My dad brought this up last night, to support his belief in the oppression of the white male on college campuses. Which is bullshit, and political correctness on campus is surely not a reason for this trend, but this does seem like a real trend and I'm wondering why it would be happening.
My answer at the time was there tend to be more non-college opportunities for men - trade school, apprenticeships, things like that, which I believe are overwhelmingly male. Also sort of similar to things I've seen about the "reverse gender gap" in Mongolia - men are more likely to take over a family business and will learn the skills they need working in the business, whereas women need to go to college to learn other skills because their future is not so laid out for them. College is not the marker for success it once was, and a lot of men might see more non-college opportunities for them that women don't.
There might also be a mental health aspect - I think women tend to deal with mental health better? Which might lead to them being able to deal with uncertainty and stress these days better than men, leading to more men dropping out. I don't have any statistics there to know if that's even true or not though.
I don't know if any of those answers hold any water, but this does seem like a real trend from what I can tell and I'm wondering why it might be occurring.
Dunno if it's a big factor, but modern conservative media is very anti-college, and men tend to be more conservative than women, so that negative portrayal might have a bigger impact on them.
This is it. That combined with college getting increasingly expensive. Rich conservatives will still send their kids to college, but the poor dopes are gonna try to make all their kids small business owning chuds.
I feel like there's also a materialist / Marxist analysis we can layer on top of this. Something about capital demands different skills from workers than they did 50 or 100 years ago. Probably more demand for workers with better social and language skills which at that age, which women may possess more of. But this is barely a half-baked analysis, someone with better theory skills can maybe carry this one over the goal line.
Here you go: As work in the imperial core has shifted from manufacturing to the service sector, demand for workers has shifted towards workers with better social, linguistic, and academic skills which to women tend to be better adapted. Customers also find women much easier to interact with (read: yell at), so a larger percentage of the workforce in the core is becoming female, as the majority of the workforce is becoming increasingly based around customer service, healthcare, healthcare support, food service, personal care, social services, and academia.
These changing demands have affected school curricula which have shifted from producing docile, subservient factory workers to docile, subservient consumers and customer service workers, and only furthered the already existing academic performance gap of female students above male students.
Also, more importantly, women attending college has become progressively less stigmatized over the past decades, meaning the 50% of the population that was attending University at far below average rates is now attending at the average rate, meaning there is more competition than ever for spots, while universities are simultaneously reducing entering class sizes relative to population growth in order to maintain and increase prestige and exclusivity to help justify tuition increases. Way more people fitting into fewer spots relative to population has resulted in even stricter competition of k-12 grades for entrance.
haha I'm there with you. But schools are just there to produce workers and reproduce ideology, so even if a teacher enter with good intentions I think they get pushed towards acting in this way since this is what the school demands of them. Especially if they have not criticized their own ideology. Like the Chomsky quote when he was being interviewed by some journalist, "I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
There were news stories (can’t find any now of course) during covid lockdowns about teachers punishing students for violating arbitrary rules during virtual classes (stuff like forced silence, not moving, etc).
The schools are barely even making functional workers, they’re making future inmates.
According to :reddit-logo: its because we put “girls rock” on tshirts and tell them they can do math too and the little boys get no support, and as a white man you can’t get a scholarship
:powercry-2:
In reality, I believe that more people are realizing college is a scam and the investment due to the high costs is not worth it. both men and women.
However, it’s still way easier to get a job as a man without a college degree. Women may realize that it, while being costly, can give them a leg up.
yeah that was my dad's position. just another day in hell
For the higher rate of dropping out, one possible cause could be that men are socialized to feel like they shouldn’t ask for help. Could be making them less likely to go to office hours or ask friends for help with homework
It's been a while, I'm a midrange millenial, but when I was a teenager starting college I roomed with my best friend from HS, and made a pair of friends early on.
Second semester my friend got the opportunity to get a single for the price of a shared double room and took it and I got into a dumb fight with one friend I'd made at college. The other friend I'd made there was her roommate so this resulted in me having massively decreased social contacts. I was already on academic probation because I tested into a math class my HS classes didn't prepare me for with decent SATs and my English gen-ed was so boring that I had trouble focusing and did poorly in it. I didn't understand that I could drop classes to avoid them impacting my GPA so I just took the failures on the nose. The second semester the social isolation put me in a spiral of depression where I only got out of bed to eat or use the restroom so I failed everything and was suspended for a year.
Come from a lot of poverty and lost my scholarships over that so that was that.
