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.

Paper and Ink: Physical Books Prove Their Worth During the Pandemic

The trend toward various forms of online education, which had been growing for more than a decade, accelerated massively during the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, which shut down most American brick-and-mortar schools in March 2019. Students from kindergarten to postgraduate found themselves doing, or trying to do, nearly everything online.

The strengths and weaknesses of online learning have been listed and analyzed numerous times. Journalists and educators have discussed the various versions of distance learning, and the associated advantages and disadvantages, at great length.

It is clear that staring daily for many hours at the screen of one’s laptop — or iPad or iPhone or Android or tablet or desktop, etc. — is not healthy, mentally or physically.

Physicians have catalogued the problems created by an overexposure to the blue light which screens emit. Psychologists have long known about the numerous problems which result from too little time spent outdoors and away from anything electronic.

One helpful factor in this situation is the simple book. Students who must spend hours on their devices will benefit mentally and physically from turning off the electronics and reading a book. The same text — whether it’s a newspaper article, a poem, or an explanation of chemical reactions — is processed differently by the human brain, depending on whether it’s read on a screen or read from a physical book.

Retention, focus, and comprehension are better with physical ink-and-paper documents.

Some over-eager proponents of online education had envisioned a world in which a single tablet device — think Nook or Kindle — contained dozens of books, and a student would spend hours reading from this single source.

That was precisely the wrong prescription.

For those students who, during the pandemic, had access to physical books — math books, history, literature, etc. — learning became richer, because it was not confined to the screens of their laptops.

Nobody really wants to read all of MacBeth or Hamlet on a smartphone. Students can study more effectively from several pages of algebraic equations or chemical diagrams on paper than from arduously scrolling up and down endless webpages.

Moving forward, schools can work to ensure that physical books are available to supplement what’s done online.

Online learning will not go away anytime soon, and it certainly has some benefits. But the very best type of distance learning will be that type which offers physical books, in addition all that’s online, to the students.

Online: The Human Factor in Education

Despite the ceaseless drive toward “remote learning” or “distance learning,” the drawbacks of online education remain stubbornly obvious. Authentic human presence and human interaction prove to be factors which improve the quality of learning and intellectual development.

To be sure, there are some specific instances in which online learning is effective: primarily when there is a highly motivated student who has excellent self-discipline, work habits, organizational skills, and study routines; and when the curriculum and content have relatively little ambiguity and little conceptual complexity.

But whether at the secondary or at the post-secondary level, such examples remain rare. For this reason, observation reveals the desirability of in-person instruction. At the University of Michigan, Professor Steven Clark reports that

We can record our lectures, but what we know from past years is that students who don’t come to class but watch the lecture at home struggle to master the material.

Online learning, in those instances in which it is most effective, places an extra burden upon, and requires more effort from, the student, in order to achieve equal or lesser amounts of learning. In addition to being less effective, online learning is less efficient.

The International Baccalaureate Organization and Its Diploma Program: Anecdotal Evaluation

There is no end to the evaluation of educational systems. Books and articles flow ceaselessly, analyzing and appraising educational schemes.

The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) has been marketing its Diploma Program (DP) since 1968. In that year, the DP was launched as an experiment, and was launched as a mature plan several years later. The IBO prefers the spelling ‘Programme’ for the DP.

In the following half-century, reams of prose have been published about the DP, some writers praising it, and others damning it. No attempt is here made to summarize, or give an overview of, the mountains of text which describe the DP.

Instead, five brief observations:

• One strength of the DP is its emphasis on Foreign Language instruction. Especially in the United States, any trend which energizes World Language instruction is welcomed.
• Another strength of the DP is its unabashed and explicit focus on high-stakes standardized examinations as exit tests. This prepares students for professional board and certification tests, and for the tests which they will face both in the university and in their efforts to gain admission to graduate schools.
• One weakness of the DP is occasional confusion of form and content. In some ‘Language Acquisition’ assessments, it is possible for a student with lower language skills to earn a better grade by mouthing IB doctrines about various topics — the importance of environmentalism, etc. — while a student with stronger language skills might earn of lower grade by choosing to talk about modern architecture or 19th-century poetry.
• Another weakness in the DP lies in its directing students away from practices which would foster academic competency. Regarding the ‘written assignment’ for language acquisition, for example, the IB instructions state: “A formal (literary) essay is not an acceptable text type for the written assignment.” Students are then allowed to choose how they will structure their writing, but the one option which they may not choose is the one which they will need for their university careers. (This assignment was replaced for the examinations starting in springtime 2020.)
• One more flaw in the DP is the manner in which teachers are prepared to instruct in the program. A careful analysis of the DP reveals that effective teaching will focus on giving students the skills necessary to achieve on the assessments which will earn the Diploma. Yet many of the seminars which claim to prepare teachers for the DP direct teacher attention away from test preparation and toward a multitude of other topics and activities.

