Here’s an interesting article from the Weekly Standard on the growing gender imbalance at U.S. colleges and universities:
Here’s a thought that’s unlikely to occur to twelfth–grade girls as their college acceptances begin to trickle in: After they get to campus in the fall, one in four of them will be mathematically unable to find a male peer to go out with.
At colleges across the country, 58 women will enroll as freshmen for every 42 men. And as the class of 2010 proceeds toward graduation, the male numbers will dwindle. Because more men than women drop out, the ratio after four years will be 60–40, according to projections by the Department of Education.
The problem isn’t new-women bachelor’s degree–earners first outstripped men in 1982. But the gap, which remained modest for some time, is widening. More and more girls are graduating from high school and following through on their college ambitions, while boys are failing to keep pace and, by some measures, losing ground.
USA Today had a similiar piece on this in October. The Weekly Standard article brought to mind this post from Jen Dziura
[I[t just so happens that the great majority of the people I know who have also been working really hard and impressing me are also women. It has been a long time since I’ve met a man of dating age I found impressive; more commonly, I end up propping up the egos of nice men who are just sort of traipsing along in life. (“But you made a short film in 1998!” I will say. “You are a filmmaker!”) Yet my women friends are accomplishing things that provoke actual excitement and professional jealousy (of the healthy, motivating sort…)
There’s a lot more that could be said on this topic, obv., but I’m heading home for the night…
I find it hard to believe that the only explanation for the disparity in men/women attending college is that men are lazier or not as into goals. Was there a boomlet in women being born in the early 1980s or something?
Probably depends on the type of college, too.
In any case, that’s what girls need – more dating issues to complain about!
No there was no boomlet. There are actually more college age men in this country than women. To quote from the article, “Women outstrip men in education despite that there are 15 million men and 14.2 million women aged 18–24 in the country.” And these numbers are nationwide, so yes they will vary from school to school (e.g., 100% women at single sex schools to vastly more male at military accademies).
Yes, I think this is having a big impact on dating. Most college graduate women want to date another college graduate and preferably one who makes about the same or more money than them. Both of these criteria are going to be harder and hard to satisfy if the education gap continues at its curent rate. It will be more than just annoying if it expands into a 40/60 split or worse.
This has become a huge problem at my alma mater, BU. (Go Terriers!) Right now it’s more than 60 percent female at the undergrad level, and university marketing folks are going crazy trying to attract more men to campus.
I also think it’s an alarming trend socially, that we’re raising a generation of under-educated men at precisely the time when under-educated men in India and China will eat their economic lunch. Worse, our under-educated men will be too ignorant to know this is their own fault and they should have gone to college.
Caren, I don’t know if it’s a question of laziness or not being into goals. My guess is it has to do with the way primary and secondary schools teach … geared more to the way girls learn. But that is just a guess.
There was a really interesting op-ed in the Washington Post a few weeks ago, by Michael Gurian:
Time, PBS’s Newshour, and NPR have also reported on this. And here’s an article by Glenn Sacks:
Also: obviously, this is something we’ve seen most dramatically in the black community for years. Part of it is just that so many black men are in jail on drug charges, of course.
I wonder what the breakdown of majors is?
The Sacks quote makes me wonder what has changed–have boys changed or has the education system changed. I’m a product of NYC public schools in the 70s and 80s and remember things like recess and gym several days a week. But all that sittiing at a desk, being still and completing work that is presented in a dull fashion has been the way it’s been forever in most schools. (I’m assuming we’re not talking about Montesorri-style education here.) Dare I wonder if playing hours of X-Box and other such games makes school more difficult for boys in this age? This graduate of a women’s college is just asking. BTW, love your blog!
New York Times had a rather pathetic Op Ed article on this on January 3. Poorly written and poorly thought out. For example, the author quotes the stat that men now rank making money as more important in a spouse than cooking or housekeeping skills. This is presented as being because men are becoming more materialistic in their interest in women. Of course, a great deal of the reason for such change is that families are cooking less and less and housekeeping is becoming less important and more of a shared duty, so it is really that those skills are becoming less valued, not that making money is becoming more valued. I don’t think any of these factors rank particularly high on most men’s reasons for marrying a woman.
That said, Derek is looking for a women with good housekeeping skills. But he is a special exception.
[…] She says — with good reason, I think — that this could be a harbinger things to come in society at large. Not that I think marriage is going to disappear or anything, but with fewer and fewer men proportionately graduating from college and men getting less and less literate, there are going to be consequences for women who want to marry an equal… […]
I think that some of this comes from these boys seeing, upon divorce from their mothers, their father taken to the cleaners, financially speaking. While my observation is antedotal, watch Judge Judy some afternoon – her courtroom is full of young females suing their “ex-boyfriends” for money they loaned them. I believe that today’s young men are happier to let woman go to college, become the breadwinner and then (if they even do marry) if things don’t work out in a marriage will be happy to divorce and we will begin to see judges awarding alimony to more and more “uneducated” men.
They may become the primary caregiver of the children, since they are underemployed and have less purchasing & earning power than their female counter parts.
Fewer young men going to college will be a great thing for females. They will get higher pay, more advancement in their career, while these men will have less financial liability in the probable (60%+) event of a divorce.
Divorce, spousal maintenance, custody, child support will become an equal opportunity event in the next 10-15 years.
That is my two sense…
Don said: “Fewer young men going to college will be a great thing for females. They will get higher pay, more advancement in their career, while these men will have less financial liability in the probable (60%+) event of a divorce.”
This is a fantastic point and I never looked at it this way before. With fewer and fewer educated young men in their way, the glass ceiling will literally break and the rain will fall on all these women who have been unfairly held back in their careers by men for so many generations. And if we choose to marry at all, it will be a winning situation for men as well since we’ll get to be more domestic and spend more time with our kids and hobbies. Win/win. Who would have thought, in a world where so many things seem to be getting worse?!
Let me guess: you guys are bitter about your own divorce, right?
But look: the divorce rate is not anything near 60%. If you look at the divorce rate in terms of people, not marriages, the the rate has never exceeded 41%. (Saying 1 in 2 marriages ends in divorce is misleading, because people can get divorced multiple times). But even that 41% is skewed, because people who get married at 18-25 are far more likely to divorce.
Fewer guys going to college is both a bad thing for men — a 21st Century economy really demands an educated workforce to get ahead — and for women, few of whom would want to marry the loafabout guy you describe.
Lastly I don’t really think things are getting worse in the world. Okay you can point to specific issues, like global warming and Iraq, where I don’t want to get into a political argument with you. But overall things are getting better and better.