For centuries, higher education was the gateway to affluence, status and a successful life. It was also a masculine preserve. Women began to trickle in barely a century ago. That both of my grandmothers were college graduates was, in my early Baby Boomer generation, a rarity.
Now the men are being routed from the Groves of Academe. The Wall Street Journal (summarized here if you can’t get past the WSJ paywall) reports that, in every racial grouping and income bracket, females top males in college enrollment, often by large margins. In a striking break with the past (and it’s a pretty recent past),
For the most part, white men – once the predominant group on American campuses – no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.
The trend is remarkable. There’s another remarkable trend on the campuses, too, namely, the trend toward more and more expense for less and less education. Yale will charge $59,950 for tuition in the 2021-22 academic year. In the 1964-65 year, when I matriculated, the figure was $1,550 ($13,600 in 2021 dollars).
The sticker prices are slightly misleading, because schools give large discounts to desirable students who can’t pay the tab. Still, they aren’t very misleading. Student loan debt has reached $1.73 trillion, nearly doubling in the past ten years. At the same time, colleges are devoting far more attention to denigrating the accumulated learning of the past than enriching it. Added to that is a pathological fixation on a “systemic racism” that, like the luminiferous ether of yore, pervades everything yet is utterly undetectable.
When one thinks about it, why would any rational being want to spend four years of his youth in what now passes for higher education? While some may attribute the male exodus to the hostility men routinely encounter on campus, it impresses me as a simple cost-benefit calculation.
Fifty or sixty years ago, colleges didn’t train students in marketable skills, as many, in between fits of wokeness, futilely try to do today. The economic value of a college degree was as a marker of intelligence and a decent work ethic. In the process of earning this marker, one learned, or at least was granted the opportunity to learn, something about history, literature, science, art, philosophy and other beautiful things.
The marker is nowadays much tarnished, because courses lack rigor and often aspire to nothing more than instilling preposterous theories in undergraduate minds. A degree in a real field of studies, obtained by taking courses whose teachers gave grades that were meaningful indicators of mastery of the subject, told future employers something worth knowing. A degree in Gender Studies where all courses were pass/fail is a goat feather.
Perhaps young men have figured this out and prefer not to pile up debt to gain an unenjoyable experience that yields little or no value intellectually or economically. I wonder how long it will be before young women come to the same realization.
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