the only option to be successful in America, and considered this an inferior education.

oh_sigh 5y ago

The title gives you one impression, but in the article you find that college attendance for men is higher than it was 10 years ago - it is just that attendance for women has grown even more.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
Is that merely a result of population growth?
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  No, there are not only more people attending college, but also a higher percentage of people - different source so the date range differs, but per NCES [0] in the year 2000 the percent males/females in college was 33/38, and in 2018 it was 38/44 [0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cpb.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cpb.pdf

eplanit 5y ago

Maybe it's the result of telling 2+ generations of boys that "males", especially "white males" (predominant in Canada) are the root of all problems in society and the world, coupled with ever-present emphasis and promotion of girls (most recently manifested in Trudeau's absurd references to "she-cession" and "she-covery").

endisneigh 5y ago
I’m curious - who is saying this? Have an example? Seems like an exaggeration. I’m sure it’s happened in some isolated cases, but I’m skeptical that this is a prevailing attitude
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Have you walked on a college campus? It's always days for Feminists, days for LGBTQ, days for the Environment, days for minorities, days for women, days for everything - but a man's day is never mentioned. And these days are advertised everywhere - on bulletin boards, in the bathrooms, on TV screens.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Days for minorities and lgbtq include men though - are you implying men cannot be in any of the other groups you mentioned?
    - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
      Try to organize a day for white heterosexual men and see what happens.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        We have days for LGBTQ, women, and minorities because they are historically disenfranchised groups still dealing with societally systemic problems oriented against them. That is not true of white heterosexual men. It'd be like trying to organize a day for people from multimillionaire families. It doesn't make any sense.

decasteve 5y ago

The absence of physical labour, of meaningful work, and learning to work with your hands, are aspects of childhood development completely abandoned over the past half-century. Kids are now confined in comparison, where primarily-seated quiet busywork and one-way non-socratic lecture is the norm, where anxiety and depression are afflicting over one third of all children, it seems absurd to me we keep doubling down on this educational direction.

slowhand09 5y ago

Expect to get flagged for this. Skimmed Youtube titles for Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson - Why Men Are Bailing Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH16ympCb7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH16ympCb7Q

trynumber9 5y ago

>Men are also less likely to be fixtures of boys’ elementary-school experience; about 75 percent of public-school teachers are female. >The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades. I'm not saying this is the cause, but it may contribute to poor schooling results of some boys. I really didn't do well in school until in the 5th grade when I had a male teacher who I saw as something of a role model.

OneEyedRobot 5y ago

I wonder if it wouldn't help if colleges/universities fissioned into more specialized institutions. By building gigantic clumps of education a single approach or philosophy drives too much of the bus. A sample set of new schools. . Work oriented, basically four year versions of junior college. Teaches EE, nursing, CSc, accounting, etc. Higher quality (and cheaper) than current for-profit versions. . Research institutions. STEM masters and up. . 'Soft' disciplines. Not just history, cultural anthropology, and the like but also the newfangled xxx studies, diversity equity stuff, etc. . Traditional old school 'classical' college. Essentially the classwork from Harvard in 1900. You don't need too many of these. . Highly specialized schools like Berklee although there was a time when music was learned the old-fashioned way, at bordellos. What we probably don't need is a world where most of the state-funded institutions are huge lumbering megaschools.

onionisafruit 5y ago

> “Historically, men have been more likely to drop out of school to work in hot economies, whether it’s in the factories of World War II or the fracking mines of the Dakotas,” In WWII were men really dropping out of school to work in factories or were they dropping out to join the military? I thought that American factories during WWII were largely staffed by women and men who weren’t eligible to fight. Also, I don’t think that guy knows what fracking is.

