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In 2006, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, dean of admissions at Kenyon College in Ohio, scandalized many readers of The New York Times by her op-ed (“To All the Girls I've Rejected,” March 23) about a relatively secret practice that many college admissions officers had been engaging in for years: giving preferential treatment to male applicants. Considering US colleges' history of discrimination against women, this is to many a curious practice. How could colleges and universities be giving “affirmative action”—if that's what it can be called—to men? Why admit supposedly less-qualified males and consequently reject superior female applicants? Have we been so successful improving girls' performance in school that we have, ironically, made it harder for them to get into college?
Even as a sense of a “boy crisis” in schools grips the public, enrollment and degree-attainment gaps between women and men in college—women now earn nearly three of every five degrees—have garnered headlines and provoked debate. To some, these statistics are just more proof of a “war” against boys being waged in the larger culture and educational systems. To others, these statistics miss the larger inequalities that women still face and represent a backlash against women's gains. I contend that such debates only scratch the surface of men's experiences and outcomes in higher education. How and why might we think differently about where “the guys” are in our colleges and universities?
In this article, I want to go beyond just enrollment numbers to examine key indicators about male experience in college. As I will show, the story about men in higher education doesn't boil down to either “men are in trouble” or “men are fine,” as popular debates might suggest. Instead, both assertions have some truth. Higher education professionals must think broadly and, even more importantly, context-specifically about college men. Doing otherwise—ignoring the nuances of men's and women's educational lives—might actually exacerbate social inequalities while still not solving any of the problems faced by men and the institutions that serve them.
How Are They Doing?
The statistics on male and female enrollments are well known: current figures from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) show that nearly 57 percent of undergraduate students are female, while in graduate school females are already over 60 percent of enrollments. These gaps are projected to grow, with women expected to become almost 59 percent of undergraduates and the majority of degree recipients at every degree level by 2018 (NCES, Projection of Education Statistics to 2018, 2009). Currently, men only exceed women at the doctoral level, though this advantage is quickly shrinking.
But in comparing males to females, we sometimes get the impression that boys and men are doing worse than they did before or—a much more insidious and baseless notion—that girls and women are in some way causing the difficulties of boys and men. Such views are rooted in a battle-of-the-sexes mentality that made for interesting tennis matches in the 1970s but leads to misguided educational policy today.
Proportion disparities may create problems, but more men attend college today than ever before, and their numbers keep rising (see Figure 1). It's just that women's enrollments have risen faster—there was a 29 percent jump in female enrollments between 1997 and 2007 versus a 22 percent jump for males.
Figure 1. Undergraduate Enrollment Trends, 1970–2010
Further disaggregating the data by race, social class, and other factors—asking “which males?”—is crucial to identifying and prioritizing men's difficulties. As Figure 2 shows, African-American and Hispanic males are much less likely to have a postsecondary degree than both their white and Asian-American peers and females of color; there is a 44-percent difference in college attainment between Hispanic and Asian-American males. To view the male-female gap in enrollment without regard to race, then, is to miss important dynamics that help explain it.
Figure 2. Percentage of Population 25 or Older With a Postsecondary Degree of Any Kind, 2008
Socioeconomic status also has a significant impact. Working-class and impoverished males are less likely to attend college than their middle- and especially upper-class peers. According to the American Council on Education, in 2003–2004 male college attendees from the lowest income quartile amounted to only 44 percent. The middle two quartiles were 47 percent male, while the highest quartile actually had more males than females, 52 percent. Clearly, to understand which men are most in need, we must account for socioeconomic status. To ignore class by focusing on all males is to extend even more privilege to those men who are already doing quite well.
Beyond Enrollment
Looking deeper, the statistics on engagement, achievement, and outcomes—what happens during the college years—also suggest that many college men do have a problem. Data from the 2006 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study of the 2003–2004 cohort of students at all postsecondary institutions, for instance, shows women exceeding men both in the percentage who have attained their degrees four years later and in the percentage who are still enrolled. Men are thus much more likely to have dropped out of college.
The 2009 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) also shows that college males excel their female peers in only about a third of the categories of engagement, including tutoring, working with faculty outside of class, and relaxing and exercising. This leaves women more engaged in two-thirds of the categories, including coming to class prepared, participating in community outreach, reading books independent of coursework, taking foreign languages, and participating in study abroad.
