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

I don’t buy it. As a college guy I loved the classes I was in where the women outnumbered the men. I seeked those out and actively signed up for them. It was a great way to meet people (before dating apps took over) and in one of those classes I met my longterm girlfriend. I remember my guy friends being excited when a class had a high female to male ratio.

I think men tend to want to compete with other men.

So:

(A) They will make choices to select activities where they will compete

(B) They will follow their male peer group as a flock to various activities.

What I would like to see here is a discussion of whether this is a bad thing or not. I mean, I went to college (got a PhD) and I eventually quit and did something different in life that didn't even require a degree... I mean, is this a bad thing or not?

Note: I'm not saying that it ISN'T a bad thing. Just thinking that any discussion about boys not applying to college also needs to answer whether it's really a bad thing for them. I'm just genuinely curious if this shift has ALSO implied a shift of worse economic outcomes for men.

(And we need to be subtle and careful here, too. Because technically I make much less money than before I quit my "degree job" but I'm also a lot happier, too.)

The author should have just come up front and said they're for gender separation to go back to the "Good Ole Days". Instead they hide that in a footnote.

Coward.

This article presents very biased view without sufficient evidence.

Not worth your time.

The content of the subject, and the related title don't accurately reflect the answer to the question, while doing the discussion a disservice cloaking it in terms of power dynamics, it neglects the very real reasons why anyone does anything.

Men historically and still today play the role of the protector and bread winner. Its a deep psychological drive that women do not have to the same degree. This is a gender difference.

Colleges today for the majority, are not primarily places of learning. They are places of torture, the torture of the pipe dream.

They were primarily places of learning at one point in time, but no longer. Corruption has corroded the institutions to the point where they no longer fulfill their primary purpose and instead act as a sieve in irrational varied ways.

There also used to be an economic advantage in those that received degrees, compared to those that don't. Today many who have managed to somehow complete degrees are not rewarded. The promises of benefit for the investment have not paid out.

The sieving actions occur at various levels of academia. For instance, you have the weed-out classes. These have been intentionally structured such that knowing the material is irrelevant to passing the class. It always changes, as the teacher's union representatives issue new guidance fairly regularly, but not for the better.

For example, B.S. Engineering degrees required GE that includes three-sequential course physics, other business related degrees have similar bottlenecks with Economics series. The name of the game in academia is how to create the forever student, and in this regard the related bureacratic corruption, and the parasitic relationship they have with e-learning business has made cost exceed benefit. The bureaucracy hides and by design fails to collect rational metrics that would show the reality (that most fail, and they pay to fail).

Engineering at one point had a notorious modification to exams. You needed to pass a midterm and a final. Each had 3 questions, that were multistep (10-20 steps) for each question, and contained properties that would skew and segment the results towards failure along with an unstated or undisclosed gimmick.

One property was causality, the answer to the third question is dependent on the second, and likewise the 2nd on the 1st. To pass you could only miss the last question on only one of the two exams. The unstated gimmick was in how to handle significant digits to account for error. If you only round on the last question (to prevent error propagation), you fail. If you round at each question, you fail. If you are not part of a group that the professor deems worthy (where they tell you during office hours), then you do not pass. You have been front-of-line blocked, you didn't know the material and failed. Its your fault, or so they would have students unfamiliar with deceit believe. These structures were promoted by representatives of the national teachers union at one point, I know this because I overheard a professor discussing this with another professor in the cafeteria (brazenly).

Male professors tended to favor female students over male students, I wonder why.

When you do deceitful things, whether it is at the individual level, or organizationally, eventually people find out because people talk and compare.

The more recent iterations of this have to do with subtle psychological triggers known in pedagogy to fail people, and they've been automated in e-learning platform design. For example, where for every question you answer, correct questions immediately move on to the next question, but incorrect answers force you to acknowledge your failure in red for each question, even when the question answer pair are invalid, irrational, incorrect, and wrong. There is also a delay inserted for each and its a timed test. The questions you get are different from other students (randomized), and those questions themselves are not recorded. You literally need to use OBS to record the entirety to have a chance at the professor investigating. The professor has no signal that a single problem is wrong (as an entire class would fail the question if it contradicted material and they all had the same question, and randomized questions from a pool are the default). Worse, occurs when the teachers don't investigate (as a result of other constraints, or just bad teaching/fraud).

There was an economics professor that managed to somehow be the only professor teaching these courses in economics in the entire county. 32 sections (different colleges), all using the autograder and lecture consisted of references to Khan Academy and mismatched material from Pearson (looks like fraud to me, no action taken despite complaints made to the Chair, Dean, and Board of Trustees, they are all in it together). The guy set up his office hours to overlap virtually in a Zoom room, and there were consistently hundreds of students in that zoom room, only about 8 getting an answer before the hours ended.

Remediation paths offer the illusion that errors get corrected, but in reality the administrators, department heads, are all teachers. There is no obligation to investigate, and just like any government job where you can't easily be fired, social standing and seniority matters more than production, investigations causes a hostile work environment of their peers. There being no investigation and front-of-line blocking guarantees the system progressively causes more abuses over time.

As for these triggers, they follow the same pattern as if you have a professor constantly berating a student taking a test, the student shuts down mentally becoming more frustrated and confused until they throw their hands up in despair and walk out. The claim is they made the choice to do that, but there was no choice; the reaction is unavoidable given the structure.

These are the things being done in academia. Its not about education, its about inspiring learned helplessness and indoctrination through torture and forcing the volunteer to pay for the privilege of undergoing such things. It meets all the classical requirements of torture systems back in the 1950s.

Outcomes matter, when people cannot graduate or progress, and there are similar roadblocks towards any degree, despite knowing the material; Rational people leave.

The sieve that was present for the men isn't as present for many of the women. That easily explains the asymmetry, but the enrollment data isn't being collected because it would show the extent of the problem.

What they would need to collect for this to be visible is first attempt pass/fail rates for each section separated from repeated attempt pass/fail rates for each class. The college doesn't provide information because the numbers are often 0 for the former in these weed out classes, and very low in the latter (where the professor's require academic dishonesty to progress).

These are just a few tools in corrupt academic officials belts. Others include variations in the actual work required for a passing score, in units to hours of work outside the class. The normal scheduling claims it is 3 hours per unit but that it varies, 12 units is full time (36 hour work weeks), Except, the courses vary sometimes by as much as 5-9 hours per unit dependent on the professor. Calculate a full time schedule and you may be looking at 60-120+ hour work weeks for 16 weeks straight. You know anyone capable of that kind of burn-in without causing detrimental health issues for a shot at higher paying jobs that come with a degree?

They have optimized for failure, with a guaranteed funding source in government regardless. The people involved often don't see themselves doing these things largely because they have blinded themselves in isolation fulfilling what generally falls under a discussion of the banality of evil.

I should mention that not 'all' teachers are this way, there are good ones out there, but they are a very rare exception and with that rarity they rarely get properly appreciated or recognized for their excellence, these individuals are not part of the problem. That said, their existence is not changing the general trend and that trend is an aggregate of blind decisions tied to the reality of the outcomes. It will continue to get worse until it cannot, such are the dynamics

When anyone in a trusted position act and behave deceitfully to others loss, even unknowingly, trust in the institution is lost.

People invest in things that provide tangible economic benefit. Unfortunately, the process of education today creates many maladaptive dynamics for those that do make it through and manage to get a degree with rare exception, and they are finding that the economic benefit advertised hasn't resulted in tangible benefit.