The male college issue

Lots of confusion this week

This past week I saw a bit of a buzz about males in college. It started with a link on Marginal Revolutions asking the question, Why are fewer men going to college? (10/11/2024) The link was to an article: Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (10/6/2024) This is worth reading from the Substack Matriarchal Blessing. Notice right away that the two questions aren’t exactly the same. Going to college isn’t the same as college enrollment. In comes Drum with his post: Men are still going to college. (10/11/2024) Drum provides data showing that the percentage of males enrolling in college hasn’t changed.

Noahpinion then picks up on this in his five interesting things post. (10/13/2024) He notes that he is skeptical of the Matriarchal Blessing explanation: “Her theory is that men are avoiding college in order to avoid women.” He then notes:

I’m incredibly skeptical of this theory, for two reasons. First, although there have been some recent small ups and downs, most of the shift to more women going to college actually happened long ago:

The goal here is to try and shed some light on all the data statistics and clarify what is true and what is ignored, while being much more careful with language. Let’s go to the data.

Entering College

I’ll start with Drum’s assertion that the rate of men going to college hasn’t changed. Figure 1 is the same data as in his post. He added the black regression line for men for the time period 1994 to 2022. The slope is 0, and he is correct in saying that over the last 30 years the percentage of men going to a 4-year college has been the same.

Figure 1. Data from NCES. The percentage of men and women, respectively, that go to a 4-year college after high school.

I added the regression line for women from 1994 to 2022. The slope is 0.16, meaning that the percentage of women going to a 4-year college has been increasing by 0.16 percentage points a year, or 1.6 points over 10 years.

Yes, male 4-year college going rates have been stable, meaning we don’t have fewer men, as a percentage, not going to 4-year colleges. But we can’t simply ignore the difference here. The question here really should be why men aren’t going to college at the same increasing rate as women, remaining stagnant while women’s rates have been increasing. The effect here is certainly that the college campus is going to be majority female, assuming roughly the same numbers going to college. What does campus look like?

In College

Figure 2 is undegraduate enrolment full or part time at 2 or 4 year colleges. Women became the majority on campus in 1980, and the spread increased until 2005. Is 2005 long ago? I suppose but notice the spread started increasing again in 2017. Focusing on percentage hides some information, though.

Figure 2. Data from NCES.

Figure 3 is undegraduate enrollment, both full and part time. Enrollment has been dropping since 2010. I added regression lines from 2010 to 2021 to point out that the decline has been faster for men than women, with on average 20,000 fewer men than women per year. I’m counting everyone here, both full-time and part-time students, and not just favoring full-time students at 4-year colleges. The differences between men and women are ongoing and didn’t just happen a long time ago.

Figure 3. Data from NCES.

To complete the picture a bit, I separated out full-time and part-time students in Figures 4 and 5. The part-time differences are bigger between men and women than full-time. What about outcomes?

Figure 4. Data from NCES.

Graduating College

Going to college can help, but not graduating often leaves a student in debt and with no better job prospects. Figure 6 is the percentage of men and women graduating with a 4-year degree. The differences separated from 1980 to 2000 and remained about the same. One would think that the gap here, 57% vs 43%, would be concern enough but it has received little attention. Worse, the gap started growing around 2015, slowly at first, to where it is now. Some of this is due to enrollment rates out of high school, but some must also be due to not completing college.

Figure 6. Data from NCES

Conclusions

There are disparities between men and women in terms of both attending college and completing college. The fact that women attend college at increasingly higher rates than men is a reasonable concern, even though men’s rates have been stable. Asking, Why are fewer men going to college? is simply a poorly asked question. Drum is correct in that fewer men aren’t going to college, but I think misses the real point.

Noahpinion is largely correct in that the growth in disparities happened largely before 2005, but he overstates his case when he says

Women have been more common at college for four decades. And yet for those four decades the gender ratio was stable, with no mass exodus of men. That immediately throws cold water on Celeste Davis’ theory that men run away from college once it becomes female-coded.

The graph he shows does have an increasing difference for the last five years, although it ends in 2019, and so he misses some of the changes after that that we see here. Finally, he says this

The other reason I’m highly skeptical of Davis’ theory is that if there’s one thing 18-year-old guys tend to want, it’s to be around girls. Young Americans may be having less sex these days, but I find it hard to believe that the basic motivations of young men have been reversed to that great a degree.

His link here has data for 18-30 year olds with a meaningful decline in no sex, but it may or may not reflect the habits of traditional college-age students, and I’ll simply say that “I find it hard to believe” isn’t exactly convincing. He dismisses Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing with very little evidence and ignores a number of other points made in the article. The article overstates the male flight from college, but if we take it more as men not increasingly going to college as women, then we, or really Matriarchal Blessing, has a stronger case. Meanwhile the flight from certain disciplines is real (I’ll have to find good data on this). The post is worth reading, and the notion of a tipping point as noted with this quote shouldn’t be ignored.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

The article provides examples of this occurring in many disciplines such as biology, teaching, nursing, cheerleading, social work, architecture, gymnastics, library sciences, and psychology.

In the end, I don’t favor singular reasons as explanations, but Celeste Davis makes a worthwhile point that could certainly be part of, if not all of, the explanation of the lack of males in college.

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Please point out if you think something was expressed wrongly or misinterpreted. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. We should all be forced to express our opinions and change our minds, but we should also know how to respectfully disagree and move on. Send me article ideas, feedback, or other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.

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I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD Math: Stochastic Processes, MS Applied Statistics, MS Math, BS Math, BS Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks R for College Mathematics and Statistics and Applied Calculus with R. I welcome any collaborations.