Previously on HN, with some discussion spread across four posts over the past year:<p><i>Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?</i> <a href="https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college" rel="nofollow">https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col...</a><p>> <i>What has changed is an increase in girls. When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college. We’re just not talking about it.</i><p>> <i>For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.</i><p>> <i>“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”</i><p>Whatever other factors may exist, college is now at or past the 60% women threshold, so of course men are quitting college. We can expect — to such a degree of certainty, given historical U.S. data that we could place a safe bet on a market about it — that college will be 80% women and in perhaps ten years or less.<p>It’s cute that Bloomberg is focusing on all the rationalizations that men are coming up with for this — at least some of them have the courage to say that it’s just the “vibes”. A little self-awareness would go a long way towards understanding, but Bloomberg doesn’t go there. Honestly, they should be assessing gender trends at trade schools over the past twenty years and see if those are at risk of becoming incompatible with U.S. masculinity next. What would it do to their president’s domestic manufacturing dreams if men refused to attend trade schools?
My son earned a business management degree and had a hard time finding a job. He had to work in a movie theatre as an assistant manager that didn't pay too well. He went to trade school and earned a CDL (Commercial Driver's License) for $5000 and now drives a truck for decent money.<p>A college degree can be expensive, and it does not guarantee a job, plus you have a huge student loan to pay off. That is why American Men think it is not worth it to go to college anymore.
A college degree is much more expensive than it was decades ago. The cost of higher education has increased well beyond inflation for a very long time.<p>Nowadays, anyone with only moderate skills/qualifications can obtain a college degree --- the primary requirement is money/debt.<p>Consequently, the marketplace has been flooded with degrees of questionable substance and value.<p>Lots of people know a degree holder working a job that doesn't require a degree (like truck driver or retail manager) while being saddled with college debt.
It’s not fashionable. There’s a growing fixation on keeping up appearances of masculinity and it’s become a common identity. Education and mental health seem to be largely getting thrown out as non-masculine.
I don't want to sound too cynical but from European perspective I'd say just remove the horrendous costs of college and university by regulazing and subsidizing education. It's not communism even if many Americans would think so. But in order to get anywhere near there you'd probably have to start with replacing that orange toad and his minions with something else, anything really would do at this point