Males' academic achievement, too, is cause for concern. Women get better grades than men and are more likely to develop aspirations for graduate and professional degrees—and ultimately, women get these advanced degrees at a higher rate than men.
Still, many indicators show men doing well. Men are less likely than women to experience stress and depression, and they report better physical and emotional health. Men are also more likely to graduate with confidence in themselves and their own abilities than are their female classmates (see Sax). And they are more confident with good reason: men are more likely to be employed after college and to be better paid than their female peers. It remains true that men are more than half (though sometimes only barely) of degree recipients in the disciplines that are particularly influential and high paying, including medicine, computer science, law, engineering, and business.
Indeed, despite greater female degree attainment, in nearly every measure of social power—including money and positions in industry and government—men still dominate. Women continue to require more education to achieve economic parity with their less-educated male peers. Consider Figure 3, which shows that women need at least one more degree than men do to make similar amounts of money. That men and women both know this and make their educational decisions accordingly should provoke little surprise.
Figure 3. Gender Gap in Median Earnings by Level of Education
Whatever the statistic brought to bear, one must remember that differences between the sexes are usually quite small. In the student-engagement scores from the NSSE, for example, most male and female averages are separated by hundredths of a point differences, nowhere near even the standard deviations within each sex's scores. In other words, you're more likely to find broader differences between any two college men than between a man and a woman.
Where Are the Guys?
Many of men's problems in colleges and universities are, of course, not simply a higher education concern. What are the larger social dynamics that are driving the results for males? Where are the men who are not coming to college? Knowing this can help admissions and student life officers decide how to direct their efforts and what is outside their control.
First, there is a pipeline problem. Boys have difficulties in elementary and secondary school that continue as they move into postsecondary education. For instance, boys have significantly lower literacy scores than girls, indicating weaknesses in crucial skills for getting through high school and succeeding in college. And boys are less likely than girls to participate in non-athletic extracurricular activities, the very ones that appeal to college admissions officers.
But most important, fewer males than females are taking and passing college preparatory courses, and fewer are actually graduating from high school. All told, many boys in school—and frequently their teachers and parents—are not making college success a priority. Colleges and universities have to work with the schools to improve boys' skills and motivation if they want to have a larger supply of high-quality male applicants.
Part of the difficulty in preparing males for college is that there is pervasive culture of anti-intellectualism for males. The “mook” image of males who are crude, rude, childish risk-takers has become ubiquitous in reality television, television commercials, sitcoms, music, and on the Web.
Selling this kind of masculinity to boys does not instill attitudes conducive to preparing for or succeeding in college. And in trying to market themselves to young men, many colleges and universities have contributed to the problem, and in the process done themselves few favors, by presenting the college experience, especially in commercials aired during televised sports, as cheering at athletic events and chatting on the quad with attractive coeds.
Another common argument has been that difficulties for men in higher education are a reflection of the increasing feminization of colleges and universities as more women become professors and administrators. The thinking is that female ways of knowing and acting are increasingly required to be successful, so men who cannot or will not act and think in those ways simply don't come to college, don't do well when they do, and/or leave college because of it.
Much evidence, however, contradicts such assertions, including the fact that most faculty and administrators continue to be male, and, according to Sax, men's GPAs, mathematical confidence, leadership skills, emotional well-being, and orientation to science all improve—more than women's, even—with an increase in the proportion of women faculty. Thus, one key to better achievement for men might be more women in positions of influence, not fewer.
Another reason for males' relative lack of interest in college may be that they have more avenues than women for transitioning to adulthood without going through postsecondary education. The military, for one, remains a major option for males. The Army alone recruits roughly 64,000 more college-age high school graduate men than women per year into active duty. The other three military branches are disproportionately male as well. Some men come to college after their service, of course, but many do not.
Joining the workforce also remains a viable option for males. Manufacturing, manual labor, and service jobs still tempt a large proportion of high school boys to forego college or even school. The pay differential for males and females in such jobs (see Figure 3 again) might help explain why these are less attractive to females.
Also, prison is a competing “option” for many men in this age group. In 2008, there were, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, 231,600 men between the ages of 18 and 24 in prison. Only 12,600 women 18 to 24 years old were incarcerated that year, a difference of 219,000 potential college students.
