The disappearing male, In College Classrooms, Men are Missing

IN THE 1990's, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys.

Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here, listening, staring at these words - this is not really who I am."

That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."

Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.

The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?"

It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry - men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses and John Robertses and George Bushes - and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.

But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their 30s, by which time the world has passed many of them by.

Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn't finish school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a college graduate earns. He'll be three times more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to get divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women, and more likely to engage in crime. He'll be more likely to develop substance abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy, statistically, since men who don't attend college pay less in Social Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more likely to father children out of wedlock, and are more likely not to pay child support.

When I worked as a counselor at a federal prison, I saw these statistics up close. The young men and adult males I worked with were mainly uneducated, had been raised in families that didn't promote education, and had found little of relevance in the schools they had attended. They were passionate people, capable of great love and even possible future success. Many of them told me how much they wanted to get an education. At an intuitive level, they knew how important it was.

Whether in the prison system, in my university classes, or in the schools where I help train teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem with how we teach and mentor boys that I call "industrial schooling," and that I believe is a primary root of our sons' falling behind in school, and quite often in life.

Two hundred years ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions of kids, we took them off the farms and out of the marketplace and put them in large industrial-size classrooms (one teacher, 25 to 30 kids). For many kids, this system worked - and still works. But from the beginning, there were some for whom it wasn't working very well. Initially, it was girls. It took more than 150 years to get parity for them.

Now we're seeing what's wrong with the system for millions of boys. Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a lot of boys "in line" - competitive learning was one. And our families were deeply involved in a child's education.

Now, however, the boys who don't fit the classrooms are glaringly clear. Many families are barely involved in their children's education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every academic area. Many of the old principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of 30 kids, about five boys will begin to fail in the first few years of preschool and elementary school. By fifth grade, they will be diagnosed as learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, behaviorally disordered, or "unmotivated." They will no longer do their homework (though they may say they are doing it), they will disrupt class or withdraw from it, they will find a few islands of competence (like video games or computers), and overemphasize those.

Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them - they don't, on average, learn as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking, listening to words. For 20 years, I have been taking brain research into homes and classrooms to show teachers, parents, and others how differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a PET or SPECT scan of a boy's brain and a girl's brain, showing the different ways these brains learn, they understand. As one teacher put it to me, "Wow, no wonder we're having so many problems with boys."

Yet every decade the industrial classroom becomes more and more protective of the female learning style and harsher on the male, yielding statistics such as these:

The majority of National Merit scholarships, as well as college academic scholarships, go to girls and young women.

Boys and men constitute the majority of high school dropouts, as high as 80 percent in many cities.

Boys and young men are 1½ years behind girls and young women in reading ability (this gap does not even out in high school, as some have argued; a male reading/writing gap continues into college and the workplace).

Grasping the mismatch between the minds of boys and the industrial classroom is only the first step in understanding the needs of our sons. Lack of fathering and male role models take a heavy toll on boys, as does lack of attachment to many family members (whether grandparents, extended families, moms, or dads). Our sons are becoming very lonely. And even more politically difficult to deal with: The boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the last 20 years (an emphasis that I, as a father of two daughters and an advocate of girls, have seen firsthand), has muddied the water for child development in general, pitting funding for girls against funding for boys.

We still barely see the burdens our sons are carrying as we change from an industrial culture to a postindustrial one. We want them to shut up, calm down, and become perfect intimate partners. It doesn't matter too much who boys and men are - what matters is who we think they should be. When I think back to the kind of classroom I created for my college students, I feel regret for the males who dropped out. When I think back to my time working in the prison system, I feel a deep sadness for the present and future generations of boys whom we still have time to save.

And I do think we can save them. I get hundreds of e-mails and letters every week, from parents, teachers, and others who are beginning to realize that we must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling and need help. These teachers and parents are part of a social movement - a boys' movement that started, I think, about 10 years ago. It's a movement very much powered by individual women — mainly mothers of sons — who say things to me like the e-mailers who wrote, "I don't know anyone who doesn't have a son struggling in school," or, "I thought having a boy would be like having a girl, but when my son was born, I had to rethink things."

