A Generation of American Men Give Up on College

That needs to be addressed by civil rights legislation. Colleges should be forced to declare men a minority and give them special scholarships and allow lower entrance scores.

Or it could be that women are flocking to liberal arts schools and men are pursuing jobs. Look at STEM majors and see if the discrepancy is still there.

Men probably do realize they can go in the trades and make more money without going bankrupt.

The article is behind a paywall, but why would they go?

Many are finding out that trades pay way better and you don't have to spend 4 years in school and amass significant debt to enter one. At this point you're just paying to be indoctrinated.

Of course, being the WSJ, they boys they interviewed are probably soyboys who are afraid of working anywhere but Whole Foods or Starbucks.

A young man graduating high school can do better for himself by learning a trade/niche than going to a university.

One of my boys, who would breeze through any college, chose to go into fire fighting. He got hooked on Mike Rowe's "How I heard It" podcast and there was nothing his mom could do to convince him to go to college.

He will pick and choose advance courses he wants in the future, but he is very level headed about his goals.

More girls to pick and choose from for the guys that go.

I'm not sure how they can be surprised by this when all you have to do is look at the landscape out there for young men.

First off; if you aren't going to school to study a STEM subject or something related to finance, simple economics should tell you that it's not worthwhile, or a bad investment. It's only exacerbated by colleges running up the costs through government intervention and the ongoing bloating of their administration. For fun look a the number of university administrators now compared to say the mid 1980's. It's mind blowing. Never mind the almost overt anti-male culture being perpetuated on campuses. Can you blame a young male for not being interested in having propaganda aimed at them daily as part of their educational experience?

Also as part of the education process; the bloat driven by administrations has expanded all types of educationals programs. Most of these programs have little to no interest from male students. So women will still flock to college to study these low ROI programs, where men simply don't find much of the curriculum relevant or even interesting. Anecdotally, even in the 90's when I was in school, I couldn't count how many programs and courses were available where I'd ask "why the hell are they teaching that". I'm sure a lot of us have shared that experience.

Second; there is a massive shortage of people for skilled labor and trade related jobs. There are high paying and plentiful jobs that appeal predominantly to men and represent a very appealing option to someone that isn't interested in leaving school close to $200k in the hole. As someone mentioned before, these are jobs that you don't have to deal with superficial and to be blunt, ridiculous corporate cultures just to do your job.

Third; the meritocracy in the jobs and the career paths that you get with a degree is dead. Chasing diversity, they've intentionally left men behind. Ironically, this has had a pretty big effect with minorities. You get left behind by the education system and once you get into the corporate space, they intentionally work to leave men behind there as well. Once you cut off pathways to success, people will find other solutions. If that solution also means that you don't have to accept massive debt and deal with a structure that has been built around quotas rather than merit, even better.

Last; the alternative educational resources have blown up over the past 20 years. If you have a very specific set of interests, there's no need for a bloated, government driven, broad university education. If you want to zero in on subject matter, it's extremely easy to get a free or very low cost education. YouTube, online certificate courses, Khan Academy, et cetera. The long view that I see is that Universities are becoming like newspapers, less and les relevant every day. There are other ways to get educated and most of them won't leave young men in massive debt and lead them to career paths where they aren't valued.

OVerall; it's a pretty simple formula for driving men away from college and into other areas of work, compounded by the fact that might actually end up being more successful in the long run.

This is exactly what the country needs. Less college enrollment leads to less indoctrination.

These people have plenty of avenues for success that don’t require paying to have the way you think reshaped to fit a political agenda.

Most college educated guys these days are in debt, broke and recently had their power turned off by a guy who elected to go to a trade school instead...

I told my little sister to go to college to be a nurse, which she is doing, because if you don't know by now from the endless stream of tik tok videos during a pandemic; nursing is one of the easiest fields of work with a strong 6 figure salary, respect, job security, and ability to work anywhere

I would not tell my kids to go to college or join the military like my parents told me. I would tell them to work a construction trade and start when they were 18, and teach them how to manage their money

Title 9 and quotas, working as intended.