Happily, many teachers have developed ad hoc approaches to accomodate for the weaknesses of the DP while retaining its strengths.

No educational program is perfect. In choosing an education, students and parents must simply decide which set of problems they can accept. The DP has both advantages and disadvantages. Wise students and parents will find their own ways of compensating for the DP’s weaknesses while enjoying its benefits.

Educating for the Future: Really?

According to a famous proverb, a good education teaches the student ‘how to think, not what to think.’ Most educators, and most other people, will agree. Yet the concrete application of this proverb remains elusive.

Criticizing schools which either teach a narrow and specific set of skills, e.g., how to write in C++ for various operating systems, or teach lots in information, scholar Noah Yuval Harari describes a common sentiment that schools should teach the broadest and most flexible skills:

So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

Yet precisely those schools which claim to implement the idea ‘four C’ education are in fact violators of those very principles.

Schools which present themselves as teaching ‘critical thinking’ often use various slogans - ‘inquirers, risk-takers, thinkers, open-minded, balanced, reflective’ - but in reality have a set of axiomatic beliefs which together constitute a worldview: a worldview which they seek to inculcate into the students.

This becomes clear when examining political, religious, and social questions. If one examines how a school indirectly and subtly nudges its students toward various viewpoints, it becomes clear that the school is not teaching a neutral skills of ‘how to think critically,’ but is rather seeking to indoctrinate.

Likewise, schools may claim to teach the skill of communication, but often shy away from the rigor needed to give students the ability to write clearly and concisely. Whether writing persuasively or informatively, a student needs a facility for spelling, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary, idioms, devices, and styles.

Many schools, however, avoid the discipline of teaching clear communication, claiming that instruction in composition is ‘oppressive’ and an exercise in imperialism.

Is it possible to have schools which are truly neutral purveyors of thinking and communication skills? Or would it be better for schools to simply and openly state their cultural and social prejudices so that parents and students become informed consumers?

Doing the Wrong Things for the Wrong Reasons: American Universities Lose Their Sense of Mission

The urge toward universal education is a clear pattern in American history. At first, it meant striving to keep all students in school until eighth grade. It grew to include high school, and the desire to see all students complete twelfth grade.

This trend emerged before public education was a widely-embraced concept. When most schools were local and parochial, the society and its institutions felt responsible to provide assistance to whichever students might not readily be able to afford education.

The distinction between ‘public school’ and ‘private school,’ as we’ve conceptualized it in the early twenty-first century, was not an articulated categorization earlier in our nation’s history. From today’s perspective, many of those early schools were neither strictly public nor strictly private; they were hybrids of the two.

In any case, the urge to expand universal education eventually grew to include post-secondary. The debatable and debated desire appeared, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, to see every student attend college.

As noble as the intentions behind this desire may have been, it led to the dilution of the university’s purpose, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:

Part of the problem is that there are too many students, a fair number of whom simply don’t belong in college. The new culture of education in the United States is that everyone should, and must, go to college. This cultural change is important to the death of expertise, because as programs proliferate to meet demand, schools become diploma mills whose actual degrees are indicative less of education than of training, two distinctly different concepts that are increasingly conflated in the public mind. In the worst cases, degrees affirm neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition.

As increasing percentages of each year’s high school graduates matriculated, the impact on the university became noticeable. The desire to have ‘everyone’ attend college has changed college.

When comparing the university of the past with the university of the present, there are two errors which threaten: either to see the past as superior in all ways to the present, or to see the present as in all ways superior to the past. We can achieve a sober analysis by steering between the two.

The features of the university which have largely disappeared are catalogued by scholar Robert Bork:

The difference between education today or education in the last sixty or seventy years and what it was before that is to be measured in light years. The future novelist Willa Cather’s studies at the University of Nebraska in 1891 included three years of Greek, two years of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Robert Browning and the nineteenth century authors (Tennyson, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Ruskin), French literary classics, one year of German, history, philosophy, rhetoric, journalism, chemistry, and mathematics.

It’s worth noting that chemistry and mathematics were included in the education of a student who would make her career in literature. This reflects the university’s goal of imparting both thinking skills and the mastery of bodies of knowledge.

It was not unusual for a student working toward a doctorate in British Literature to be required to do a semester of calculus, or a student studying theology to complete courses in physics. Such was the university’s understanding of itself and its mission.