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Colleges Have a Guy Problem

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Colleges Have a Guy Problem



American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider. Last year, U.S. colleges enrolled 1.5 million fewer students than five years ago, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Men accounted for more than 70 percent of the decline.To get more news about 美国大学毕业证, you can visit jzjy001.com official website.

The statistics are stunning. But education experts and historians aren’t remotely surprised. Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s—every year, in other words, that I’ve been alive. This particular gender gap hasn’t been breaking news for about 40 years. But the imbalance reveals a genuine shift in how men participate in education, the economy, and society. The world has changed dramatically, but the ideology of masculinity isn’t changing fast enough to keep up.
For decades, American women have been told that the path to independence and empowerment flows through school. Although they are still playing catch-up in the labor force, and leadership positions such as chief executive and senator are still dominated by men, women have barnstormed into colleges. That is the very definition of progress. In poorer countries, where women are broadly subjugated or otherwise lack access to regular schooling, girls enjoy no educational advantage whatsoever.

Still, gender inequality on something as important as education presents problems, no matter what direction the inequality points in. While men are more likely to go to college than they were 10 years ago, something seems to be restraining the growth of male enrollment. In 1970, men accounted for 57 percent of college and university students. Two years later, Congress passed Title IX regulations that prohibited sex-based discrimination in any school that received federal funding. “The fact that the gender gap is even larger today, in the opposite direction, than it was when Congress determined that we needed a new law to promote equal education seems like something we should pay attention to,” says Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who is writing a book about men and boys in the economy. “I’m struck by the fact that nobody seems to understand why this is happening.”

The U.S. education gender gap isn’t just a college phenomenon. Long before female students outnumber men on university campuses, they outperform boys in high school. Girls in elementary school spend more time studying than boys, are less likely to misbehave than boys, and get better grades than boys across all major subjects. “For decades, guys have been less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to enroll in college immediately, and less likely to finish college and earn a diploma,” Reeves told me. “There is a linear educational trajectory for girls and women. Boys and men tend to zigzag their way through adolescence.”
Sociologists and cultural critics have taken many dubious stabs at why the gender gap in education is growing. Some have blamed the feminist dogma of the education system and the inherently distracting presence of girls in classrooms. I don’t put much stock in those explanations.

The story I prefer begins with the economy. For much of the 20th century, men without any college education could expect to earn a middle-class salary in fields such as manufacturing and mining. In the 1970s, the share of the labor force working in these brawny industries declined. But men—especially in poor areas where college attainment is low and may even be falling—have struggled to adapt to a 21st century economy, where a high school diploma alone is often insufficient to earn a middle-class wage.
The sociologist Kathryn Edin has written that men without college degrees in deindustrialized America have been adrift for decades. They face the simultaneous shocks of lost jobs, disintegrating nuclear families, and rising deaths of despair in their communities. As 20th-century institutions have crumbled around them, these men have withdrawn from organized religion. Their marriage rates have fallen in lockstep with their church attendance. Far from the ordered progression of the mid-century American archetype—marriage, career, house and yard—men without college degrees are more likely to live what Edin and other researchers call “haphazard” lives, detached from family, faith, and work.

This male haphazardness might be reproducing itself among younger generations of men who lack stable role models to point the way to college. Single-parent households have grown significantly more common in the past half century, and 80 percent of those are headed by mothers. This is in part because men are more likely to be incarcerated; more than 90 percent of federal inmates, for example, are men. Men are also less likely to be fixtures of boys’ elementary-school experience; about 75 percent of public-school teachers are female. Suggesting that women can’t teach boys would be absurd. But the absence of male teachers might be part of a broader absence of men in low-income areas who can model the path to college for boys who are looking for direction.
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