USA Today notes that, for everyone 135 women who receive bachelor's degrees, only 100 men do so. Glenn Reynolds wonders, what's happened to all the male college students?
One would be to treat it the way we treat other "underrepresentation" issues in higher education: By wondering what universities are doing wrong. There seems little doubt that universities have become less male-friendly in recent decades, to the point of being downright unfriendly in many cases...The remedy, in this view: Affirmative action for male candidates, re-education for faculty, campus "men's centers" to match the womens' centers that were created when women were an underrepresented group on campus (and which still remain today almost everywhere), and efforts to make curricula, dormitories, and recruiting more male-friendly...The second approach would be to shrug the problem off. Men aren't going to college as much? Big deal. Maybe it's because women are smarter, or better suited to such things...
The third possibility is that men aren't so much underrepresented in college as women are overrepresented. This is plausible.
Glenn notes that the only explanation that we're likely to see any educrat offer is the second. It'll be interesting to see if any educrats really are gullible enough to open up the topic of genetic explanations of gender differences.
While Glenn certainly isn't the first one to point out this problem, few people note that the male-female disparity is not equal across ethnic groups. In a post from 2003, I noticed that black women earning bachelors' degrees outnumbered black men 2-to-1. The most up-to-date information I found now includes the year 2001-02.
Overall, men were awarded 42% of the bachelors' degrees in 2002. But that is primarily driven by the large number of white men, who earned 43.2% of the degrees awarded to white students. In contrast, Asian men earned 40.4%, Hispanic men 39.7%, AmerInd men 39.6% - and finally, black men earned only 33.6%.
If universities are still doing everything in their power to get female students in the door, one wonders why.
Posted by kswygert at September 29, 2005 05:49 PM