Why American men think it's not worth going to college anymore | Hacker News Reader

Why American men think it's not worth going to college anymore

bloomberg.com

27 pointsjnord39 comments

Previously on HN, with some discussion spread across four posts over the past year:

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col...

> What has changed is an increase in girls. When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college. We’re just not talking about it.

> For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

> “There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Whatever other factors may exist, college is now at or past the 60% women threshold, so of course men are quitting college. We can expect — to such a degree of certainty, given historical U.S. data that we could place a safe bet on a market about it — that college will be 80% women and in perhaps ten years or less.

It’s cute that Bloomberg is focusing on all the rationalizations that men are coming up with for this — at least some of them have the courage to say that it’s just the “vibes”. A little self-awareness would go a long way towards understanding, but Bloomberg doesn’t go there. Honestly, they should be assessing gender trends at trade schools over the past twenty years and see if those are at risk of becoming incompatible with U.S. masculinity next. What would it do to their president’s domestic manufacturing dreams if men refused to attend trade schools?

This is 5GW, and many of the statements you link are entirely value based.

The simple fact of the matter is there are hidden biases against men completing college, that favor women completing college.

The same holds true to a large degree in employment with few exceptions.

Making a supposition that the pool of female to male candidates for college is interconnected is a fallacy. It is independent, and based on factors with no current visibility, and there are no guaranteed prospects even if men can somehow complete the struggle session to a degree.

What's worse. Women don't date down. So all those women who got degrees will have a harder time finding mates, will be the bread winner which leaves the men in a role that is unattractive to them, and they will be highly dissatisfied as a result of simple math and gender selection differences.

You don't survive by ignoring reality, and birthrate collapse is going to happen given the myriad of issues that people can't seem to get a mental grasp enough to recognize the underlying problems. When there is a problem, and people can't communicate sufficiently to organize to recognize said problem, nothing gets done. You can't react, and the problem grows until it can't grow any more (at existential crisis). Cascading failures are diabolical because people cannot believe that certain little things cause great big things in time. Evolutionary selection eventually destroys societies based in total control, as those members cannot adapt and fail Darwinian fitness.

I disagree.

I am in my 50’s and I could not agree more, every step of the way in my education and career it is just women everywhere. most of my teachers were women all the way through high school, undergraduate school, all women (teachers and students), graduate school, all women, myriad of jobs since graduation all my bosses and co-workers all women, CEOs of every company I worked for, all women. On just about every team I worked on I was the only male person on the Team. Lived in 12 states during schooling and subsequent career, my Congress representatives, all women, my Senators, all women. Mayors of every of the 14 towns/cities I worked in, all women. My Governors, all women… Just madness :)

Where is this glorious place?

Definitely not in the CS campus.

> Whatever other factors may exist, college is now at or past the 60% women threshold, so of course men are quitting college. We can expect — to such a degree of certainty, given historical U.S. data that we could place a safe bet on a market about it — that college will be 80% women and in perhaps ten years or less.

I simply don't buy this. A social gathering spot of common age where the male:female ratio is 4:6 or better for men should be swarmed with men. When I was young, I worked in a geographic area that had demographics like that among the 20-30 year old women and it was the sole time in my life that I was "popular".

The problem is the school pipeline. The average girl does significantly better than the average boy across the board (this is documented ad nauseam). If they all apply to college, then with no adjustment, more girls will get admitted than boys.

What happened is that college became required, which means that the "average" high school student must now go to college where in the past only the "upper" high school students would go to college.

The differential between boys and girls is much smaller the higher the average achievement of the "demographic slice" you take.

My son earned a business management degree and had a hard time finding a job. He had to work in a movie theatre as an assistant manager that didn't pay too well. He went to trade school and earned a CDL (Commercial Driver's License) for $5000 and now drives a truck for decent money.

A college degree can be expensive, and it does not guarantee a job, plus you have a huge student loan to pay off. That is why American Men think it is not worth it to go to college anymore.

> think it is not worth it to go to college anymore.

They're likely right, too. Turns out... employers minds are elsewhere. The degree no longer serves as a useful signal.

In nearly two decades I still haven't found cause to finish my degree. Hell, I don't even have to practice what I was hired for.

Can often find the job is 'whatever we decide'. Education, in some/several senses, is undesirable. Instead of falling for it, may find it better to be too dumb to notice or too tough to care about hoodwinking.

Additionally going into the trades can mean joining the workforce immediately so that you can start early on buying a house and saving for retirement.