imbnwa 5y ago
Yeah, that's kind of a strange statement, almost talking-out-of-ass quality research, and this is The Atlantic
trynumber9 5y ago
We only drafted a small portion of the working age, male population compared to other countries. The vast majority of working-age men were still in the workforce. Less than 1/5th of those registered were conscripted, the target rate of the War Manpower Commission. Furthermore Executive Order 9279 closed voluntary enlistment for working age men aged 18-38 to prevent factory labor shortages: >After the effective date of this Order no male person who has attained the eighteenth anniversary and has not attained the thirty-eighth anniversary of the day of his birth shall be inducted into the enlisted personnel of the armed forces

Factorium 5y ago

You can make a better living as a tradesperson: 1. Start earning money right away as an apprentice. No massive student debt. 2. Live outside of high-COL cities. 3. Skills valuable everywhere, instead of specific industries (eg. finance jobs only in certain cities). 4. Optimise/minimise your own taxes. 5. Housing is our single biggest expense in life, so build it yourself and save. 6. Easy to hire employees and start a medium-sized business if you want. Maybe men are just 'smarter' and have realised this?

eNTi 5y ago
Colleges are propaganda machines at this point. Men just don't like to be told they are the root all evil. Also... who thinks gender studies are real?

djoldman 5y ago

The article touches on a lot of issues but one I find interesting is: why does it matter? It provides the following answers, which seem weak to me: 1. "[historian and economics professor at Harvard]: 'I worry they’ll come to severely regret their choice if they realize the best jobs require a degree they never got.'" 2. "...further delays in marriage and childbirth may ensue. That would further reduce U.S. fertility rates, which worries some commentators, albeit not all." 3. "The most severe implications, I suspect, will be cultural and political. The U.S. electorate is already polarized .... Those divisions seem likely to worsen" I'm not sure this is convincing. It seems to boil down to a historian worrying, fertility rate changes that some people may view badly, and a possibility of increased political polarization... meh?

kesselvon 5y ago
It's gonna lead to bad times when men start seeing education as effeminate.

eNTi 5y ago

Write states that he dismisses feminism as a culprit... and goes on to describe how feminist talking points are the most likely reason... It's cognitive dissonance all the way down.

vivab0rg 5y ago
I can't believe no one else is pointing this out. The reckoning will hit them like a freight train.

gjhh244 5y ago

It's not just US thing, similar widening gender gap can be seen also here in Finland (probably rest of Europe as well), despite us having free education. As far as I can see, many master's degrees are not worth today it even if you pay no tuition fees. Many blue-collar jobs like plumbing pay better nowadays than your average humanities, social sciences etc job, with equal or better job security and only 3 years of studying instead of 8. So, avoiding higher education can be the rational choice. In addition, there are major flaws in how students are handled nowadays. Teachers simply have no authority to punish bad behavior, and it seems restless boys suffer the most from this in educational outcomes. The system is increasingly designed only for kids who enjoy school and perform well even without supervision. Personally I had no trouble with school, but I'm still not convinced that CS degree was the right choice instead of plumbing or something similar. The job market sucks for everyone except senior software devs.

VLM 5y ago

Outcomes don't matter as much as expectations WRT planning and higher ed is all about planning far in the future. There's no "just in time" higher education economic model LOL. In my state, where $20/hr buys you a pretty nice lifestyle, union building trades ALL pay $30 to low forties per hour and are essentially sausagefests WRT being "boys future jobs" and these jobs pay you around half pay to learn as an apprentice for a couple years, and require absolutely no college or student loans. A "journeyman" experience level "girls future jobs" such as day care worker, which is 99% female employment, pays $13.64/hr average in my state at that experience level and absolutely requires either a K12 ed degree (we produce twice as many degree holders as we have jobs, so optimistically the "bottom half" of degreed teachers end up as bartenders, day care, real estate saleswomen, etc). There is an associates degree program in early childhood education at my local tech school so young women can pay about $10K plus room and board and food, to eventually get a job that might eventually pay as much as $25K/year. Like I wrote, most kids plans fall apart upon contact with reality much like the famous military aphorism about military plans not surviving contact with the enemy. However, the situation boils down to boys "know" they can get a great high paying career in the manly manual labor fields without a degree, whereas women "know" they need a degree and immense levels of debt to make less than McDonalds is willing to pay them, although at least their job is to literally hug babies all day. Maybe half the boys can't actually work construction due to drug use or weakness or just plain old laziness, but when they were planning they "knew" they could get those jobs. Whereas women know that even to change diapers for less than fast food pay, they "knew" they need a degree to compete. The real story is very low paying, very low functioning jobs defined as "for women", require degrees and the supply/demand curve is such that they get away with it and the women hired will show up with expensive degrees and lifetime debt. Men's jobs that don't require degrees do not get away with demanding degrees.

