Incomplete Education: “Interrupted Learning” or “Learning Loss”

Because education in the United States remains largely a local matter — city, county, state — it is always difficult to make national generalizations. But it can confidently be written that three consecutive academic years have been compromised: 2019/2020, 2020/2021, and 2021/2022.

The word is carefully chosen: “compromised.”

There has been some debate about the nomenclature. Some have rejected the phrase “learning loss” as too negative or too alarmist. Some have suggested the phrase “interrupted learning.”

Many of the compromises in these three consecutive years can be placed into one of two categories: reduction in curriculum and content, or reduction in work habits and study skills.

The degree of these deficits varies from city to city, county to county, and state to state, but in any case, a college admissions officer looking at applications from students who graduate from high school in 2022 or 2023 will need to do some reckoning. Universities will doubtless need to increase remediation efforts.

America Needs More Male Students: The Shortage of Boys at Colleges and Universities

In September 2021, The Wall Street Journal featured an article under the headline “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College” and provided data to describe a phenomenon which was by that point in time already well-known: more girls than boys were matriculating at colleges and universities in the United States. Likewise, more girls than boys were obtaining both undergraduate degrees and graduate degrees.

This trend is separate from the question of whether the U.S. is sending too great a percentage of high school graduates to universities. However one might answer that question, it is a concern distinct from the ratio of boys to girls in higher education.

The article began by stating a pattern already established in various publications:

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

Since the 1960s and 1970s, large amounts of federal, state, and local funding has gone into explicit efforts to encourage girls to attend post-secondary institutions. To which extent, if any, that funding is responsible for the current gender gap is open to question.

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.

Over time, this disparity could lead to a significant shortage of professionals. The societal and economic impacts will take time to manifest themselves, and take time to be corrected.

In the past, there was a time at which a gender gap existed in the opposite direction: when more boys than girls attended, and graduated from, institutions of higher education. The problems caused by that old gender gap were different from the problems which will be caused by the current gender gap. A scarcity of men with college diplomas will present society with a different set of challenges than the scarcity of women with college diplomas formerly caused.

The Birth of Black History Month

In the 1920s, people began to observe a week-long period of time, dedicated to exploring the history of African-Americans and their achievements.

Around 1970, the expansion of the week into a month became an increasingly favored idea. An unsigned wire service story, found in newspapers in early 2021, explains:

The week-long event officially became Black History Month in 1976 when U.S. president Gerald Ford extended the recognition to “honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” Black History Month has been celebrated in the United States every February since.

President Ford’s attachment to the concept of Black History originated several decades earlier. In the early 1930s, Gerald Ford had been a star football player at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was team MVP for the 1934 season.

One of Ford’s friends on the team was a player named Willis Ward. The University of Michigan had African-American plays on the team since 1890. Gerald Ford and Willis Ward were roommates when the team went on the road.

In 1934, a crisis developed when Georgia Tech was scheduled to play Michigan. The game was in Ann Arbor at Michigan Stadium. But Georgia Tech had stipulated that it would only play if Willis Ward were benched for the entire game.

Gerald Ford was outraged at the racist action. He threatened to resign from the team, and hundreds of U of M students protested the situation - by some counts, over a thousand. In the end, Willis Ward told his teammates to play the game and to win for him.

The Michigan players were motivated by Ward’s words, and Gerald Ford especially so. Michigan won the game, and Ford distinguished himself in tackling the Georgia Tech players.

Buddy Moorehouse, who directed a documentary film about Willis Ward and Gerald Ford, explains that “During the game, there was this player on Georgia Tech that was using racial slurs and talking trash. Ford and this other Michigan lineman put a hit on this guy that knocked him out of the game.”

Ford apparently hit the Georgia players with particular ferocity, angered by the injustice which they had inflicted on his friend.

Willis Ward and Gerald Ford remained friends until Ward died in 1983. Their experiences on the U of M football team shaped Ford’s thinking. When Ford endorsed Black History Month, it was merely an extension of his college teamwork.