Also military recruitment is way up, which is another avenue young men (and women) can take to acquire employable skills without going to college.

But why do American Women disagree with American Men on this?

Not all women, there were some women in my son's class applying for the CDL.

Generally, Women do not want labor jobs and enjoy a desk job instead. This is why men are paid more than women in general the labor jobs pay more and require a trade school.

A college degree is much more expensive than it was decades ago. The cost of higher education has increased well beyond inflation for a very long time.

Nowadays, anyone with only moderate skills/qualifications can obtain a college degree --- the primary requirement is money/debt.

Consequently, the marketplace has been flooded with degrees of questionable substance and value.

Lots of people know a degree holder working a job that doesn't require a degree (like truck driver or retail manager) while being saddled with college debt.

The public school and financial systems in the US are set up to retain ignorant students in economically worthless degree programs and saddle them with the costs for the rest of their lives. Not pursuing any degree at all (because one cannot identify which degrees might be valuable enough to avoid this trap) is an obvious reaction.

That completely fails to explain the gender gap, unless women are just less savvy than men.

The facts I presented transcend gender. But here are some that are gender related.

Women make up 58% of all college students.

Women hold 67% of all student loan debt.

Personally, I looked but failed to find much to discredit your "less savvy" explanation.

There is some evidence that part of the effect is explained by women needing to go to college more than men in order to get decently paying jobs. This is less true today than 20 years ago, as we've seen real wages of men without college degrees drop since the financial crisis, but the trend of more women attending college started well before that.

It’s not fashionable. There’s a growing fixation on keeping up appearances of masculinity and it’s become a common identity. Education and mental health seem to be largely getting thrown out as non-masculine.

Yes, I'm sure toxic masculinity is the only reason there's a growing dissatisfaction to the tradeoffs of enrolling in higher education.

"Am I the one who's wrong?"

"No, clearly it's the college-aged men that have to weigh the consequences of their choice who are wrong"

It does not need to be the only reason for it to be a reason.

Basically zero macro social trends have exactly one cause.

Mental health is much worse amongst young women than young men and the gap is widening with time, so that part of your analysis is inverted.

Example: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

Something that complicates that statistic is the awful one the article alludes to: Broadly speaking, women attempt suicide, men commit suicide. When you're looking at nonfatal suicide, women tend to show up much higher because the men don't get admitted to the hospital, they end up in the morgue.

Most measures that rely on self-reporting can underrepresent men; completed suicide is just the most drastic example. It’s difficult to think of a reliable measure that doesn’t have this problem.

The same problem can be seen against a range of statistics e.g. having received a diagnosis of mental health problems from a doctor. Girl's mental health was already worse, and in the last 15 years or so was collapsing at much higher rates.

I don't want to sound too cynical but from European perspective I'd say just remove the horrendous costs of college and university by regulazing and subsidizing education. It's not communism even if many Americans would think so. But in order to get anywhere near there you'd probably have to start with replacing that orange toad and his minions with something else, anything really would do at this point

US has a higher proportion of university graduates than almost every European country. Especially e.g. Germany is almost 2x lower.

It’s not strictly true in all cases but generally it seems that free or subsidized higher education results in rationing and lower accessibility (which is not really such a bad thing if other options like trade schools etc. are available).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...

Does this hold if one only compares attainment of degrees in fields that are in demand?

US policy has specific features that have resulted in many people of limited means pursuing degrees that confer no professional qualification at all.

That was an interesting conundrum.

I used the gpt research feature to explore that so maybe take it with a grain of salt but I think it's not too bad:

> In short, Americans attend college in greater numbers partly because they feel they must (to secure good jobs), whereas many Germans do not feel they need a university degree to have a good career, thanks to the established apprenticeship system and different employer expectations.

https://chatgpt.com/share/680c8d76-d6a8-8010-a4cd-48155198f9...

This matches my own experience as a german citizen, that german "Ausbildung" is a very valid and accepted option. Maybe university enrollment or tertiary education on its own isn't drawing the full picture? Worth to think about

The inflection point for the extreme rise in costs of US higher education is the Federal government making it so that students can take out loans that are not dischargeable through bankruptcy. This is a massive subsidy to the entire education system because students will always be able to find someone to loan them more money, because they HAVE to pay it back. Cutting the tap off by removing this exemption would likely see a lot of belt tightening and tuition reduction in the world of higher ed.

Or the British approach. Tuition fee caps and a low interest government backed loans that effectively function like an income tax surcharge.

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