notjes 5y ago

The Bell Curve dictates that only about 15% of humans should go through higher education. But our society decided force everybody into HE with various "incentives". And now everything is distorted. Young men know this is all bullshit, so they drop out. Young women don't drop out. They stay and consume Xanax, Prosac and are financed by sugar daddies and/or only fans.

imbnwa 5y ago

Summary of the points therein: * Men accounted for 70% of the 1.5m decline in college enrollment last year * Women have outpaced men in bachelor attainment since the 80s * Women have been told to get college degrees in order to secure independence and freedom for decades * Men were 57% of college enrolled students in 1970 but since Title XI passed barring gender discrimination, the rates have been getting more lopsided for women * Girls outperform boys generally in high school and elementary long before college * Blaming "the feminist dogma of the education system and the inherently distracting presence of girls in classrooms" is dubious * A better explanation is that up to the 1970s, men could secure middle-class wages on blue-collar work, but afterwards, that labor demand dried up and these types of men are adrift, and marry less since they also don't attend church anymore, and so live 'haphazard' lives detached from traditional responsibilities * This has the effect that young boys don't have stable male role models, as men are more likely to be incarcerated, and aren't present enough in early schooling as teachers or as fathers in low-income areas * The college gender gap is also occuring in "France, Slovenia, Mexico, and Brazil". * Perhaps a blend of biological and cultural differences are at play * This will have broad implications for marriage rates, delayed marriage, delayed childbirth * This may have the cultural implication that education be seen as a identified with effeminacy, barring more men still * "The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades.” This gender gap is an economic story, a cultural story, a criminal-justice story, and a family-structure story that begins to unfold in elementary school. The attention-grabbing statistic that barely 40 percent of college grads are men seems to cry out for an immediate policy response. But rather than dial up male attendance one college-admissions department at a time, policy makers should think about the social forces that make the statistic inevitable."

falcolas 5y ago

One thought: If you're a male, not an athlete, and not an academic star, you're going to be on the hook for your entire college costs. You'll be eligible for few (if any) scholarships, low-interest loans, grants, etc. No idea if there's actual causation there, but given the high cost of college (compared to previous generations), it's certainly a consideration.

HelloMaties 5y ago

No one going to point out the elephant in the room meaning feminism. Feminists have been attacking boys since the 1970-1980 on and thus we are now reaping what the man hating misandrists weaved? Lets not forget how Title IX was literally weaponised against male students.

ngngngng 5y ago

I'm surrounded by this, and I can't help but feel like I'm part of the cause for people I'm close to. About the time I was beginning my CS degree I got a job doing tech support at a web hosting company. Within one semester the skills I'd gained on the job had far outpaced my university classes as far as providing me with real world problem solving abilities. Debugging shared webhosting servers was a far better learning exercise than writing sudoku solvers. Maybe it's not true at other universities, but at the two universities I attended it takes literal years for the majority of students to understand how to take the skills they're learning in a CS degree and solve real world problems. So, I dropped out. And you all know the story, now I write code and makes lots of money, woohoo. Now my father and father in law, both highly educated and financially successful people, look at me and wonder why they did so much schooling and worked so hard when uneducated programmers are making more than they made in their whole career. They're vocally questioning the value of higher education to people around them. Where it gets messy though is that I have family members and friends that have completely or partially used my situation as justification to ditch education, and none of them have gone anywhere as of yet. I've tried to teach some of them programming but I've given up on that, because the motivation and drive they need to teach themselves is the primary determining factor of their success (in my opinion), and I can't change that. I know I'm far from special in this community of overachievers, but whatever it took for me to get myself in this position isn't exactly common among the general populace, and it took me years of watching my friends and family members trying to mimic my path to appreciate that. So now I just tell them to go to college.

