Sunday, December 04, 2005

Still Plenty of Big Men on Campus   For the past year or so, article after article has noted and lamented the declining percentage of male students on college campuses. This includes today’s op-ed in the Washington Post called “Disappearing Act” by Michael Gurian, described as head of an educational training organization. He writes: “Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.”   Problem is Gurian’s alarming statistics are flat wrong. Men are NOT disappearing from college campuses. In fact, a higher percentage of all college-age men in the United States are going to college than ever before and this trend has held steady for two decades. What’s really happening is that women are going to college in greater numbers, and college campuses have expanded and multiplied to accommodate them.   According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1983 some 27 percent of all college-aged American men (ages 18 to 24) were enrolled in college. In 2003 that number was up to 34 percent.   But at the same time, in 1983 only 21 percent of American college-aged women were enrolled in college, and that number climbed more steeply to 41 percent of all college-aged women two decades later.   Gurian writes: “The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a significant crisis.”   Again, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2003 there were 7.2 million men enrolled in degree-granting institutions and 9.6 million women. This is hardly a disappearance of men.   What is irritating about these kinds of “crisis” analyses is that they often characterize women as “overtaking” or pushing out men from higher education. Women’s higher education, the key in the late 20th century to energizing half of the American workforce to meet the information age, is being made suspect because it is falsely seen to be impeding men’s educational advancement.   Yes, the gender ratios have changed, with men making up about 43 percent of the college student body, depending on how schools are counted. But men are hardly disappearing from college campuses. It’s just that women are showing up.   -RH                   8:03:50 PM    comment []

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