The vanishing male college student
Thoughtful article up today on Enter Stage Right's site about the vanishing numbers of men on college campuses. I'm not going to quote from it at length - the whole thing is good, so go read it - but I was left wondering about a point that was made early on in the article, and then dropped.
Authors Philip W. Cook and Glenn Sacks begin with these statistics:
Females now outnumber males by a four to three ratio in American colleges, a difference of almost two million students. Men earn only 43 per cent of all college degrees. Among blacks, two women earn bachelor's degrees for every man. Among Hispanics, only 40 percent of college graduates are male. Female high school graduates are 16 per cent more likely to go to college than their male counterparts.
....which will be surprising only to those who still buy into the "girls are being shortchanged in school" argument. Everyone else has figured out that girls do better in school and are more likely to go on to college, and Cook and Sacks spend some time discussing why that is, and whether we should take steps to fix it.
What they don't do is return to their initial point, in which they note that the discrepancy between male and female college students is different for Hispanics, African Americans, and Caucasians. A while back, I posted about the fact that African American women are so much more likely than African American men to earn a college degree, and this argument is evidence (I think) for why affirmative action at the graduate and professional school level is not useful. If you go back and look at the NCES data that I linked to then, you can view college graduates by race and sex. If you compare Asians and Caucasians to everyone else, in terms of male vs. female graduates, the results are astonishing. Here are the male and female graduation percentage for bachelor's degrees, by race, from highest percentage of men to lowest:
Asians - 46% M, 54% W
Caucasian - 43% M, 57% W
Hispanics - 40% M, 60% W
American Indians - 40% M, 60% W
African Americans - 34% M, 66% W
I agree with Cook and Sacks' premise that it's problematic that college women outnumber men in every ethnic group. But why is this happening so much more dramatically for certain groups? The article makes a couple of references to campus groups which are specifically hostile to white males, but that doesn't explain why males are so much more highly represented in the Asian group than in the African American group.
Unlike Cook and Sacks, I'm not going to offer theories as to why this is happening, or what we can do to fix it. I think that many of their suggestions, such as more male elementary school teachers, and more discipline in the K-12 setting, would be extremely helpful for all boys. I just find it interesting that they didn't really address this differential effect. It seems that if we are really concerned that the percentage of men earning college degress is dropping, we should begin with the group that shows the worst numbers, and start trying to fix things with them.
Update: Clarence Page is also concerned with the differential numbers of minority males who enter college, but don't graduate. One suggested solution: Mo' money.