On American college campuses, the ratio of women to men is approaching 60-40. Of every 100 students who entered college last fall, 58 were women. The trend of more women and fewer men in college has been going on for decades.
For example, this year’s incoming freshman class at UNC-Chapel Hill was only 41.6 percent male. Although group statistical disparities usually set college administrators into a frenzy of concern over “fairness,” and “social justice,” this one elicits only yawns. Stephen Farmer, director of undergraduate admissions at Chapel Hill says, “We really have made no attempt to balance the class. We are gender-blind in applications, very scrupulously so.”
Most college administrators aren’t worried about the increasing dominance of women on campus, but is there any reason why it should concern us? The answer is both no — and yes.
No, because the common idea that among any large population, such as student bodies, we should expect to see all groups of people proportionally represented is mistaken. People make decisions as individuals, each person trying to do whatever is best for himself given his particular circumstances. Students who decide to enroll in college, or not to, make that choice carefully. With each individual presumably making an intelligent decision, the overall balance among groups doesn’t matter.
Since male students are more likely to go into crucial fields such as science and engineering, shouldn’t we worry that the United States will face a shortage of scientists and engineers in the future?
Not really. That is because the set of young men who are not going to college doesn’t intersect with the set of young men who are interested in math and science. The chance that any noncollege guy would have studied those hard disciplines and gone on to work in math, science, or engineering is just about zero.
Although the ratio of men to women in college is not a problem in and of itself, it is indicative of a problem.
For years, there has been a movement in American K-12 education that is built upon the notion that schools must try to make boys more like girls. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the excellent book The War Against Boys calls it the “feminization” of education. The core idea is that most of the world’s problems stem from predominantly male traits such as aggression and competition and the solution is to socialize boys to be more cooperative and nurturing, like girls.
Some of the implications of that theory are that reading material that might appeal to boys (e.g., stories involving adventure or conflict) must be replaced with material that conveys “better” messages. Competition is also reduced or eliminated, as by having students do group projects rather than working individually. Even the games kids play during recess have to be controlled to make sure that they don’t reinforce all those bad latent tendencies in boys.
The result of all this is to make school a lot less interesting for boys. Of course, many still do well, but the tendency is to cause marginal students to lose interest. Far more boys than girls get bored with school and drop out. The feminization of education has much to do with that.
The dominance of women on campus may be alerting us to a serious problem — the fact that early education is turning many boys off from making the most of the chance to develop their minds.
George C. Leef is the executive director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.