We all need to rethink things. We need to stop blaming, suspecting, and overly medicating our boys, as if we can change this guy into the learner we want. When we decide - as we did with our daughters - that there isn't anything inherently wrong with our sons, when we look closely at the system that boys learn in, we will discover these boys again, for all that they are. And maybe we'll see more of them in college again.

We must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling and need help.

Coleus,

I have 4 children: two boys and two girls. There is a 13 year age gap between the oldest boy and the three younger.

I homeschooled the three younger children ( a boy and two girls). I deeply regret not homeschooling my oldest boy. At the time homeschooling was unknown. I can see the difference in confidence, self-motivation, love of learning, and especially creativity between the my oldest schooled son and his homeschooled brother and the three younger children. The schooled older boy is a college graduate, a faithful father and husband, and would be considered successful by any standard, but I can see the difference.

"No, no, no. Dodgeball requires adult organization. Manhunt, Capture the Flag, Smear the Queer, Hit the Bat, and any number of other great school recess period games requiring no supervision" ( Herman the Cherusker)

Herman,

I attribute the success of 3 homeschoolers to the massive amount of PLAY that my children enjoyed. Formal homeschooling rarely took more than 2 hours of their day. The rest of the time was spent in highly physical, very creative, loosely supervised, large muscle PLAY.

Please observe children playing on a beach. You will notice that they are able to concentrate on a project for HOURS. These children are learning how to concentrate and focus. The older more experienced children are given the opportunity to mentor the younger. The younger children learn how to take direction, and learn good manners and "beach" ettiquette. Tired or irritable children are free to leave the group at any time, and those who don't are socially excluded if they don't shape up.

By the way,,,,my 3 homeschoolers were admitted to community college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. All finished all three levels of college Calculus by age 15. The two younger graduated from university with B.S. degrees in math and one at 20 just finished a masters in math. The oldest is slight behind his siblings, but spent 2 years in Europe on a church assignment and returned home completely fluent in Russian. He is also a nationally and internationally ranked athlete.

My homeschooled kids are NORMAL. It is the schooled children who are academically and socially delayed.

I work with young graduate students in my field. On balance, I find they hae a remarkably high self esteem, but remarkably low self assurance and self confidence. They can't cope well with being told they are wrong, for example.

I had a client recently give me a hard time, insisting that what I had offered them was 'just opinion.' Of course it was - it was my very educated opinion, and that's worth a lot more, or balance, than their opinion. When framed like this, she freaked out.

Such delicate souls. Lucky for them they have such a powerful self image - I'd hate to imagine how they would cope if they didn't. :-)

I fired her as a client, too, and banned her from any of my products or consulting. :-)

"When we decide - as we did with our daughters - that there isn't anything inherently wrong with our sons, when we look closely at the system that boys learn in, we will discover these boys again, for all that they are. And maybe we'll see more of them in college again."

This is not original with me, but when the problem was the reverse, we changed the institutions. Now, insteading adjusting the institution, we want to change the guy. As he said, medicating and intimidating.

The universities and colleges are still wanting girly men.

I also think there is some undue whining on the part of males in this sphere, too. It's just the flip side ofthe victim mentality that harms so many so-called progressive types.

The truth is, whether men or women do notably better in higher education has almost nothing to do with how well any indidual will do in life. A person's success is primarily their responsibility, and their lack of achievement shouldn't be undluly blamed on membership in a class (that is, males).

I worked in law offices in nyc for most of the 1990s. I fully bloomed when I left in my mid 30s to start my own business. In terms of dollars and cents, I passed all my peers after oinly three years. Their degrees and scores on IQ tests doesn't matter.

Increasingly, it has become clear to anyone with a brain that most of the best and brightest inhabit small cubicles or very small offices and are terrified of middle managers and their shadows. Not a way to live, I think.

http://www.morningnewsbeat.com/archives/2005/01/04.html

Your Views: The Scales Of Justice
Yesterday, we had stories about lawsuits that Wal-Mart is facing from immigrant janitors who say the company cheated them out of overtime and vacation pay (Wal-Mart says they were the employees of outside contractors, and therefore it is not responsible), and from women who have filed a gender discrimination suit claiming that they weren’t paid as well as men.

