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At the end of sophomore year of college, my roommates and I had back luck that turned out to be the best luck. The bad luck was picking low card in the housing draw, relegating us to annex housing in the attic of a freshman dorm. But the bug – housing Siberia, five flights of stairs, no adult supervision – turned out to be a feature. Chris C., MacGyver among us, installed a TV antenna on the roof just in time to watch Sinead O’Connor rip up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live, prompting Alex, a devout Catholic, to spit on the television screen. With the help of General Electric’s appliance helpline, Chris D., a pitcher on his high school baseball team, figured out how to make our freezer produce unending frost so he could launch snowballs from our eyrie, startling Chapel St. pedestrians on hot days. But only Mr. Pants took full advantage of both our remote location and captive audience.
Mr. Pants was a pair of Chris C.’s jeans that he stuffed with newspaper, attached socks and shoes, then rigged with wire to dangle in a lifelike manner. The freshmen downstairs thought someone was dangling outside their window and called the campus police. But in Mr. Pants’ dramatic final act, Chris C. found a chair with an open back that Dave could kneel behind with Mr. Pants laid out before him – fake legs and feet looking very much like Dave’s own. That evening, Chris C. descended a few flights and returned with a line of freshmen willing to bear witness to “an important experiment.”
Chris C.: Thanks for coming up. We’ve been up here all night testing each other’s thresholds of pain. We’re going to start with Dave. Watch this.
[Chirs C. takes a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, opens the blade, and plunges it into the foot of Mr. Pants. Freshmen scream.]
Dave: [Wincing] That hurt a bit. But I’m pretty sure I can take more.
[Chris pulls the knife out of the foot and stabs the leg. Freshmen run back downstairs.]
Ever since Mr. Pants, I've wondered whether there was something deficient about boys. My suspicions were heightened through multiple viewings of Spinal Tap, including discovering some dude had assembled an encyclopedic guide to the Spinal Tap Universe. Then came confirmatory data: at the top campuses of the University of California – Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, Irvine, and Santa Barbara – the gender gap for admitted students is now 26 points, 63% women and 37% men. Nationally, the gap for undergraduate enrollment is now 16 percent, 58% women and 42% men – same as for degree attainment.
Despite being male, I wanted to learn more. So I invited Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, to speak at Achieve’s recent annual meeting in New York. He is the author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, which former President Obama selected for his summer 2024 reading list. In May, Melinda French Gates announced twelve $20M grants to further gender equality. Eleven focused on leveling the playing field for girls and women, one went to the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Reeves begins his book and presentation by acknowledging that women continue to face significant barriers in education and the workforce. In education, women continue to be underrepresented in many STEM fields. In the workforce, women continue to be underpaid relative to men (16% less on average) and may well be the first victims of AI. But if we can follow the advice of F. Scott Fitzgerald and hold two opposed ideas in our minds at the same time, Reeves makes a compelling case that – as our education system is currently constituted – gender has become the elephant in the room for student success. Although the labor market still favors men, “we have an education system favoring girls,” he says. But “two wrongs don’t make a right. We need to fix both.”
Beyond undergraduate enrollment and degree attainment numbers, Reeves marshals a multitude of measures to prove his case:
Reeves isn’t focused on the top 5%. There’s no gender gap at highly selective private colleges where schools handpick 50/50 classes; at the highest rungs, men appear to be holding their own. But for the other 95%, Reeves concludes that “gaps at the college level reflect the ones in high school.” It’s even worse for underrepresented minorities (college degree attainment gender gap of 30% – 65/35 – for Black students) and for low-income students (girls from bottom quintile families are 57% more likely to earn a degree).
“While women are catching up with men in the labor market,” notes Reeves, “boys and men are falling further behind in the classroom.” That’s in part because no ballyhooed educational interventions seem to be working for boys and men. Free college programs benefit women; men see almost no gain in degree attainment. Same with scholarship, degree completion, and mentoring programs.
What’s going on? With 23% of K-12 boys labeled as learning or developmentally disabled, Reeves turns to biology. He attributes American education’s gender gap to sensory-seeking vs. impulse control, the former running rampant in adolescent boys, the latter more developed in girls. Biologically, the parts of the brain associated with impulse control (e.g., organization, planning, future orientation) mature two years later in boys than in girls. In Of Boys and Men, Reeves quotes the chair of the department of neurology at Penn’s medical school: “in adolescence, on average girls are more developed by about 2 to 3 years in terms of the peak of their synapses and in their connectivity processes.” And – crucially – this developmental gap “is widest at precisely the time when students need to be worrying about their GPA [and] getting ready for tests.”
Of course, the reason they need to be worrying is that GPA and test scores are the keys to college. Since we’re not likely to change our biology or behavior, the only way to close education’s growing gender gap is to change our college-for-all environment i.e., one with few viable – and practically no socially-valued – pathways to socioeconomic mobility and career launch outside of multi-year degree programs at accredited tuition-based postsecondary institutions.
