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For many families, a season of applying to college lies ahead; a moment of reckoning about the reality of opportunity in our country. Yet despite recent debates over opportunity gaps, there is still one major (and surprising) gap we ignore. The millions of young men who are not going to college.

Nationally, 59 percent of college students are female; many campuses, like mine, have a gender imbalance, with the student body over 60 percent women and less than 40 percent men. And the gap only expands when we consider student retention; the six-year graduation rate is six percentage points lower for men than for women.

In contrast to issues of race and class, this disparity challenges our usual notions of opportunity. After all, men continue to earn more than women for the same work and have more access to the top jobs. So, why is it that men are falling behind in higher education? And why should we care? For most of history, women had very little educational opportunity, and the college spots available to them were in gender-segregated schools with fewer resources. The Ivy League, for example, didn’t admit women until the late 1960s. It would be decades before the most elite schools reached gender parity.

Wait for it…

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And gender bias still lingers in American education, from pre-K through college.
If women now outperform men in high school and apply to college in greater numbers, isn’t that just a tribute to their grit and determination?

So, she’s laying down the assumption that fewer men in college and fewer men graduating from college is a factor of women ‘out performing men” with “grit and determination”. Are there no other explanations?

Maybe TOO MANY people are going to college. Maybe women are more likely to choose college when it doesn’t make financial sense for them; taking on huge college debt for a worthless degree.

Are colleges complicit in this Faustian bargain, as they continue to raise tuition and fees beyond the rate of inflation, while diminishing their academics with critical theory crap, and wasting money on diversity equity and inclusion staffing and programming.

But back to her illogical argument about those underachieving men.

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Universities themselves have limited tools to fix the gender issue because we come too late in the process. We lack the power to narrow the gap in the applicant pool.

Many schools try to balance their numbers somewhat by quietly creating affirmative action for male applicants. Making it easier for men to get into college than women raises real issues of fairness, however, and may also fuel the differential in graduation rates if more male applicants on the margins are admitted.

So, affirmative action raises issues of fairness? But only when it’s applied for men, not when it’s applied for women and minorities?

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We often encourage in our daughters a focus on schoolwork over other time-consuming — though possibly life-enriching — extracurricular activities.

This, some have argued, helps girls perform better in school. It also may make girls more perfectionist and anxious, and thus less willing to take healthy risks and to be brave, traits which may set them back in the workplace.

So, it’s the patriarchy that’s hurting the girls and that’s how men are falling behind? That’s her explanation?

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With boys, we are more likely to reward confidence (particularly for those who also enjoy other privileges of race and class). That confidence is supremely useful, but it can devolve into swagger unmoored from actual performance.

So, boys are not going to college and are dropping out in greater numbers because of their unmoored swagger bolstered by race and class privilege?

So it’s the rich white boys were are suddenly talking about? And it’s their own fault they are less successful than those gritty girls?

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We also glorify boys who buck rules and expectations, rather than those who visibly try hard in class. We accept a higher level of aggression in boys than girls, and boys are disciplined far more often in school. We encourage resilience in boys, but possibly by teaching them not to reach out when they need help. And by entertaining them with tales of violence rather than stories of navigating relationships, we hobble their ability to navigate the world. I read a book of female biographies called “Rebel Girls” to my seven-year-old daughter, encouraging her to be brave and ambitious. But I have come to realize that we also need stories of how amazing it is for boys to study hard at school, how cool it is to work to earn an A.

This is pure fantasy, and can only be imagined in the mind of a post-modernist feminist, who conveniently sees boys and girls as identical and undifferentiated except for the nasty patriarchical culture that fricks them up.