The pandemic is speeding up the mass exodus of men from college

&gt;&quot;His male classmates “don’t think they’re smart enough” for college, Adon says. “They doubt themselves a little bit because of their life and what they’ve been through and what they’ve been seen as.”<p>That part of it is sad. Lots of guys haven&#x27;t really had a shot at finding out what they&#x27;re capable until life shows them otherwise. My bro-in-law was like that. Graduated from a crappy, unchallenging high-school in the sticks.<p>He was about 30, and a highly-skilled mechanic with several kids, when he decided to give it a shot. Spent about a half-year at a community college doing remedial math and writing, then applied at a University. Four years later he was handed a degree in chemistry, <i>with honors</i>. As he would say, &quot;Not too shabby.&quot;

To summarize the article, women are now 50% more likely to enroll in college than men. For those interested in the longer term trends, here is a pew report on the subject up to 2010 [1]<p>The post article brings up the point of financial expectations, but I wonder what other factors could might be changing for young men. Alternatively, what factors ARE changing for women, and are not changing for men, specifically minority men.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;3&#x2F;2011&#x2F;08&#x2F;Gender-and-higher-ed-FNL-RPT.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;3&#x2F;2011&#x2F;...</a>

&gt; While enrollment in higher education overall fell 2.5 percent in the fall, or by more than 461,000 students compared to the fall of 2019, the decline among men was more than seven times as steep as the decline among women, according to an analysis of figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.<p>7x is a big multiple. The article offers some explanations but not enough to get me past the “wow” response. The bigger picture is just that the 60&#x2F;40 split between college educations has flipped to favour women now, and was the opposite a decade ago, but the short term 7x is still crazy

This is not a surprising outcome. Most institutions are trying to increase the % of women, not create a parity between genders.

Why would you want to go to college, have huge debt and learn things (CS) that&#x27;s avaliable on the internet for free? even courses from an actual edu institutions like mit, stanford and so on<p>The only thing I think is knowning people from the industry and seeing what cool stuff other people do, but otherwise?<p>I just graduated with engineering degree that I&#x27;ve done on weekends while working full time as SE and I&#x27;d never want to go on normal schelude (where I attend college on work days instead of 4days&#x2F;month) because it&#x27;d be straight up waste of the time, but when they&#x27;d additionally require me to pay tens of thousands of usd for this, then holy shit.<p>The difference would be when it would be top country CS like top1, top2, top3, top(1+some), but below that?<p>What&#x27;s the point of paying mad cash for basics of CS? just for the title? just for the diploma?<p>I don&#x27;t believe that not obtaining higher edu is a good choice, but there&#x27;s so many things that sounds poor about it.

I think there is a big open space for a new kind of institution for higher learning: Shorter, more focused careers, no SJW bullshit, no expensive administrators overhead, partially or completely online, open to a worldwide population. I am aware things like CC and technical schools exists but there is a probably undeserved stigma that they are &#x27;inferior&#x27;, we need this as a solid,widely respected alternative.

Isn&#x27;t this a <i>good</i> thing, since it&#x27;s correcting for an historical inequity?

With the combination of increasing economic equality between the sexes (young women actually earn more nowadays) and women’s rising expectations from online dating attention, I think it’s clear that we’re heading rapidly towards the normalization of polygamy. There’s just no incentive for women to ever “settle” anymore. I fear that this is going to end in civil unrest when so many young men are economically insecure and have no family of their own to give them ties to the local community.