Given these social and cultural conditions, colleges and universities clearly have a compelling interest in making college a more viable and attractive option to a broad range of men and in focusing on the social dynamics that remove men from their enrollment pools.
Implications for Higher Education and Society
What are the implications of these various indicators and causes of men's difficulties in collegiate enrollment and attainment? When women were forty percent of the higher education student population prior to 1980, there was reason to be concerned for the social, economic, and political well-being of women and for our society as a whole. Now that men are approaching that forty percent mark, are similar consequences inevitable?
The persistent inequalities that women face are unlikely to be visited upon men simply because fewer of them enroll in college, but there still are potential ramifications that provoke concern. Consider the following.
Diversity
We need males' perspectives. Note the plurals; there is no single male perspective and there's no one type of male. Rather, men embody many types of masculinities (to use Raewyn Connell's notion) and thus can offer diverse perspectives on and experiences of the world and of the multiple ways of being a man. The fewer males present, the fewer versions of masculinity will contribute to the university community.
Athletics
Having fewer men on campus exacerbates difficulties that athletic departments have in meeting Title IX standards for proportionality. The more women on campus, the more women's sports opportunities must be provided. While adding women's sports is a good thing, the more common practice has been instead to eliminate men's sports. The resulting community and student furor is disruptive to the university, and the loss of opportunities to compete in their chosen sport is often injurious to those men whose sports disappear. Many students, women as well as men, rely on sports for incentives to stay in and succeed in school.
Social Relationships
Though hard to establish empirically, it is a widespread belief among enrollment managers that some students shopping for colleges can be swayed by the belief that it will be hard to find romance on a campus if there are proportionately fewer men there. Even those looking for friendship will find fewer males around, increasing the chances of isolation for some students.
Manufacturing, manual labor, and service jobs still tempt a large proportion of high school boys to forego college or even school.
Societal Impacts
Higher education provides the credentials by which individuals differentiate themselves in the workforce. Employability is a concern for social stability; a relatively under-educated male population struggling to find work (or to keep their jobs, as the current recession has demonstrated) can create myriad social problems.
College also has a positive impact on the personal, intellectual, and civic development of individuals. Ensuring that both women and men continue to have full access to this experience is an investment in social cohesion, a way to provide society with citizens who are informed, self-sufficient, engaged in their communities, and well positioned to create equitable, peaceful, and prosperous families. Educational imbalances between partners conversely has the potential to diminish life satisfaction and promote relationship conflict. All told, keeping a balance in college attainment between men and women is a tool of social stability.
Focusing on Masculinities
As I noted above, a broad array of masculinities can enrich the campus environment. Rather than simply looking for any male to fill out a bifurcated enrollment statistic, institutions should consider the kinds of masculinities that can make a campus diverse and representative. Programs to recruit and retain males must consider the campus environment from a broad range of perspectives, including those of various types of men.
Institutions might ask whether gay, bisexual, and transgender students are welcome, safe, and represented in the community and the curriculum. Are the only publicly valued males those who play sports, or does the university laud the accomplishments of men whose pursuits are scholarly or nurturing? Might admissions favor work experience more than grades or volunteering for those youths whose paychecks contribute to their families' survival? If such non-stereotypical males do not see their concerns addressed, will they come and will they stay?
Colleges and universities face a significant challenge in making their campuses places that are safe for varying forms of masculinities, femininities, and sexualities. As Michael Kimmel argues, college has become a site of suspended adolescence for many young men. More young men than we would like spend their college years studying little, lost in large lecture hall classes, drinking heavily, hanging out with friends, watching pornography and sports, and participating in hazing and binge drinking.
While some people and institutions excuse this behavior as “boys being boys” or, worse, promote it as a reason to come to college, we must remember that these activities are repellent to many students considering college—including, as Kimmel shows, many of the minority and working-class students institutions work so hard to recruit—not to mention counterproductive to the success and retention of both those students who participate in these activities and those who don't but are affected by them.
This is not to say that college should be merely a series of study sessions, but many young men come to college unprepared to succeed in a context of new freedoms and higher expectations while also untethered from the social support and guidance they need to resist the bacchanalian aspects of college life. Institutions wishing to retain more male students must confront these challenges head on.
