Fewer men are choosing college, reports Monte Whaley in the Denver Post.
In 2015, 61.2 percent of Colorado’s female high school graduates enrolled in college, compared to 51.8 percent of males, the state reports.
Adam Stark, who left college to pursue a music production career, poses outside a Denver night club where he DJs. Photo: John Leyba/Denver Post
Nationally, “women hold almost 60 percent of all bachelor degrees, and women now account for almost half of students in law, medical and business graduate programs,” writes Whaley.
John Maxwell, 24, dropped out of Littleton’s Arapahoe Community College after one semester, reluctant to “waste his parents’ money on college work that held little or no interest to him,” writes Whaley. Maxwell now works in a liquor store.
Adam Stark, 28, dropped out of Metro State University after studying computer science for a year and a half. “If you don’t want to go to college you can go to a trade school and come away with something and not be on the hook for $150,000,” he said.
Now a software engineer for a music company in Denver, Stark also DJs at some of the area’s most notable nightclubs. “What I was getting in the classroom just didn’t jibe with me. I felt I could teach myself on the Internet,” he said.
The gender gap is widening on college campuses, said James Shelley, director of the Men’s Resource Center at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio.
He believes the “cleansing of boy behavior” in elementary and secondary schools and boys’ more independent learning style all discourage traditional college classroom work. Date rape prevention programs, although well-intentioned, also scare men away from campuses, Shelley said. The programs “welcome young men to college by essentially telling them that they are potential rapists,” Shelley said.
“One woman once told me that she could use statistics to determine how many of my friends were rapists,” said Maxwell.
The “feminization of everything fails our boys,” argues David French in National Review.
The gender achievement gap starts in elementary school. It’s widening at the college level.
Sixty-one percent of white working-class men view college as a “risky gamble,” concludes a new survey reported by Emma Green in The Atlantic. “The enduring narrative of the American dream is that if you study and get a college education and work hard, you can get ahead,” said Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI. “The survey shows that many white working-class Americans, especially men, no longer see that path available to them.”