WHERE ARE THE BOYS? (1)

Surprise: Feminized education favours females!

A stealth revolution, unplanned and largely unnoticed, is changing the face of American higher education. In a trend that began in 1980, but only recently grew large enough to catch national attention, men now attend and graduate from college in numbers far lower than women. Every year, women increase their presence on campuses nationwide, while men do not. The percentage of young men going from high school to college today has scarcely changed since 1968, hovering around 61 percent. By contrast, the percentage of women enrolling in college increases every year, reaching 72 percent in 2004. Men outnumber women in the 15-24 age bracket by under 1 percent, yet women accounted for about 60 percent of all associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees awarded in the United States in 2004. Michigan's numbers were in line with the national average.

"Women continue to march right along," said Tom Mortenson, a researcher at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education who has studied this shift for 10 years, "and the guys are apparently just looking for the next video game or pickup football match."

Among the state's universities, only the University of Michigan has a nearly even split in its freshman class. The next closest is Michigan State University, where male freshmen constitute 43 percent. This disparity is not the result of any favoritism in admissions. Simply put, far more girls apply to college these days than boys. Jim Cotter, MSU senior associate director of admissions, concedes officials have begun to discuss "in a light-hearted way whether we should look at recruiting strategies that might attract young men."

Experts cite several reasons why men might be underperforming, starting with frustration in school. These experts point to the relative difficulty boys have picking up reading and writing, and suggest that the elementary and secondary educational system simply fits girls better than boys.

William S. Pollack, a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School who heads the Center for Men and Young Men, calls schools "some of the most boy-unfriendly places on Earth." Movement and hands-on manipulation, he says, are central to the ways boys learn -- yet it's precisely this tendency to fidget and squirm "that drives teachers crazy." Girls, on the other hand, learn to sit still and pay attention at an earlier age. Pollack also notes that boys learn to put words together and read, on average, "six months to a year later than girls. And their fine-motor skills are less-well developed," affecting their ability to pick up writing.

Reading scores offer the clearest sign of disparity between the genders. In the fourth grade, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, boys trail girls by 7 percentage points. By eighth grade, that gap widens to 11 points. The upshot, Pollack suggests, is that boys on average struggle more in elementary school, are more prone to frustration, and therefore are less likely to emerge from school seeking higher education.

Employment realities may also play a role. Many experts note that young men can get jobs right out of high school, such as in construction, that pay far better than entry-level positions for women. Some authorities also speculate that boys still believe their gender will guarantee them success no matter what, while girls feel they must prove themselves. Robert Massa, Dickinson College vice president for enrollment, suggests that boys just seem less motivated than girls. "I say this as a father of both a son and a daughter," he said from Carlisle, Pa. "Boys just seem less interested in proving themselves. I wonder whether there's a safety issue about staying at home and not worrying about your future -- a problem I think is endemic among the male population today."

Once in college, some men seem to have different priorities than women. A 1999 study by the Higher Education Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that women study more and participate more in school activities. Men, on the other hand, excel at exercise, partying, watching TV and playing video games. "We call that the Bart Simpson syndrome," said Stephen Lawton, Central Michigan University's chairman of educational administration.

The gender shift raises other issues as well, notably what women with higher degrees will do when it's harder to find a man who's their educational peer. It's a problem that Courtney McAnuff, Eastern Michigan University's vice president for enrollment, suggests is particularly acute in minority communities. "When you have urban school districts where half the males don't finish," he said, "that's important."

This male-female disparity exists across all racial groups. Among white 18- and 19-year-olds in 2002, women outnumbered men on campus by about 2 percentage points. Among blacks, the figure was 6 percentage points and 5 percentage points for Hispanics. In all cases, the gap widens as the student population ages....

Pollack, in the introduction to his book, "Real Boys," sketches an emergency that goes far beyond academics. American boys, he writes, are "cast out to sea in separate lifeboats, and feel they are drowning in isolation, depression, loneliness and despair."...

"All the studies show that college degree holders earn over a million dollars more in their lifetimes," says EMU's McAnuff. "Maybe we should be selling that to boys -- 'Could you use an extra million?'?" But perhaps men who ditch college are just making rational calculations. Researcher Laura W. Perna of the University of Pennsylvania found that although a college degree raised a young woman's starting salary 45 percent, men saw no initial payoff over what they would have earned right out of high school, further discouraging them from pursuing higher education.....


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WHERE ARE THE BOYS? (2)

In the 1990s, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys. Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught -- literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here, listening, staring at these words -- this is not really who I am." That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in the District. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."

Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. 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.

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. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?"

It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry -- men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses and John Robertses and George Bushes -- and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.

But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their thirties, by which time the world has passed many of them by...

Most frightening, the old promise that schools will take care of boys and educate them to succeed is also breaking down, as boys dominate the failure statistics in our schools, starting at the elementary level and continuing through high school ....

When I worked as a counselor at a federal prison, I saw these statistics up close. The young men and adult males I worked with were mainly uneducated, had been raised in families that didn't promote education, and had found little of relevance in the schools they had attended. They were passionate people, capable of great love and even possible future success. Many of them told me how much they wanted to get an education. At an intuitive level, they knew how important it was.

Whether in the prison system, in my university classes or in the schools where I help train teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem with how we teach and mentor boys that I call "industrial schooling," and that I believe is a primary root of our sons' falling behind in school, and quite often in life.

Two hundred years ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions of kids, we took them off the farms and out of the marketplace and put them in large industrial-size classrooms (one teacher, 25 to 30 kids). For many kids, this system worked -- and still works. But from the beginning, there were some for whom it wasn't working very well. Initially, it was girls. It took more than 150 years to get parity for them.

Now we're seeing what's wrong with the system for millions of boys. Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a lot of boys "in line" -- competitive learning was one. And our families were deeply involved in a child's education.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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