A Collegiate Theory

"Men appear to be giving up on college," Hot Air worries, citing WSJ data.

U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline, the Journal analysis found.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man...

All of this makes me worry about the future. Having CRT enter public classrooms and emphasize the idea of white supremacy and male privilege at a point where white males are already struggling with education seems like a perfect storm of bad ideas. Based on the data above, we don’t need to be telling boys that they need to check their privilege from the time they can first read and write, we need to be helping them do as well as girls.

Alternatively, it may be that college is objectively less valuable than it was, and men are on the forefront of figuring this out. Just as an initial baseline, college costs have skyrocketed over the last decades due to government making student loans easily available. Colleges responded by raising tuition to the limits the government would support. Thus, college costs a lot more now for whatever value you are going to get out of it.

There's less value to get out of it, too. Feminists sometimes complain that any field that women succeed in entering immediately begins to lose pay, although they read this as 'sexism' rather than as 'supply and demand'; if you add many more workers to the field, the supply increase naturally means that pay can be lessened. Women now are successfully dominating the office jobs that require a bachelors degree, and that means that office jobs are not as prestigious or well-remunerated as once. These environments were always unattractive to men, but the pay made up for the depressing need to be inside all day long. Now there's less pay, too. 

Meanwhile, a lot of college degrees are now education degrees or lower-level medical degrees -- nursing, say. In addition to being inside-all-day fields, these are also areas where there is social pressure to keep men out. Men are essentially unwelcome to be elementary school teachers, and barely welcome in secondary schools; and nursing is a traditionally female field, though of course men do become nurses. These are classic fields that offer security in return for no real chance of making a fortune, which are less attractive to men even absent the social pressures that keep men out of them. 

Outsourcing and offshoring are also an issue. It first affected factory workers, but at this point a lot of white collar jobs can be offshored. What can't be offshored is skilled trade work. Your plumber or electrician is going to have to be there where you are physically. Those are jobs that require certifications and practical experience rather than college degrees. 

I have obviously spent a lot of time in school, and don't mean to run down education's value. Yet an actual education is hard to get in college; you really have to work at finding one. If you want to know the secrets of the universe, it's possible to learn a lot about them in a university. What you'll probably be routed towards, though, is a degree in 'education' or some nonsense 'social science' that teaches you nothing about physics, little about math beyond statistics, and assumptions about philosophy and history rather than a capacity to inquire into them deeply. You'll read Aristotle's name a few times, but you won't read Aristotle. 

For me that was the real value in education, and most degrees do not now even aspire to it. Of course men might lose interest in something that has become less interesting. The question is why women continue to double-down on a play that has become vastly more expensive and obviously less valuable.