Wednesday, January 05, 2022

A Crisis

Well, it would be a crisis if the sexes were reversed:

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

Crickets.

1 comment:

Ellen K said...

There are a few reasons for this. First of all, the methods of classroom education have been shifted away from competition to group work. Secondly, reading is being pushed at age 5, when many boys are not psychologically mature enough to do tracking required for reading. IN the old USSR it was against the law to teach any child to read before age seven because not all kids could read at that age. Now we have boys filling up spots in Special Ed classes not because they can't learn, but because they are pushing expectations beyond their chronological age. They need to scrap Maslow and bring back Piaget in education. Third, because the majority of teachers are female in lower grades, boys get in trouble more frequently for what is viewed by parents as typical boys behavior. Had I known when my son was in elementary school what I know now, I'd be a very rich woman. They singled him out for abuse in a way I would never spotlight any child. It still makes me furious 24 years later. Finally, males are on the bottom of the list for internships, on campus jobs and scholarships, meaning that many students who would have previously benefited from such programs are either going to community college or trade school. My own son, who has a degree in History has said frankly that we wasted our money and he should've learned to be a mechanic or electrician. Many young men are looking at the fact that such professions as welding can pay more than a young doctor would make and training is usually subsidized if they accept a job with a big company.