Colleges have a boy problem

Why are the boys staying home?

From Etsy

Last week I caught an episode of the Freakonomics podcast that tried to explain why men account for 71% of the drop in overall college enrollment in recent years. Most experts agree that the ratio of women to men in college is now 6:4. The story gained urgency this week with a news blitz on the unexpected drop in overall college enrollment in Spring 2022. 

Experts offer many theories for this overall downturn. That will not be my focus here. As my great-grandfather, Roy Boomer, might have said, it is likely common horse sense that the cost of college and the prospect of lifelong debt is beginning to outweigh the perceived value of the college degree. But I am not an economist and will leave that analysis to others. 

The Freakonomics story intrigues me because it offers two explanations of why men increasingly avoid college that resonate with my own experience, both as a professor and as a student. First, that boys are socialized to resist the rules and authority structures that shape K-12, and that these attitudes make them less likely to succeed in college. And second, that young men feel they simply aren’t welcome in many college classrooms. 

Ruth Simmons, President of Prairie View A&M University, believes that college is hemorrhaging men because they have been taught from their earliest memories to believe that they are problems. According to Simmons, boys more commonly challenge authority, get into trouble, and find themselves at odds with what teachers and other school authorities value: sitting still, being quiet, and doing what they are told. This essay in The Atlantic argues much the same: girls simply outperform boys in school. I do not have space here to fully explore the school-to-prison pipeline, but these statistics rather speak for themselves: 80 percent of all prisoners are high school dropouts and men account for 90 percent of the incarcerated population in the U.S. 

There is a whiff of “boys will be boys” about Simmons’ thinking. And it hews to gender binaries that deserve scrutiny. However, Simmons might explain some of the attrition that I typically saw in my first-year classes. Every professor knows that if you want to have a good discussion, students have to do the reading beforehand. You might think that if students are paying tens of thousands a year for college that they might be motivated to do the reading. You would be wrong. 

Many young men came to my classes with the expectation that it was my job to impart knowledge rather than to facilitate their discovery of it. I felt the same as a first-year college student. Even though I was intellectually curious, I rebelled against someone else telling me what to read, and I often played a quiet game of chicken with professors to see how accountable I would be if I didn’t come prepared. In many cases, I found that I could participate in discussions without having done any reading at all, that I could simply repeat what I’d heard in class on my exams, and that I could almost always get an A with this method. Eventually I wised up to the fact that the joke was on me, not on my professors, and I began to – as they say in pedagogy circles – take ownership of my education. 

When I began teaching at the college level, I was determined to outwit students who thought they could game the system in that way. In my first-year courses, I required reading responses every day and asked students to keep them organized in a portfolio that I’d collect four times per semester, each time a formal essay was due. In theory, it was a carrot and a stick rolled into one: a reward for basic preparation and a penalty for blowing it off. 

In my experience, the young men who could not complete that basic portfolio were overwhelmingly the ones who withdrew the next semester or did not return the following year. These young men did not blame me for the grades they received. They were often the first to admit that they understood perfectly well what to do and simply chose not to do it. Some of them even apologized for letting me down. I had the sense that I had unwittingly created an environment that made it more difficult for struggling young men to succeed, even though the concept was straightforward: show me that you’ve done the reading. 

Imposter syndrome might have paralyzed some of my students. Maybe they weren’t fitting in with their sports team and didn’t see the point of continuing without that sense of belonging. Maybe they felt stressed about money or were dealing with family trauma during that semester. Even so, I always felt that I had failed them. Could some of these young men have developed mindsets so malformed by the time they graduated high school (men don’t read, girls are smarter at school, any low-stakes assignment is “busy work”) that no intervention would have helped them succeed in college? 

The second theory about why men increasingly avoid college is more disturbing. Pano Kanelos, the founding president of the University of Austin, believes that young men feel increasingly unwilling to speak honestly in the classroom, either because they are afraid of saying something inadvertently offensive or because they know very well that what they are thinking would be heresy if uttered aloud. As I noted in an earlier post, many young people feel that meaningful debate is now dampened by self-censorship and fear of public shaming. Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, discussed a similar topic in a 2016 op-ed, in which he argues that “the angry white male” is frequently a straw villain in identity politics. The backlash against Lilla’s essay and his later book, The Once and Future Liberal, seems to have largely confirmed his point. Lilla addresses political strategy, not college admissions. However, Kanelos explicitly links the political currents that Lilla describes to the drop in male college students. 

One might argue that men have brought this on themselves and deserve all the shaming they get. The recent ESPN story about Todd Hodne is one of many chilling examples of how public universities have protected predators, especially if they are star athletes or coaches. I am mindful of many stories from my female colleagues of harassment by male students, either through direct challenges to their authority in class, subversive behavior, or lewd remarks in student evaluations. And the 2015 film The Hunting Ground captures the extent to which men represent a pervasive threat to women on college campuses. 

