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Why Are So Many Young Men Giving Up on College?

84 点作者 edtechdev超过 3 年前

35 条评论

dang超过 3 年前
The article that this article reports on was discussed here:<p><i>A generation of American men give up on college</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28436836" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28436836</a> - Sept 2021 (776 comments)
lordgroff超过 3 年前
I have no idea what the situation is like in the United States, but in Canada, this &quot;abandoning&quot; (ahem) is a direct function of eroding performance of boys that starts right in elementary school and continues right through high school. This leads to obviously fewer male university students. The trend is clear and has been going on for two decades.<p>Pointing this out, especially in terms of arguing that targeted interventions for boys may be in order or that the education system in some way may be suboptimal for them, is an absolute political no go zone though. It&#x27;s not a discussion that can currently be had.
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NikolaNovak超过 3 年前
My take:<p>First, depends on definition of &quot;College&quot; and &quot;University&quot; that differs from country to country.<p>But overall, value of University education to improve your employability and skillset I think is being questioned by both employers and employees.<p>1. Some &quot;Blue Collar&quot; skills may withstand the test of automation better than many &quot;White Collar&quot; skills - e.g. I anticipate needing an electrician, contractor, plumber for the next few decades; but hopefully accountant, lawyer, travel agent etc less and less.<p>2. For &quot;White Collar&quot; skills, well... I went to ComSci university and it&#x27;s not that it brought <i>no</i> value - but given the time, money, effort and commitment, it was very <i>very low value proposition</i>. I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually <i>learning</i>. (note I wasn&#x27;t the one going to university for some &quot;Party &#x2F; Social Experience&quot; - I found many better, more flexible methods than that:).<p>Not going to university is not necessarily the same thing as not wanting to learn and educate and acquire skills. And there is a whole spectrum today between free online education (random Youtube videos, manuals, free university courses etc), bootcamps, practically oriented post-secondary education, and then university.<p>Bottom line: I have two young kids, I want them to succeed, and I want them to be educated - and I don&#x27;t know if traditional university is something I will encourage them to consider 10 years from now.<p>I honestly don&#x27;t know however how that translates into a gender gap discussed in the article though; and article doesn&#x27;t really provide a satisfying answer either :-&#x2F;
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wikidani超过 3 年前
I believe that in the western world, specially in the countries that have free (or subsidized) universities there has been a lot of societal pressure that makes young people <i>want</i> to go to college but no idea <i>why</i> or <i>for what</i>. Now, one of the smartest decisions I made was going for the sort of equivalent of a trade school in my country, it&#x27;s not a replacement of college but an alternative for what I believe americans call High School, so three years from fifteen to eighteen years old and I truly believe that the rest of the world would benefit massively from such a concept. I also believe we should stop viewing the preparation for university as universal and provide young people with a trade from the beginning.<p>(edit) thanks martzy13 for your comment about vocational schools, I didn&#x27;t know about them
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gred超过 3 年前
It&#x27;s interesting to consider whether we are entering a period of time in which young men will &quot;fail&quot; at a higher rate than young women, but we will maintain early-age support structures that prioritize women over men because men continue to dominate in late-age power structures.
motohagiography超过 3 年前
Simply they do not desire to become like the people they see in it, or the ones they see graduating.<p>&gt; <i>“That’s why we need both parties to offer a positive vision of college and a positive vision of masculinity. If male identity is seen, by some, as being at odds with education, that’s a problem for the whole country.”</i><p>The question should be, how did college repel young men? That&#x27;s pretty obvious in the last decade and 90% of it barely merits an article.<p>However, the conseqeunce is likely a milennial middle class baby bust that is just building momentum as this cohort of women who graduated into professional careers ages out of child bearing years and the scramble for donors intensifies. Men who don&#x27;t graduate are in effect mostly ineligible as partners for women who do, then other factors like poor fitness levels, choice paralysis, unsecured debt, housing bubbles, and lately a virus of political polarization are reducing the likelihood of durable matches for all involved.<p>I&#x27;d be less concerned with maintaining retroactive continuity on the college narrative and asking what is to be done, and instead, being prepared for handling the consequent bust this dynamic has set us all up for.
thatjoeoverthr超过 3 年前
We have a student debt crisis. This means, categorically, many degrees proper are bad investments. To pass on a bad investment is smart. There exist good degrees but not everyone is fit for them. We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices.<p>I speak not of education or the humanities in abstract but rather the degree proper; the piece of paper. An expensive document should be understood as a certification with concrete numerical price that can be compared to its effect on your earnings.<p>My advice to my daughter, who is working actively to become an artist, is very clear; stay far from college.
