How the Education System Leaves Boys Behind

This week we are sponsored by Cannabis Life. If you’re looking for excellent CBD products for wellness etc. then Cannabis life is just about perfect. They offer a wide range of non-vaping CBD products for everything from sleep to pain. CBD won’t get you high but it can relieve a variety of aches, pains, and is wonderful for sleep. Try out Cannabis Life!

The Wall Street Journal recently posted a viral article about how young men of today are giving up on college. This sparked quite a discussion around the internet and on social media about why young men are falling behind in education and why college campuses are increasingly dominated by women (59.9% last fall).

School is for Girls!

I’ve maintained for quite sometime that the source of this problem is that the K-12 education system is calibrated for the success of women. One former teacher in the WSJ facebook comment section took umbrage at what I said after she herself mentioned that girls in her classes were easier to deal with, easier to teach, and more serious than boys. She didn’t like me saying it out loud, but then promptly proved my point.

This Financial Times article puts it right on the nose, “And whereas most workplaces remain male-friendly environments, schools may be more girl-friendly. Girls tend to be more self-disciplined (perhaps because of how they are socialized), and good at sitting and listening, something many small boys find hard, says Francesca Borgonovi, senior analyst at the OECD. “Boys are too often seen as deficient girls,” says Gijsbert Stoet, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University.”

Tracking with what I found in my deep dive into education in my book, “What The Hell is Going on?” the problems with education are not just about teachers, schools, funding, or even parents. There are societal factors as well. The Heching Report said via Luis Ponjuan, associate professor of higher education administration, Texas A&M University, “We have a lot of young men who are completely disengaged from our society because quite frankly they don’t feel they’re being valued as men. So, they think, why even try when everybody sees me as a thug, as a delinquent, when everyone assumes the worst of me instead of assuming the best of me?”

Pile on top of that the Heching Report also found that many young men were eager to help support their families, if the came from a disadvantaged background, and that they viewed getting a paycheck early on and getting on the path to self-sufficiency to be a better deal than spending 4 years in college and taking on student loans. Ponjuan went on to say, “Despite the allure of a paycheck versus going into debt and spending years pursuing a degree, the reality is that “a lot of these young men at 17 or 18 years old end up working 12-hour shifts, getting married, buy a truck, get a mortgage, and by the time they’re 30, their bodies are broken,” Ponjuan said. “And now they have a mortgage, three kids to feed and that truck, and no idea what to do next.”

Long-Term Impacts

Obviously, this has long-term impacts. Men not being interested in education is a huge problem for the dating market. According to a recent email blast from Scott Galloway who realizes the problems with school-leaving boys behind stated that “between 1970 and 2011 the marriage rate for the lowest earning quartile fell by nearly 35% while that of the highest fell by only 15%. A college degree increases your chances of getting married by 30%.” The result of fewer men in college is that there are fewer men for women to date. Women tend not to date economically downward. While men will date horizontally and down, women tend to date horizontally and upwards.

This has social consequences. Men at the top of the dating pyramid have easy access to sexual partners and little incentive to settle down with one mate, while men at the bottom aren’t even getting scraps from the table. For once, Scott Galloway and I agree on something. I predict a long winter as a result.

Either way, a large group of unmarried men with no access to dating and relationships will have some rather unpleasant consequences on society. Violence is likely to increase over time, and this violence can have dire consequences when you add social media into the mix. It’s a bad deal for both women and men.

Admittedly, I don’t see college as necessarily being the solution to this problem. I will address how to fix the male admission to college problem, but the reality is that my generation is the most educated in American history and still only 30% of the popular has a Bachelor’s degree. Our economy is creating jobs for educated people and not creating jobs for those who aren’t going to college. Some might say there is no problem with this, but I disagree. We need to fix high school and give students valuable skills they can take with them into the world and begin working if they so choose. This is the first way to resolve the problem. The second way is to diversify the economy and expand opportunities for jobs that don’t require a lot of post-secondary education. As it turns out, those manufacturing jobs were important and service jobs just don’t have the same levels of pay, dignity, and respect as someone bolting bumpers onto Fords.

How to Fix College

As for the college problem, the difficulty arises much younger. According to an OECD report, “by age eight, 40% of boys are disaffected, disappointed, or disappeared.” If we want more boys going to college on the other end, then we have to focus on making sure that more boys are actually engaged and enjoying school. This means giving our strange obsession with standardized testing (thank you George W. Bush and to a lesser extent Barack Obama) and focusing on making school fun and interesting again. We can’t always make school “cool” (the same report mentions that school is lacking the cool factor for boys) but we can do a better job of empowering boys to learn and catering to their learning styles. Ditching oppressive homework that has children working an extra shift in the evening would relieve both students and parents. This means less time in the seat and more time getting up and doing things. We also need more men to classrooms. A boy can go quite a while before seeing a male teacher. This further reinforces the idea that school is for girls and is simply no good.

The reality is that before we fix the economy and start generating jobs that don’t require a lot of education, we can likely fix the education system that is leaving boys out in the cold and wanting to get away from school as fast as possible and putting college out of desire and unreachable. Giving many an option to get marketable skills during their last two years of high school can be a great way to up their earning potential and set them on the pathway to a career. To get more boys into college, a similar method can be used, where they can start taking college credits for free in high school. Obviously, President Biden’s idea of making community college free would only add fuel to the fire of getting more people (including young men) educated.

The point being, this is a fixable problem if we are willing to try. There are noticeable gaps in effort and achievement between boys and girls, and with a little bit of adjustment those gaps can be closed and society will be both richer and better off.