Indeed, attending to the institutional climate can pay off in big ways. As Sax found, the personal effects of college are often more powerful for men than for women. The peer culture influences men's level of academic self-confidence, cultural awareness, political engagement, GPA, self-rated changes in drive to achieve, and critical thinking. Experiences of working with people different from themselves influence men's desire to improve race relations, increase their political engagement, and modify their attitudes about social issues and gender equality.
The inescapable conclusion is that improving men's enrollment, retention, and success in higher education is more complicated than just creating appealing recruiting materials, mentoring programs, sports opportunities, and other incentives driven by stereotypes. The quality of support and diversity on campus are major contributors to men's success, and institutions will see few gains without concerted attention to campus culture.
Looking for Solutions
There is one further piece of bad news in the story of males in higher education: the problems identified are not easily or quickly solved, and not all are ones that institutions can make much progress on by themselves. As for the ones that they do have some control over, each institution must craft solutions based on its own unique needs and constraints. But they do not have to start from scratch in addressing the issue of male underrepresentation and underperformance. There are some promising programs out there that institutions might look to for guidance in developing interventions of their own.
In particular, there are a number of programs to recruit and retain men of color. Numerous institutions and systems around the country have, for instance, made recruiting and retaining African-American males a priority. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, created one of the first in the Meyerhoff Scholarship Program, which is designed to help minority students progress towards advanced degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics. [Editor's note: See the interview of Freeman Hbrowski, president of UMBC and winner of the V.B. Smith Award, in the May/June 2009 issue of Change.] As of 2008, the program had helped hundreds of minority students (male and female) earn advanced degrees in these fields, including 53 PhDs, 21 MD/PhDs, 74 MDs, and 115 master's degrees. The program has met its goals through a generous scholarship endowment, the creation of a summer residential program that prepares incoming students for college life, and deeply engaged mentoring. Importantly, the program also eschews competition and promotes caring—both challenges to traditional masculinity—and it actively seeks the involvement of students' families.
Many young men come to college unprepared to succeed in a context of new freedoms and higher expectations while also untethered from the social support and guidance they need to resist the bacchanalian aspects of college life.
Another initiative, the Call Me MISTER program at Clemson University in South Carolina is designed to bring African-American men into a traditionally female discipline, education. The program provides loan forgiveness and covers other academic expenses for participants, and it supplies a social-support network and mentoring opportunities for the men who participate. Partnering with other institutions around South Carolina (and now in several other states), the program had reportedly put 20 new African-American males into classrooms by 2006, a sizable influx in a state that had had only 200 African-American male teachers. What is more, several hundred other young African-American men are in the pipeline to become classroom teachers across the network.
Programs to reach not only men of color but men more generally are rarer, but the ones that do exist have features that are worth considering. Many men's programs on college campuses work to end sexual violence, and a number of colleges and universities have instituted efforts to improve men's health outcomes through student health clinics. A few other programs are focused on men's gender-based issues. Pierce College, a community college in Washington, runs a men's program that features a student support group for men, a mentorship program, and a lecture series on men's issues.
The University of Oregon also opened the nation's first men's center in 2002 with the goal of addressing the physical, emotional, and social health of men on the campus. The center's programs include a welcoming event for new students that promotes “positive masculinity,” a 5K walk/run event denouncing violence, a five-week curriculum for improving college men's help-seeking skills and emotion management, a program to promote “positive masculinity” in campus fraternities, and training for students in social-services provision to men. Such programs might serve as models for reaching and supporting important groups of men on campus.
In addition to organized programs, here are some other activities that institutions concerned about men might consider:
Disaggregate data on students by gender and further by race/ethnicity and class in order to accurately target groups needing help and to identify the specific problems they are having.
Focus retention strategies on those groups that have special difficulties. Depending on the campus context, this might include men who are gay, working class, transgendered, racial or ethnic minorities, from rural or urban areas, international students, effeminate, older, veterans, disabled, and more. Discover the unique needs of these groups and craft solutions tailored to them.