Would have helped a lot to have someone giving me good advice as an 18-19 year old dumbass, but I didn't even realize that was a possibility, much less seek it out.
Edit: Not to be all woe is me, things are okay now financially, but that required a combination of luck and putting up with years of work in a very miserable customer service role.
I think there's some truth to this. Working in higher ed, my observation has been women are more willing to take advantage of free tutoring offered thru the school. It's not that men don't use these services, but my gut says it's about 60% women and 40% men.
I'm not sure if there's an easy way to check the data by gender at the institution I currently work. I'll ask around.
i taught in a heavily working class high school. typically, besides the boys who liked school, everyone else was eager to get to work to start making money. Whether to help provide for the family, learn the family trade, or just go out on their own, these boys were eager to get some cash in their pockets.
I think it's more just the debt and poverty with shitty job prospects afterwards tbh
true, but why wouldn't this also affect women? Debt, poverty and shitty job prospects isn't a gender thing.
That's why I brought up the mental health thing - if women are better at dealing with mental health issues than men, they might be able to deal with the anxiety and depression of a shitty future better. I don't actually know if that's true though, anecdotally it just seems like women have healthier coping mechanisms than a lot of men with their "I can't cry, I can't show weakness, I can't show vulnerability" sigma mindset that just makes things worse. But that might all be some weird essentialist bullshit.
men are expected to still be seen as bread winners, even in households with more than one job. it's 'expected' that the man has things more together financially. that said, I imagine it is just a little bit of everything, and other factors still, all feeding into a larger slow trend
but why wouldn’t this also affect women? Debt, poverty and shitty job prospects isn’t a gender thing.
Being willing to go into debt may have more varaibles based on background though. For example, something like the number one demographic group that stood to benefit from student loan forgiveness were Women of Color.
i feel like that would suggest women are more affected by debt and therefore less likely to go to college/more likely to drop out. Especially if women of color are the most hurt by student loans
Dunno, escaping poverty through college, maybe? Being the first of the family to graduate with a degree ("breaking the cycle") is still a very big meme in poverty stricken areas and first/second gen immigrant families. You see it a lot over on :reddit-logo: Meanwhile, white males are becoming disillusioned by the system at a rapid pace. Problem being when they blame the less advantaged rather than the system.
To add to this, you often see specific degrees marketed to specific demographics. Women of Color were a major target of CNA/ Nursing school advertising for a while here in Florida.
As a straight, white, cis, college dropout - college sucks for the most part. People and connections were cool, but I couldn't tell you anything super important I learned in my proper four year college as opposed to what I learned in my two year community college program.
It's a lot of busy work for little to no point. Some of that is my (at the time undiagnosed) ADHD, but also busy work sucks.
I went to college and I mostly regret it. The work I've done since college has largely been unrelated to my degree, and when I was there I could feel the quality declining so people at the top of the school's administration could take more money for themselves. Whole programs being cut, fucking furlough days literally every week to save money on actually teaching classes (which as I understand it has lately lead to people having to take way longer to get their degrees at all, meaning more chances to make them take out loans).
I wouldn't blame young people if they thought that shit was a scam, because it was certainly feeling like one by the end of my stay.
My experience mirrors this.
I think it started when my university went from having a joke football program to winning games. A couple years later they got a massive new training complex and a new huge stadium.
Meanwhile I knew people who flat out could not graduate because the school eliminated their program. I saw the rapid decline in educational quality as more money was put into certain programs and bigger name professors were hired.
All of this was especially poignant when I was doing my master’s and after failing an exam and speaking to the professor about it he said “you’ve made it this far so you’ll get what you need to pass.” I was angry because I entirely deserved that failing grade.
Could flip the script on him and argue most colleges are exploiting anyone who goes to them and colleges are disproportionately targeting women for exploitation because patriarchy.
However, I'm not sure how true that argument is.
Yeah I don't know how true the statistic is. After the conversation I looked it up, and it wasn't just a bunch of questionable far right sources reporting this, it was in a lot of lib media too. Not that lib media is that great, but they do tend to have a better grasp of reality than a bunch of far-right sources screaming WOKE IDEOLOGY IS DESTROYING AMERICAN MEN! So it made me think there was some truth to the statistic, but yeah I don't know how much or even if it is true.
It might be because women are marginally better than men at handling the pressures of college. The difference isn't substantial enough to have any policy implications though.
A simpler explanation is that for a long time men have been overrepresented in academia, and what we are observing is just regression to the mean.
