There's been a flurry of recent articles on the declining share of men enrolled in colleges and universities.
The Wall Street Journal's A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’ seems to have started the flurry. Key quote:
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
Quickly following were stories from The Atlantic, New York Times, USA Today and others on the same topic.
As the Bloomberg chart below shows, the college gender gap has been in place for several decades.
The gap also widened in 2020, with the pandemic-induced decline in college enrollments hitting men a bit harder than women.
So men struggling academically relative to women is not a new trend. And it generated a lot of attention a decade ago.
The 2010 Atlantic article The End of Men, released as a book in 2012, focused on the academic underperformance of men relative to women.
This article and book also covered other issues faced by men and boys.
These include higher rates of incarceration, addiction, suicide and mental illness than are experienced by women.
We covered these and other issues men face in our 2010 article on the end of men.
This sudden media interest in this topic illustrates an interesting aspect of trends - they can lie low or disappear for years and then suddenly reappear.
In this case, the renewed interest is certainly justified. The problems men and boys face have, if anything, increased over the past decade.