Create collaborations both with elementary and secondary schools and between community colleges and four-year institutions. The pipeline problem for young men can only be solved by working with the other levels of education and other institutions. School systems, moreover, have been working on boys' issues for many years now, and many solutions created at that level might be replicable in some higher education contexts. Anti-bullying programs, counseling programs exploring the pressures of masculinity, and even curriculum changes to represent diverse masculinities, for instance, are all things colleges and universities could consider.
Work with parents both before and after college entrance so that they can support their sons throughout college and not leave them solely under the influence of negative peer relations. The NSSE has shown that parental involvement in college students' decision-making has positive effects on their levels of engagement. Retention from the freshman to the sophomore year is a particular concern, and parental support can help male students navigate the dramatic academic and social transition that beginning college entails.
Recruit for diverse masculinities by using images and descriptions in recruiting materials that show men engaged in a variety of non-stereotypical activities, and make sure that any programs for men are part of the recruiting materials.
Foster mentoring relationships between male students and both male and female staff and faculty in order to help the students adapt to the social and academic expectations of college.
Encourage young men to find social opportunities that go beyond sports and other stereotypically male activities. These can include community service, artistic events, academic fora, or religious gatherings, among many others.
Recruit and hire administrators, staff, and faculty with diverse masculinities and from a variety of backgrounds. These men can serve as mentors and role models for the array of men on campus.
Look to the curriculum: does it address the masculine experience (beyond just that of military commanders, famous artists and thinkers, and captains of industry)? What courses and programs are offered that appeal to a cross-section of men? How can we teach in ways that encourage men's participation and success?
Some caveats and cautions are in order when considering programs for men, however. First and foremost, their existence must not roll back the gains of girls and women. Indeed, men's initiatives should be formulated to work cooperatively with and complement campus programs for women.
Second, institutions should consider the possibility that no interventions are needed. The frequent media drumbeat about men's problems in higher education can seduce us into thinking that all colleges and universities have problems with their male students, but this isn't necessarily so. Using resources to create men's programming for groups that are already doing well is counterproductive.
Finally, programs for men must expect and plan for resistance from both men and women. For many women, programming targeted to men sounds like giving privileges to those who already have many social, economic, and cultural advantages. Institutions can address some of this resistance by ensuring that they have well-resourced services for women before starting men's programs.
At the same time, many men may be leery of programs that “pathologize” men as violent or in need of “fixing.” Others may be wary of therapeutic programs that emphasize emotional disclosure. Still others may have fears that peers will think them weak or gay for being part of a men's organization. In creating programs for men, it behooves us to be sensitive to the existing socialization and development of men in order to identify and counteract such resistance.
In the end, any initiatives to improve the success of men in college need to be long-term, and they are likely to have uneven results. And each institution—with its particular context, history, population, and resources—must look for solutions that will work for it and for the particular men it enrolls. Each institution must consider carefully and cautiously whether they should be concerned about the men they serve, which are the ones in need, and how they can serve them better—all without rolling back important gains for women and girls.
Data Sources
1. Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System , http://nces.ed.gov/das/library/tables_listings/showTable2005.asp?popup=true&tableID=3786&rt=p
2. National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) (2009) , http://nsse.iub.edu/2009_Institutional_Report/pdf/2009%20Grand%20Means%20Class%20and%20Gender.pdf
3. US Army Recruiting Command , http://www.usarec.army.mil/hq/apa/goals.htm
4. Bureau of Justice Statistics , http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=132
Resources
4. American Council on Education. (2006) Gender equity in higher education: 2006, American Council on Education, Washington, D.C..
4. Connell, R. W. (2005) Masculinities, 2nd ed., University of California Press, Berkeley.
4. Cuyjet, M. J. (ed) (2006) African American men in college, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. associates
4. Kellom, G. E. (ed) (2004) Developing effective programs and services for college men [Special issue], New Directions for Student Services(no. 107)
4. Kimmel, M. S. (2008) Guyland: The perilous world where boys become men, Harper, New York.
4. Sax, L. J. (2008) The gender gap in college: Maximizing the developmental potential of women and men, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower is an associate professor at the University of North Dakota. He is the author of The Politics of Policy in Boys' Education: Getting Boys “Right” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and co-editor, with Wayne Martino and Michael Kehler, of The Problem with Boys' Education: Beyond the Backlash (Routledge, 2009).
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