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.

  • PapaEmeritusIII [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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

    • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.