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Reeves doesn’t think the answer for boys and men is faster + cheaper training programs. His conclusion, which isn’t surprising in the slightest, is that “it is hard to find examples of government-funded workforce training that work well for anyone, male or female.” However, “if a training program works, it generally works for women, but not always for men.” The problem is more fundamental than length of program or cost. It’s one that must be addressed before frustrated young men need workforce development help.
Earlier this month, New York Times columnist David Brooks set out parameters for how government should reshape the economy to foster innovation and economic growth as well as social cohesion. In his Recipe for a Striving America, Brooks homed in on education: “I strongly believe that any healthy society needs to find ways to reward a variety of abilities, not just the one our current meritocracy rewards: the ability to please teachers and take tests during adolescence.” Brooks went on: “We have to find more ways to reward the abilities that don’t involve information analysis on a laptop.” Brooks is arguing for high school (and perhaps middle school) pathways that don’t run through the College-Board-Advanced-Placement-Weighted-GPA-Standardized-Testing-Common-App industrial complex. That complex has successfully killed career and technical education (CTE), which values skills other than taking tests, writing essays, and pleasing teachers. Which makes us an outlier internationally since in other developed countries, 40-50% of high school students are enrolled in vocational education and training.
In our current college-for-all system, Reeves sees insufficient motivation and aspiration in boys. Far too many boys are demotivated – suffering from what Mark Fisher terms malaise – and turn to video games as a result. For Reeves, the cause is biological. Given differential brain development, boys benefit from – and are motivated by – more immediate goals than getting into college in a few years then graduating into uncertainty four + years after that. Goals like winning a video game, or – more constructively – completing a project with a tangible outcome (i.e., not a five-page paper). Or doing a job for a real employer no matter how small or menial, or successfully selling something, or even just completing schoolwork with the prospect of a specific employment outcome in the near-future. Plus, as Reeves points out, many boys are more interested in interacting with things than with people, like fellow students and teachers in a classroom environment.
Of Boys and Men proffers a number of policy fixes to address the K-12 gender gap including having boys start school a year later and recruiting more male teachers (elementary school is only 11% men, middle school 28%, high school 40%). To Reeves’ list, I’d add changing the way teachers teach: less lecturing, more learning-by-doing. We also need more ways to assess skills in middle and high school beyond sitting quietly at a desk to take a test or write an essay. Performing for an audience of only one, with written feedback and evaluation tucked away in an online gradebook – and little to no opportunity for gratification from social approbation (unlike, say, on a playing field) – is unlikely to be the ideal form of assessment for everyone.
As if these aren’t hard enough, restoring teenage male motivation to close the gender gap will require even more fundamental changes. Not just re-investing in CTE, as Reeves also suggests, but connecting CTE to what comes next. Because it’s Sisyphean to rebuild CTE in a college-for-all environment where the path to college admission is a higher GPA requiring honors and AP classes weighted on a 5.0 scale, not feeble 4.0 CTE classes. There’s simply no rejuvenating CTE without rethinking college-for-all.
The good news is that the steps to establish clear, low-or-no-risk post-high-school pathways – where young men will be less likely to zig-zag – will be even more motivating to boys than a robust CTE program alone. These are earn-and-learn options like work-integrated learning, internships, co-ops, and apprenticeships. And in order to help students pick the right one, we need career discovery that’s much more than junior year check-the-box in College and Career Readiness platforms like Naviance. We need multi-year career discovery starting in middle school – as American Student Assistance has been ably advocating – and integrated across the curriculum.
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Last month a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania wrote in the New York Times that given the “prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as… finance and consulting… can secure us worthwhile futures,” careerism is ruining college. While the author’s lofty Penn experience may have been diminished by pedestrian career concerns, she misses the forest for the trees. Careerism isn’t ruining education; what’s ruining education is a colossal shortage of clear, low-risk career pathways outside of finance and consulting.
Or so the public thinks, as demonstrated by last month’s Jobs for the Future survey of nearly 2,000 registered voters. According to the survey, the two most popular education and workforce policy proposals, each commanding north of 80% – and bipartisan – support are:
Our current college-for-all system hasn’t served half the population well. This is a big reason everyone is suddenly talking about faster + cheaper alternatives to college, particularly apprenticeships. And why the Democratic Party seems to have stepped back from its 15-year-long college-for-all agenda. More dramatically, Vice President Harris has changed course. Perhaps it takes a woman to recognize the harm college-for-all has done to men. It also could be more pragmatic: better to engage boys and men where they are so they don’t retreat – in Reeves’ words – “to the online manosphere where they will be reassured that… liberals are out to get them,” emerging only to attend rallies and vote for candidates who articulate, mirror, and/or amplify their grievances.
College-for-all has not been for all. Just as college was harmful to Mr. Pants, it should now be clear to all that it’s hurt millions of other misters.