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imbnwa超过 3 年前
Summary of the points therein:<p>* Men accounted for 70% of the 1.5m decline in college enrollment last year * Women have outpaced men in bachelor attainment since the 80s<p>* Women have been told to get college degrees in order to secure independence and freedom for decades<p>* Men were 57% of college enrolled students in 1970 but since Title XI passed barring gender discrimination, the rates have been getting more lopsided for women<p>* Girls outperform boys generally in high school and elementary long before college<p>* Blaming &quot;the feminist dogma of the education system and the inherently distracting presence of girls in classrooms&quot; is dubious<p>* A better explanation is that up to the 1970s, men could secure middle-class wages on blue-collar work, but afterwards, that labor demand dried up and these types of men are adrift, and marry less since they also don&#x27;t attend church anymore, and so live &#x27;haphazard&#x27; lives detached from traditional responsibilities<p>* This has the effect that young boys don&#x27;t have stable male role models, as men are more likely to be incarcerated, and aren&#x27;t present enough in early schooling as teachers or as fathers in low-income areas<p>* The college gender gap is also occuring in &quot;France, Slovenia, Mexico, and Brazil&quot;.<p>* Perhaps a blend of biological and cultural differences are at play<p>* This will have broad implications for marriage rates, delayed marriage, delayed childbirth<p>* This may have the cultural implication that education be seen as a identified with effeminacy, barring more men still<p>* &quot;The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades.” This gender gap is an economic story, a cultural story, a criminal-justice story, and a family-structure story that begins to unfold in elementary school. The attention-grabbing statistic that barely 40 percent of college grads are men seems to cry out for an immediate policy response. But rather than dial up male attendance one college-admissions department at a time, policy makers should think about the social forces that make the statistic inevitable.&quot;
RappingBoomer超过 3 年前
I would say that there may be more opportunities in the blue collar world, as opposed to the white collar professional world, at least for the demographic that is &quot;abandoning&quot; college
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trynumber9超过 3 年前
&gt;Men are also less likely to be fixtures of boys’ elementary-school experience; about 75 percent of public-school teachers are female.<p>&gt;The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades.<p>I&#x27;m not saying this is <i>the</i> cause, but it may contribute to poor schooling results of some boys. I really didn&#x27;t do well in school until in the 5th grade when I had a male teacher who I saw as something of a role model.
scohesc超过 3 年前
Colleges and Universities have been used as research churns, using professors, graduates and undergraduates to further influence research through a combination of tuition, good-will, and the promise of a paper after 4 years of hard work that says you can do what you spend 4 years doing. Combined with the ever-increasing costs of college education with ever-decreasing return on investment (have fun getting a job involving the gender studies doctorate (or any other vague, wishywashy, non-practical education) you got that&#x27;s functionally useless)<p>You can get the exact same level of education online for 90% of the courses that universities offer. Trades are a different story when there&#x27;s practical skills to learn however but is the exception to the norm.<p>Why would men spend the time going to college if it&#x27;s been ensured that they&#x27;re going to be in debt for the rest of their life due to the inflated ego of these institutions, thinking they can charge so much for degrees that really have no practical value. But then again, why blame the institution if there&#x27;s thousands of people still lining up willingly?
ngngngng超过 3 年前
I&#x27;m surrounded by this, and I can&#x27;t help but feel like I&#x27;m part of the cause for people I&#x27;m close to. About the time I was beginning my CS degree I got a job doing tech support at a web hosting company. Within one semester the skills I&#x27;d gained on the job had far outpaced my university classes as far as providing me with real world problem solving abilities. Debugging shared webhosting servers was a far better learning exercise than writing sudoku solvers.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s not true at other universities, but at the two universities I attended it takes literal years for the majority of students to understand how to take the skills they&#x27;re learning in a CS degree and solve real world problems. So, I dropped out. And you all know the story, now I write code and makes lots of money, woohoo. Now my father and father in law, both highly educated and financially successful people, look at me and wonder why they did so much schooling and worked so hard when uneducated programmers are making more than they made in their whole career. They&#x27;re vocally questioning the value of higher education to people around them.<p>Where it gets messy though is that I have family members and friends that have completely or partially used my situation as justification to ditch education, and none of them have gone anywhere as of yet. I&#x27;ve tried to teach some of them programming but I&#x27;ve given up on that, because the motivation and drive they need to teach themselves is the primary determining factor of their success (in my opinion), and I can&#x27;t change that. I know I&#x27;m far from special in this community of overachievers, but whatever it took for me to get myself in this position isn&#x27;t exactly common among the general populace, and it took me years of watching my friends and family members trying to mimic my path to appreciate that. So now I just tell them to go to college.