thatjoeoverthr 5y ago

We have a student debt crisis. This means, categorically, many degrees proper are bad investments. To pass on a bad investment is smart. There exist good degrees but not everyone is fit for them. We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices. I speak not of education or the humanities in abstract but rather the degree proper; the piece of paper. An expensive document should be understood as a certification with concrete numerical price that can be compared to its effect on your earnings. My advice to my daughter, who is working actively to become an artist, is very clear; stay far from college.

rndmind 5y ago
You said it better than I could. To pass on bad investments is smart, modern day universities charge an arm and a leg, and a bachelor's degree is not very useful. Lawyers, Doctors, require at least 6-7 years of 10k-50k Per Year. That's a lot of dough. When you involve that much dough... greed, scams, and predatory behavior are inextricably bound. Greed and education should never mix, I think it's contradictory. Community colleges are where the real education happens, imo "We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices." It's not just young women, it's young people bro

motohagiography 5y ago

Simply they do not desire to become like the people they see in it, or the ones they see graduating. > “That’s why we need both parties to offer a positive vision of college and a positive vision of masculinity. If male identity is seen, by some, as being at odds with education, that’s a problem for the whole country.” The question should be, how did college repel young men? That's pretty obvious in the last decade and 90% of it barely merits an article. However, the conseqeunce is likely a milennial middle class baby bust that is just building momentum as this cohort of women who graduated into professional careers ages out of child bearing years and the scramble for donors intensifies. Men who don't graduate are in effect mostly ineligible as partners for women who do, then other factors like poor fitness levels, choice paralysis, unsecured debt, housing bubbles, and lately a virus of political polarization are reducing the likelihood of durable matches for all involved. I'd be less concerned with maintaining retroactive continuity on the college narrative and asking what is to be done, and instead, being prepared for handling the consequent bust this dynamic has set us all up for.

dang 5y ago

The article that this article reports on was discussed here: A generation of American men give up on college - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 - Sept 2021 (776 comments)

Jensson 5y ago

It is simple. Girls outperform boys in every subject up until high school. This isn't seen a problem, boys are just lazy. But in high school boys starts to outperform girls in math. This is treated as a huge problem and lots of resources has been spent and girls only programs has been created to try to get girls to outperform boys in high school maths as well. Do people really think that this doesn't affect boys view of the education system? They see this, take the hint that they aren't welcome and go do other things in life instead. And the worst thing is that getting boys to learn more in school is trivial. Instead of a mostly female curriculum why not focus on reading action books, learning about the inner workings of bombs and guns, looking at how a car engine works and similar? Put that in the curriculum and you will have the boys attention and they will learn lots of chemistry, physics, reading etc. But that will never happen as long as women are designing the curriculum. Edit: Clarified the second sentence so it doesn't look like I actually believe boys are lazy.

sys_64738 5y ago

Maybe it's also the garbage you need to do to get in like all those extracurricular activities which are pure bogus crap. In the old days you could get in by your high school qualifications alone. Now you can't tell two students apart due to grade inflation.

France_is_bacon 5y ago

What man in his right mind would want to go to university, when you KNOW that you are going to get 24/7 hate on men, with the whole patriarchy thing, and white men suck the most, in particular? And just all the hate on men in general, in the media and elsewhere. For men, it's just time to drop out and play video games all day and live at your parent's house. I know about 10 guys in my immediate circle who are doing that.