16 votes

As women become 60% of all US college students and continue to outpace & outperform men, the WSJ takes a look at how colleges and students feel about it

7 comments

  1. Kremor
    (edited )
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    Although the comments in this thread are not really that bad I feel that most of them fall into gender essentialism, "it makes sense that men are not enrolling into college because men are X or do...
    • Exemplary

    Although the comments in this thread are not really that bad I feel that most of them fall into gender essentialism, "it makes sense that men are not enrolling into college because men are X or do Y", imagine if women never got the push to get into STEAM "because they are just bad at math and science".

    Do men naturally take more risks than women, or they are expected to have higher incomes and a stable financial situation which push them to seek high risk high rewards opportunities?

    Do men naturally avoid caretakers roles or they avoid them because they don't want to be labelled as sexual predators if they work with children, do they avoid them because they don't pay as much, or is something else?

    Do men develop mentally and emotionally slower than women or it is assumed that they will do ok just because they are men, which leaves them to figure things on their own, sometimes with bad results.

    22 votes
  2. Kuromantis
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    Link
    Archive.is link, because the actual article is about 2500 words long. An article about how there are more women in college and how they're doing better than men. It seems like this is the core of...

    Archive.is link, because the actual article is about 2500 words long.

    An article about how there are more women in college and how they're doing better than men.

    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.

    American colleges, which are embroiled in debates over racial and gender equality, and working on ways to reduce sexual assault and harassment of women on campus, have yet to reach a consensus on what might slow the retreat of men from higher education. Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention.

    No college wants to tackle the issue under the glare of gender politics, said Ms. Delahunty, the enrollment consultant. The conventional view on campuses, she said, is that “men make more money, men hold higher positions, why should we give them a little shove from high school to college?”

    Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”

    In 2008, Mr. Smith proposed a men’s center to help male students succeed. The proposal drew criticism from women who asked, “Why would you give more resources to the most privileged group on campus,” he said.

    Funding wasn’t appropriated, he said, and the center was never built.

    It seems like this is the core of the problem. In the past, the idea that women could be better than men at anything other than the stuff women were/are assigned to do was unthinkable, and now one of, if not the first examplee of women doing objectively better than men somewhere for reasons other than being forced into doing that by gender roles imposed on them. Some consider just doing the same things they did & do for minorities, or various forms of affirmative action and support, but politically those programs and ideas have always been for minorities because they were the ones facing discrimination so doing that obviously won't be seen as progressive even if you use the same methods.

    One thing worth noting though is that apparently the amount of men enrolling in college hasn't actually gotten lower as per the actual headline of the article, more so that women's enrollment has kept getting higher and is increasing faster than men.

    5 votes
  3. [3]
    streblo
    Link
    Just spitballing here so feel free to disagree but even among people from backgrounds most likely to enroll in post-secondary in my experience I feel like there is a larger segment of men vs women...

    Just spitballing here so feel free to disagree but even among people from backgrounds most likely to enroll in post-secondary in my experience I feel like there is a larger segment of men vs women who try to, often to their detriment, "outsmart" conventional wisdom. When the popular refrain is that college is oversold (and depending on the field there is definitely truth to that) it makes sense to me that enrollment by people looking to 'get ahead' would be down -- which my gut tells me would favour men.

    2 votes
    1. [3]
      Comment deleted by author
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      1. lou
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        Link Parent
        Related to that, men are less likely to become caretakers. Either for the young, the old, the sick, and the fragile -- women generally fulfill this essential task. Women are taking up our slack,...

        Related to that, men are less likely to become caretakers. Either for the young, the old, the sick, and the fragile -- women generally fulfill this essential task. Women are taking up our slack, so to speak, so men are free for other pursuits.

        6 votes
      2. EgoEimi
        Link Parent
        I observe similar among people I know and concur: men tend to chase risk more. Leads to some good things like big career payoffs; it also leads to some bad things like a significantly higher...

        I observe similar among people I know and concur: men tend to chase risk more. Leads to some good things like big career payoffs; it also leads to some bad things like a significantly higher death-by-injury rate.

        I had a very racially and gender-mixed network of friends and acquaintances in high school. I'm about 10 years out of high school now. It's very curious how the men I knew have a wider distribution of outcomes than the women I knew.

        Looking at the men I knew

        • At least three died from drugs or drug-related accidents
        • One dropped out of a low-tier college to do construction and now is quite well-off. A few dropouts. Many completed college. Several have started their own companies; a few are successful, and one now has a wildly successful tech company.

        Looking at the women I knew

        • None have died from drugs or drug-related accidents.
        • Almost all completed college and are now in stable professional careers in medicine (either as biomedical researchers, doctors or nurses), software, marketing, communications, etc. But none have started a company.

        But this is a limited dataset of like 100 or so people in my high school network.

        4 votes
  4. [2]
    nukeman
    Link
    One thing I’ve seen mentioned in r/professors is that male brains tend to develop slower than female brains, I.e., a 20 year-old woman is more mature and better equipped to handle college courses...

    One thing I’ve seen mentioned in r/professors is that male brains tend to develop slower than female brains, I.e., a 20 year-old woman is more mature and better equipped to handle college courses than a 20 year-old man. This difference at a critical time means women have a bit of an edge in the classroom.

    I’d be curious to see if this is different in countries with military conscription. I know the phenomenon is global, but I wonder if countries like Finland, Israel, and Switzerland have a narrower gap than others.

    2 votes
    1. Oak
      Link Parent
      What is the college enrollment difference by sex in other countries?

      What is the college enrollment difference by sex in other countries?

      2 votes