Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?(celestemdavis.substack.com)

15 points by hui-zheng 1 year ago | 10 comments

mrkeen 1 year ago |

Whenever there is writing about other groups and their struggles, I need to suppress the urge to declare that they should just suck it up and do better, e.g. Fat population? Individuals need to eat less. Gang violence? Hey maybe stop shooting each other for a fucking second. But I can't comment because they're not my struggles.

Finally they're talking about my group, so here goes: if you don't go to uni because of girls, you don't deserve to go to uni.

randomdata 1 year ago | |

It seems a bit strange to frame it as a struggle. Like the article alludes to, men seek high social status. University no longer provides greater social status. So men have moved on to the next thing that will give them what they seek. They're not bothered by it. It is not like university is some kind of magical deity that will send you to the fiery pits of hell if you don't attend. It's just a tool, and if the tool isn't working it is no big deal to not use it.

gregjor 1 year ago |

One of the most common reasons floated for so few women in IT/software jobs amounts to the same thing: women don’t want to work in the “bro culture” or deal with “toxic masculinity.” I don’t have any evidence for that, just my own career experience watching women leave (or never enter) the software field since I started in the late ‘70s. When I started programming women made up 25% or more of my co-workers. Today that percentage seems close to zero.

I suppose it works both ways.

znpy 1 year ago |

Talking about boys’ and mens’ problems does not sound progressive. Add that this is the age of “appearance above everything else” and you get why.

mmaniac 1 year ago |

Good article, but the most curious part comes in the final footnote. After all that has been said, the final sentences are these:

> If you actually wanted a solution for boys to want to go to college, bring back male-only colleges. Watch college suddenly become really popular for boys again.

Is this resentful sarcasm, or sincere pragmatism? I can't tell.

dtgm92 1 year ago |

I would be interested to know if there is any difference between the rates of male versus female military members. In particular, those that have earned GI Benefits for free college, so people who served a certain amount of years.

cafard 1 year ago |

I would point out that George Washington had little formal education, and John D. Rockefeller had little past high school. Dan Rather I can't be bothered looking up.

js2 1 year ago |

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41811050

JojoFatsani 1 year ago |

Oh god more “boo hoo I’m a victim” substack articles..

zahlman 1 year ago |

I try rather hard these days to avoid talking about so-called "culture war" issues publicly, but this particular one is admittedly catnip for me. I'll say up front before I get into more specific issues: I'm very much not a fan of this analysis. To me it exemplifies many of the problems with current feminist discourse.

In this frame, for example, when women were a minority at university, this was problematic and evidence of discrimination against women (in straightforwardly parsable ways); now that they are the majority, this is also problematic, and still evidence of discrimination... against women. Supposedly, women were filtered out by social factors (and still are in the case of most STEM disciplines) [0], but men are now choosing not to attend [1]. It's supposedly "surprising" that male-dominated discussions (like the Freakonomics podcast) supposedly overlook explanations related to masculinity (it couldn't possibly be that they simply disagree), despite how poorly things reliably turn out for any man in our society since the 1970s or so who actually attempts to do that. [2] It's well understood that feminism is the only socially acceptable framework for discussing gender issues in the West today [3]; somehow mostly-female feminists can claim all the insight needed to understand traditional masculinity, even though this is the opposite of what feminist standpoint theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_feminism) would conclude if applied fairly. When men do choose a non-traditional masculinity (such as, say, being a "hacker" in the HN sense), they still ultimately get accused of perpetrating "toxic masculinity" and "bro culture" (as cited in gregjor's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912053), and the existing gender imbalance at their workplace is held up as evidence. Biological explanations are implicitly pooh-poohed, except when they come to the right conclusion. And finally, men are supposedly deliberately avoiding this analysis - why can't they just take the L and accept that they're causing this harm no matter what they do?

Also, worryingly, the central thesis here is rather grim. If men are indeed leaving because there are proportionately more women (i.e., because men have started leaving), that's clearly a positive feedback loop. This seems consistent with typical feminist rhetoric about gender role models, but it seems to imply that mixed-gender environments are inherently unstable [4]. That's quite a claim to be making, and it doesn't exactly predispose me to trying to work together with the author on anything. (After all, I'm a man, so the idea seems to have been deprecated a priori.)

I had here a much more detailed rebuttal - backed up locally, of course - but it fell afoul of the post length limit. I don't want to post it on my personal blog, because I'm trying to keep any politics there strictly programming-related. Maybe some other time. But let me just drop a few links regarding explicit discrimination against men in academia:

https://www.safs.ca/about.html

https://archive.is/g7qXN

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/will-2019-be-the-year-that-co...

https://www.thefire.org/news/third-circuit-private-universit...

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/dei-higher-ed-when-it...

[0] - and, of course, here we must also invoke the spectre of "legal or structural" prohibitions (an awkward conflation) from "decades ago". In point of fact, it was possible for women to attend certain colleges in the US as early as the 1830s (https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/2021/03/21/histor...).

[1] - and, supposedly, bear full responsibility for those choices - never mind the social and societal factors influencing them. It's bizarre to me how this rhetoric enforces an internal locus of control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control) for men, but an external one for women. I think it's rather sexist to deny the agency of women like that.

[2] See, for example, the history of Warren Farrell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Farrell), and in particular how talks he attempted to give at the University of Toronto in the early 2010s were effectively shut down by feminist protesters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx5x0Ztffm4 has some live footage).

[3] See, for example, section 11 of https://becauseits2015.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/a-non-femini... - the text anchor appears to be broken, unfortunately. This FAQ was written by a former online acquaintance of mine, and the entire thing is quite high quality, honestly.

[4] Except perhaps the ones involving heterosexual coupling.