onionisafruit超过 3 年前
&gt; “Historically, men have been more likely to drop out of school to work in hot economies, whether it’s in the factories of World War II or the fracking mines of the Dakotas,”<p>In WWII were men really dropping out of school to work in factories or were they dropping out to join the military? I thought that American factories during WWII were largely staffed by women and men who weren’t eligible to fight.<p>Also, I don’t think that guy knows what fracking is.
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endisneigh超过 3 年前
School, and education and general have become too fixated on selection bias.<p>Employers don’t train and schools don’t ensure people have necessary skills. Neither institution has any skin in the game.<p>Furthermore things are becoming more zero-sum with respect to employment opportunities.
decasteve超过 3 年前
The absence of physical labour, of meaningful work, and learning to work with your hands, are aspects of childhood development completely abandoned over the past half-century. Kids are now confined in comparison, where primarily-seated quiet busywork and one-way non-socratic lecture is the norm, where anxiety and depression are afflicting over one third of all children, it seems absurd to me we keep doubling down on this educational direction.
adolph超过 3 年前
Previously on HN:<p>A generation of American men give up on college (wsj.com): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28436836" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28436836</a><p>Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment. Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work (nytimes.com): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28472274" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28472274</a>
djoldman超过 3 年前
The article touches on a lot of issues but one I find interesting is: why does it matter?<p>It provides the following answers, which seem weak to me:<p><pre><code> 1. &quot;[historian and economics professor at Harvard]: &#x27;I worry they’ll come to severely regret their choice if they realize the best jobs require a degree they never got.&#x27;&quot; 2. &quot;...further delays in marriage and childbirth may ensue. That would further reduce U.S. fertility rates, which worries some commentators, albeit not all.&quot; 3. &quot;The most severe implications, I suspect, will be cultural and political. The U.S. electorate is already polarized .... Those divisions seem likely to worsen&quot; </code></pre> I&#x27;m not sure this is convincing. It seems to boil down to a historian worrying, fertility rate changes that some people may view badly, and a possibility of increased political polarization... meh?
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mschuster91超过 3 年前
&gt; The few neighborhoods where Black and white boys grew up to have similar adult outcomes were low-poverty areas that also had high levels of “father presence.”<p>Call me surprised. That&#x27;s the result of racist drug policies <i>intended</i> to go specifically after Black men (and hippies): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;23&#x2F;politics&#x2F;john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;23&#x2F;politics&#x2F;john-ehrlichman-...</a><p>The biggest problem - and one that the author conveniently and completely ignores - is that the US justice and incarceration system is set up for biblical an-eye-for-an-eye revenge with ludicrous sentencing (&quot;three strikes&quot;, <i>decades</i> for nonviolent drug offenses, people getting summarily executed by police <i>regularly</i>, ...) and not, like in Europe, for real, <i>measurable</i> rehabilitation.<p>Also, people in the US receive no education during their prison stay that helps them to gain useful employment after their release, they start with significant debts from the prison system and often enough from loan sharks, there is no meaningful assistance system to help them gain housing and jobs after being released, and forget about physical and mental healthcare - often, people will leave prison in a way worse state than when they entered: malnourishment, denial of healthcare, trauma from assaults both by fellow inmates and officers...<p>And finally: When employers and even landlords are allowed to do routine comprehensive background checks and everything about a person&#x27;s history is up for a google grab &quot;thanks&quot; to public record laws, it is no surprise that arrests for low level shit like petty theft or smoking weed sets up people for <i>a life</i> in poverty.<p>I&#x27;ve said it before and I&#x27;ll keep saying it: if the US wants to fix their society, the process has to <i>start</i> with their attitude towards criminals, criminality and healthcare.