I honestly don’t know how women trust men in light of this history. As a father of daughters, I take seriously the visceral rage that inspired Jessica Valenti’s recent post “A Few Good Men: There are none.” How do my daughters remain open to friendship and love while protecting themselves against men who might betray them? I do not know the answer. That they cannot simply love without hesitation is a grief to me. 

I experienced a related conundrum once while moderating a discussion of Sharon Olds’s The Wellspring, a poetry collection with many explicit representations of female desire. Olds has won nearly every poetry award on that planet and will be canonized as a major voice in 20th and 21st century literature. I could defend my decision to include her in the syllabus. But could I defend myself as the one to teach Olds’s work? When a young woman blurted out, “I don’t want to be having this conversation with a forty-year-old man,” I could only think Fair enough. I suspect that my student didn’t want to be having that conversation with twenty-year-old men, either, and I don’t blame her. 

I am also father to a son, and I read with sadness the opening to Cassie Mannes Murray’s “Throwing Pennies,” where her first thought upon hearing that she and her partner would be having a boy is not joy, but apprehension: “how do we raise a non-toxic white boy in the South?” This question came from Mannes Murray’s own experience of trauma, as she explains. That personal history shapes her perception of her unborn son so thoroughly that she even imagines his future mugshot, among other intrusive images. If the penis poses a problem even in utero, then maybe Simmons is right and this boy, even through well-intended messages about what he should not become will understand from his earliest days that something is fundamentally wrong with him and behave accordingly. 

The dissonance between how we view the baby, the boy, and the man may explain why Stephen Marché was compelled by the comments on his essay “The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido,” to publish a correction titled “Not All Men Are Monstrous.” The juxtaposition of these two titles illustrates Kanelos’ and Lilla’s points: that young men accurately deduce that college professors and classmates will view them with de facto suspicion. On the one hand, statistically, I don’t know how that could not be true. The Todd Hodnes and Elon Musks have made it so. One might reasonably expect young men to own this fact and, in the words of a gym poster, “suck it up, buttercup.” On the other hand, it is not mere fragility that causes young men to opt out of conversations where they cannot think out loud, reasonably disagree, or make mistakes in good faith. 

Some of the principles that I now believe in most strongly are ideas I initially and sometimes stridently opposed. There is no greater teacher than the sick feeling of inhabiting an untenable position. The aphorism “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” applies as much to impromptu discussion as it does to the writing process. 

Many of us mount a stiff resistance when presented with ideas that threaten our preexisting beliefs. The denial and anger stages of grieving can also be steps toward abandoning old ways of thinking and accepting new ideas. I fear for the society that is produced when fewer men have the opportunity to discover, perhaps through their initial resistance, that there are better ways to think and to be. But angry bluster can also mean intransigence. I do not imagine that Tucker Carlson ever thinks to himself, after one of his televised rants, Damn, I really sound like an asshole. Maybe I have it all wrong. If men who would subject their classmates to tirades are staying home and finding other outlets for their angst, perhaps the drop in male students is a good thing.

But I’m reminded of my friend John Struloeff’s poem “The Man I Was Supposed to Be,” which is also the title of his first book. John imagines the life waiting for him in a cedar mill, eight hours staring at a lumber blade, then dulling that hopelessness at home with beer and guns. The poem doesn’t say it outright, but John didn’t want that life for himself as a young person. He wrote the poem in part out of gratitude for the freedom that college and graduate school gave him. John is now Director of Creative Writing at Pepperdine University and recently served as Poet Laureate of Malibu, a title that he surely would have mocked while growing up in a logging town in Oregon. How sad it would be if we must now read John’s poem in reverse, following the young man from the college classroom back to the sawmill or the oil field or some other narrow horizon. 

Maybe it is my evangelical background that makes me think that college ought to save young men from themselves. Defenders of the liberal arts often strike a plaintive note while trying to compete with STEM, as if the arts, humanities, history, and philosophy inoculate us against moral bankruptcy. But I’d bet that Elon Musk took his share of humanities courses at the University of Pennsylvania. Charlie Rose’s degree in history from Duke University did not prevent him from preying on women at CBS. Maybe John Struloeff is more the exception than the rule. 

Dr. D’Wayne Edwards offers an alternative to the traditional college experience: a design academy linked directly to employers. Dr. Edwards argues that The Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design restores the original model for college, something more like a long internship. Certainly that model offers a more straightforward path to opportunity for some young men. I do not expect that Dr. Edwards requires his students to write reading responses and organize them in a portfolio. Nor do I expect that Sharon Olds is required reading at Pensole Lewis. I still believe that a college education ought to expose us to ideas and to people that broaden our minds. But perhaps the traditional college experience is but one of many paths to enlightenment for young men.

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If you’d like to read more of my work, see my feature “The Big Quit” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. There is a paywall, but you can create a free account for access.