To which MNB user David J. Livingston replied:

How could Wal-Mart possibly lose in court to those janitors who weren't even employees of Wal-Mart? And those women who claim they did not get equal pay? How absurd. Salary is negotiated between the person or union and their employer. This is a free country where everyone is free to pick and choose their compensation level based upon their own ambition and negotiation skills. It has nothing to do with being a man or a women but rather skill and ambition.

Not always, we’re afraid. We’re not taking a position on the Wal-Mart gender discrimination suit, but there certainly have been plenty of cases in this country where old boy networks serve to keep women underpaid and under-promoted. It happens less and less, but it still happens. And while a lawsuit ought to be the last resort, sometimes it is the only way to get justice. And we assume that whichever way the result of this case goes, the result will be justice.

(We also suspect that there may be a few women out there who will disagree with your assessment. It so happens that we had a mother, and still have a wife, daughter and four sisters…so we know which battles to take up and which to avoid.)

As for the janitors – well, just what company employed them and determined their pay schedules strikes us as the heart of the legal battle. And only time and a system will tell us what the facts are and where the responsibility lies.

"make $150K a year operating a 120 ton crane

must be a union job..."

Not the one that I know. Crane companies are big business. I wouldn't want a union slob running something that big, expensive and dangerous if I owned it.

It's just one example of a skill that can't be taught in a college. It's best for men to join the military and choose a career field with the longest technical training course. There is no slob-off time in those courses. You fail, you get kicked out. You pass and go to your assignment and you can take free college courses at night for the useless subjects for a degree.

It only takes discipline. Simple.

1. My generation was misinformed—by elders and fortune—about the value of our college degrees. $120,000 of your/our money now buys, career-wise, just a hair more than your free high-school diploma used to.<<<<<<<<<<<

I think there is a lot of truth in this statement, in fact I can make a case that there was more real opportunity for males, especially WHITE males who had a high school diploma forty years ago than there is today for males with a college degree. Of course this refers only to those who go into the corporate world, those who start their own business are in a totally different category.

I know of more successful men of my generation (I am 25 years old) personally who dropped out of college than who completed college.

I don't doubt it in the slightest. I hope you and your friends are aware that phrases such as "500 times smaller" and "400 percent less" are imbecilic mathematical impossibilities, that knowledge seems to be lacking among the supposedly educated "journalists" who write the news copy for CNN.

Glad to hear it wouldn't be a union job - then the guy doing it must've earned it and be quite skilled.

Sadly, these days, the non-degreed jobs don't get the respect that they used to. Carpenters, mechanics, construction workers, plumbers, etc. are all skilled jobs and are needed in our society, but aren't always treated like professionals. (Probably because illegals are doing a lot of the work and are dragging down the wages and the reputation.)

But, on the other hand, not all college degrees are useless (although I will grant that probably any liberal arts degree is and a person could make more money by spending the 4 years starting in a company and working their way up.) But - the guy running the crane couldn't be doing that job unless an engineer worked on the design and manufacturing of the crane. And I wouldn't want to go into a building or ride in a vehicle unless someone qualified did the calculations to make sure it was safely built.

We need all of these professions. But, it's too bad more trade schools aren't available. But I guess that's what the military is good at, like you said - my hubby went through the nuclear power school in the Navy and I hear most power plants look for those that made it through that school because they know they'll get qualified people.

"Funny... the femilezis got what the wanted... NOW--- they don't want it!!!!!!"

That's true. I sometimes go to a university to use a specific engineering tool they have for my company on contract. While walking about, getting lunch or coffee or whatever, I look at the women on campus. Most look fine but are not happy as in someone I want to meet for a little talk or whatever.

I don't have time for that because I want to finish my testing and leave. They need a course in charm school.

stories about lawsuits that Wal-Mart is facing

This isn't about equality in the Labor market. It's about out of control lawyers (wonder what the gender split is?) who have found the latest "deep pockets" corporation.
Large and successful corporations these days are very vulnerable to suits about the pc hot buttons - sexism, racism, health issues, occasionally ageism, and there's probably a "for the children" button in there somewhere.

The only ones who profit from these suits are the lawyers.

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