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eNTi超过 3 年前
Write states that he dismisses feminism as a culprit... and goes on to describe how feminist talking points are the most likely reason...<p>It&#x27;s cognitive dissonance all the way down.
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VLM超过 3 年前
Outcomes don&#x27;t matter as much as expectations WRT planning and higher ed is all about planning far in the future. There&#x27;s no &quot;just in time&quot; higher education economic model LOL.<p>In my state, where $20&#x2F;hr buys you a pretty nice lifestyle, union building trades ALL pay $30 to low forties per hour and are essentially sausagefests WRT being &quot;boys future jobs&quot; and these jobs pay you around half pay to learn as an apprentice for a couple years, and require absolutely no college or student loans. A &quot;journeyman&quot; experience level &quot;girls future jobs&quot; such as day care worker, which is 99% female employment, pays $13.64&#x2F;hr average in my state at that experience level and absolutely requires either a K12 ed degree (we produce twice as many degree holders as we have jobs, so optimistically the &quot;bottom half&quot; of degreed teachers end up as bartenders, day care, real estate saleswomen, etc). There is an associates degree program in early childhood education at my local tech school so young women can pay about $10K plus room and board and food, to eventually get a job that might eventually pay as much as $25K&#x2F;year.<p>Like I wrote, most kids plans fall apart upon contact with reality much like the famous military aphorism about military plans not surviving contact with the enemy. However, the situation boils down to boys &quot;know&quot; they can get a great high paying career in the manly manual labor fields without a degree, whereas women &quot;know&quot; they need a degree and immense levels of debt to make less than McDonalds is willing to pay them, although at least their job is to literally hug babies all day. Maybe half the boys can&#x27;t actually work construction due to drug use or weakness or just plain old laziness, but when they were planning they &quot;knew&quot; they could get those jobs. Whereas women know that even to change diapers for less than fast food pay, they &quot;knew&quot; they need a degree to compete.<p>The real story is very low paying, very low functioning jobs defined as &quot;for women&quot;, require degrees and the supply&#x2F;demand curve is such that they get away with it and the women hired will show up with expensive degrees and lifetime debt. Men&#x27;s jobs that don&#x27;t require degrees do not get away with demanding degrees.
oh_sigh超过 3 年前
The title gives you one impression, but in the article you find that college attendance for men is higher than it was 10 years ago - it is just that attendance for women has grown even more.
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falcolas超过 3 年前
One thought: If you&#x27;re a male, not an athlete, and not an academic star, you&#x27;re going to be on the hook for your entire college costs. You&#x27;ll be eligible for few (if any) scholarships, low-interest loans, grants, etc.<p>No idea if there&#x27;s actual causation there, but given the high cost of college (compared to previous generations), it&#x27;s certainly a consideration.
gjhh244超过 3 年前
It&#x27;s not just US thing, similar widening gender gap can be seen also here in Finland (probably rest of Europe as well), despite us having free education.<p>As far as I can see, many master&#x27;s degrees are not worth today it even if you pay no tuition fees. Many blue-collar jobs like plumbing pay better nowadays than your average humanities, social sciences etc job, with equal or better job security and only 3 years of studying instead of 8. So, avoiding higher education can be the rational choice.<p>In addition, there are major flaws in how students are handled nowadays. Teachers simply have no authority to punish bad behavior, and it seems restless boys suffer the most from this in educational outcomes. The system is increasingly designed only for kids who enjoy school and perform well even without supervision.<p>Personally I had no trouble with school, but I&#x27;m still not convinced that CS degree was the right choice instead of plumbing or something similar. The job market sucks for everyone except senior software devs.
Factorium超过 3 年前
You can make a better living as a tradesperson:<p>1. Start earning money right away as an apprentice. No massive student debt.<p>2. Live outside of high-COL cities.<p>3. Skills valuable everywhere, instead of specific industries (eg. finance jobs only in certain cities).<p>4. Optimise&#x2F;minimise your own taxes.<p>5. Housing is our single biggest expense in life, so build it yourself and save.<p>6. Easy to hire employees and start a medium-sized business if you want.<p>Maybe men are just &#x27;smarter&#x27; and have realised this?
