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Big man on campus likely a woman
By Amy Fagan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 27, 2007
Women's share of college enrollment is at an all-time high as
education researchers continue to debate what is causing the trend of
more women than men going to college, and what the future impact of
the trend could be.
"It is a topic of some conversation within the admissions
community, and they certainly are looking at it," said Barmak
Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of
Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "I don't think we have
a proper understanding of what would be at the root."
"It's well-documented that there's a female majority on college
campuses," said Jacqueline King, director of the American Council on
Education's Center for Policy Analysis and author of a 2006 study on
the topic. "I think where there's not a consensus is why this is the
case."
Historically, more men than women have graduated college. In 1870,
the first year a national survey was conducted, 7,993 men and 1,378
women received bachelor's degrees. But by the 1980s, women were
outpacing men and that trend has continued through today, even though
overall numbers for both groups continue to rise.
In the 2003-04 school year, 595,425 men received bachelor's
degrees, compared with 804,117 women, according to the Department of
Education's National Center for Education Statistics. The department's
fall 2004 numbers show that 57.2 percent of college enrollees were
women -- the highest percentage ever.
The department estimates that by the time the 2013-14 school year
rolls around, women receiving degrees will outnumber men by more than
300,000.
"Every year, the situation gets worse and worse and worse," said
Tom Mortensen, a higher-education policy analyst who publishes
Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter and has beat the drums
on the issue since the 1990s.
"It's a very serious and long-standing problem, and there's no
solution in sight," said Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at
the conservative American Enterprise Institute and author of "The War
Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men."
Some, however, say the trend has been overblown and misunderstood.
Sara Mead, a senior policy analyst with the Education Sector, a
liberal think tank, said the public has wrongly been led to think that
boys are doing worse than girls.
"The rate at which men go to college has not fallen; women have
just increased their numbers more rapidly," she said. In a report
titled "The Truth About Boys and Girls," she says, "The idea that
women might actually surpass men in some areas ... seems hard for many
people to swallow. Thus, boys are routinely characterized as 'falling
behind' even as they improve in absolute terms."
Catherine Hill, director of research at the American Association
of University Women, agreed that gains for women shouldn't be read as
losses for men. "It's not a zero-sum game," she said.
Ms. Hill added that "there's a lot to celebrate" in the trend,
saying that not too long ago, it was rare to have women in certain
fields, like medicine, while today it's routine.
But the discussion of possible causes of and solutions for the
broader college gap between men and women continues. One possible
cause is that since the 1980s, some older women have gone back to
college to get degrees, said Ms. King. There is a degree of "pent-up
demand," Ms. Hill agreed.
Mr. Nassirian said some college admissions officers think the
problem stems primarily from shortcomings in the K-12 education
system, while other officers think the problem lies in colleges'
marketing and messaging -- that somehow boys are overlooked or
discouraged by the messages they receive from higher education. "My
guess is that a little of both would be the case," Mr. Nassirian
said.
Ms. King's 2006 study found the college gap is still the widest
between minority men and minority women -- leading some, like Ms.
Mead, to argue that if the word "crisis" is to be used, it should be
used for the plight of minority boys.
But Mrs. Sommers said problems for all boys begins in younger
grades. She said girls, on average, adapt better to school from the
early grades, traditional classrooms aren't set up to accommodate
boys' natural energy, and that, while state and federal efforts have
aggressively aimed to improve girls' performance in science and math,
there hasn't been an equal effort to help boys' in their weaker
subjects of reading and writing.
"All of the emphasis has been on girls. Boys were left on the back
burner," Mrs. Sommers said.
Judith Kleinfeld found the imbalance -- which is happening in
other Western industrialized countries, too -- so troubling that she
started the Boys Project, a coalition of scholars, educators and
nonprofit groups that tries to help engage and inspire boys at the
local, state and national levels. She said girls' surging college
success is important and welcomed, but it's also clearly time to
encourage boys to the same degree.
"Boys don't like school -- this is the root," she said.
Mrs. Sommers said if the trend continues, the result could be a
generation of poorly educated and unemployable boys facing a
generation of women who are considerably more educated, a situation
causing "all sorts of psychological ramifications."
Meanwhile, a few colleges are taking specific steps. Among them,
St. Petersburg College in Florida has a male recruiting program called
"Men on the Way," loosely based on a pre-existing program for women.
Howard University plans to start an initiative to address
underrepresentation of black men on campuses, according to a January
report by the Black College Wire. And a few small religious schools
sponsor a program that encourages boys to go into teaching.
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