“Colleges Have a Guy Problem” screams the headline over an Atlantic item this week responding to a Wall Street Journal story reporting that if current trends continue, “in the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man.”
“The world has changed dramatically, but the ideology of masculinity isn’t changing fast enough to keep up,” Derek Thompson writes. He then quotes Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves, who adds, “My biggest worry is that by the time policy makers realize that gender inequality in college is a problem, we’ll have hit a point where college will seem deeply effeminate to some men in a way that will be hard to undo. That’s why we need both parties to offer a positive vision of college and a positive vision of masculinity. If male identity is seen, by some, as being at odds with education, that’s a problem for the whole country.”
But are men avoiding college because they see it as effeminate? Neither Thompson nor Reeves point to any actual data that suggest so.
Instead, Thompson notes that, “Single-parent households have grown significantly more common in the past half century, and 80 percent of those are headed by mothers…the absence of male teachers might be part of a broader absence of men in low-income areas who can model the path to college for boys who are looking for direction.”
Thompson then points to a fine study by Harvard economist Raj Chetty that found “income inequality between Black and white Americans was disproportionately driven by bad outcomes for Black boys. The few neighborhoods where Black and white boys grew up to have similar adult outcomes were low-poverty areas that also had high levels of ‘father presence.’ That is, even boys without a father at home saw significantly more upward mobility when their neighborhood had a large number of fathers present. High-poverty areas without fathers present seem to be doubly impoverished, and boys who live in these neighborhoods are less likely to achieve the milestones, such as college attendance, that lead to a middle-class salary or better.”
It seems to me the data points to the conclusion that a driving factor of men not going to college is that men raised in single-parent households have much worse outcomes than men raised in married households.
As Thompson notes above, 80% of single-parent households are headed by women. This means that when marriage rates decline, boys are more often left without male role models to help them navigate and master the world. And there is a growing body of evidence that being raised in an unmarried household hurts boys more than it hurts girls.
For example, researchers have found that in households where the mother has at least some college education but the father is either absent or has no college education, women are 14 percentage points more likely to finish college than boys. Meanwhile, in households where the father is present and has some college, there is no gap in college achievement between the sexes.
Other researchers have found that growing up in a single-parent home significantly decreases the probability of college attendance for boys but has no effect on girls. And the academic problems for boys from single-parent homes start well before college. Other research has documented that while boys from single-parent homes are 25% more likely to be suspended in the eighth grade than girls, the gender gap for married-parent households was just 10%.
Unfortunately, they are just wrong. Marriage matters. Children from single-parent households, particularly boys from single-parent households, fare far worse than children from married households.
Until our public policy elites admit our nation has a marriage crisis, the “guy problem” at colleges will only get worse.