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notjes超过 3 年前
The Bell Curve dictates that only about 15% of humans should go through higher education. But our society decided force everybody into HE with various &quot;incentives&quot;. And now everything is distorted. Young men know this is all bullshit, so they drop out. Young women don&#x27;t drop out. They stay and consume Xanax, Prosac and are financed by sugar daddies and&#x2F;or only fans.
Jensson超过 3 年前
It is simple. Girls outperform boys in every subject up until high school. This isn&#x27;t seen a problem, boys are just lazy. But in high school boys starts to outperform girls in math. This is treated as a huge problem and lots of resources has been spent and girls only programs has been created to try to get girls to outperform boys in high school maths as well.<p>Do people really think that this doesn&#x27;t affect boys view of the education system? They see this, take the hint that they aren&#x27;t welcome and go do other things in life instead.<p>And the worst thing is that getting boys to learn more in school is trivial. Instead of a mostly female curriculum why not focus on reading action books, learning about the inner workings of bombs and guns, looking at how a car engine works and similar? Put that in the curriculum and you will have the boys attention and they will learn lots of chemistry, physics, reading etc. But that will never happen as long as women are designing the curriculum.<p>Edit: Clarified the second sentence so it doesn&#x27;t look like I actually believe boys are lazy.
sys_64738超过 3 年前
Maybe it&#x27;s also the garbage you need to do to get in like all those extracurricular activities which are pure bogus crap. In the old days you could get in by your high school qualifications alone. Now you can&#x27;t tell two students apart due to grade inflation.
martythemaniak超过 3 年前
There is a large online network of communities that have dedicated themselves to making outcasts out of boys for their own ends. Sometimes it&#x27;s for clear ends (like Bannon&#x27;s work on Gamergate) and sometimes it&#x27;s an intuitive growth instinct. Places like ZH need attention and they&#x27;re not going to get it if boys grow up to go college. They need them angry, cynical and isolated.<p>I think HN is one outpost of this network. Imagine a 12-16 year old happening upon HN and becoming a regular. Do you see this person coming away with a positive view of higher education and being encouraged to pursue it? Or are they more likely to develop a cynical, contrarian view?
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beervirus超过 3 年前
Maybe they&#x27;re just doing the ROI math and deciding it isn&#x27;t worth it.
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slowhand09超过 3 年前
Expect to get flagged for this. Skimmed Youtube titles for Jordan Peterson.<p>Jordan Peterson - Why Men Are Bailing Out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LH16ympCb7Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LH16ympCb7Q</a>
OneEyedRobot超过 3 年前
Perhaps college abandoned them.
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OneEyedRobot超过 3 年前
I wonder if it wouldn&#x27;t help if colleges&#x2F;universities fissioned into more specialized institutions. By building gigantic clumps of education a single approach or philosophy drives too much of the bus.<p>A sample set of new schools.<p>. Work oriented, basically four year versions of junior college. Teaches EE, nursing, CSc, accounting, etc. Higher quality (and cheaper) than current for-profit versions.<p>. Research institutions. STEM masters and up.<p>. &#x27;Soft&#x27; disciplines. Not just history, cultural anthropology, and the like but also the newfangled xxx studies, diversity equity stuff, etc.<p>. Traditional old school &#x27;classical&#x27; college. Essentially the classwork from Harvard in 1900. You don&#x27;t need too many of these.<p>. Highly specialized schools like Berklee although there was a time when music was learned the old-fashioned way, at bordellos.<p>What we probably don&#x27;t need is a world where most of the state-funded institutions are huge lumbering megaschools.
eplanit超过 3 年前
Maybe it&#x27;s the result of telling 2+ generations of boys that &quot;males&quot;, especially &quot;white males&quot; (predominant in Canada) are the root of all problems in society and the world, coupled with ever-present emphasis and promotion of girls (most recently manifested in Trudeau&#x27;s absurd references to &quot;she-cession&quot; and &quot;she-covery&quot;).
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droopyEyelids超过 3 年前
The framing on this makes your head spin... &quot;Abandoning college&quot;<p>Hard to imagine that language being used with other demographics.
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redleggedfrog超过 3 年前
I literally could not get past the 6 to 4 ratio used in the first sentence. Why would you not use 3 to 2? Made me suspect that the rest of the article was similarly ill considered and I moved on.
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