Premature male dropout. As in sex, so in college?

Way back in high school, we read a HG Wells short story about a sighted fellow wandering into a valley of the blind.  Wells (I am pretty sure he was the author of that story) did a fantastic job of turning upside down the adage about the one-eyed man being the king of a country of the blind.

As one who for years has been reading, thinking, and writing about boys and men falling behind girls and women in higher education, I find it rather bizarre that by and large society itself pays very little attention to this phenomenon.  For now, I suppose I should simply be thankful that I have not been forced off a cliff, which was the case with the sighted person in the Wells story.

Thus, it is neat to have company with whom I can share this misery.  This book review of The Rise of Women notes:

Starting with the people born around 1950, the rate of men’s bachelor’s degree completion stopped growing, and it stayed stagnant for years. In 1970, 20 percent of men and 14 percent of women finished college. By 2010, women’s graduation rates had “skyrocketed” to 36 percent, DiPrete said, while the rate among men grew only seven points, to 27 percent.
Today, women outpace men in college enrollment by a ratio of 1.4 to 1.

Ok, you say "a ratio of 1.4 to 1" and I have always preferred expressing that as a 60/40 split.  Sometimes, I make it even powerful a point by saying that there are three female students in college for every two male students.

My suspicion is that this ratio will widen a tad more and then stabilize.  I suspect it will get closer to a two-to-one ratio.

I have always reasoned that this trend is is caused by equal opportunities opening up for girls, with boys simultaneously simply assuming that the world hand't changed a great deal and that they would be successful no matter what.  

Boys have historically been trained to think that they needn’t obey rules or work hard because men used to be able to drop out of high school and still earn wages comparable to better-educated women, thanks to jobs in fields like manufacturing, construction and travel. That’s not the case anymore.
Even today, DiPrete said, young men are “overly optimistic” about their ability to earn a livable salary, even though they’re less educated than women. That may cause them to “under-invest” in schoolwork, lowering their academic performance and probability of completing college.

Exactly!  It is not any skills gap as much as the getting things done.  Two days ago, I wrote in an email to a male student "your days are numbered, man :)" and added:

The new reality requires a different approach to understanding gender roles in society.  However, I am worried that gender studies in universities focus more [on the past] atrocious discrimination of anyone who was not a white male

But, as with anything else, it will be a while before academia catches up, thanks to its glacial speeds. 

The review ends with this:

Full-time working women in 2011 earned only 82 percent of what men earned. That’s up 20 percentage points from 30 years ago, thanks in part to women getting more education and access to high-paying managerial positions, but also an internal motivation to get a degree as “insurance” to be able to make a middle-class living.

Yes, female students are playing that long game that life is.  And that is what this Jezebel commentary notes:

[Women,] rather than men, who have the more realistic long-term view of the relationship between debt and earnings. As the study makes clear, it's not that women are more inherently comfortable with a heavy debt burden — it's that women are more likely to see borrowing for education as a worthwhile long-term investment. As Gender and Society editor Joya Misra puts it, "Women's recent advantage in college graduation rates is associated with their relative disadvantage in the job market. At the same time, men's seeming advantages in the short run can lure them away from a surer path — college completion — to longer term economic security."
Precisely because young men still benefit from an enduring wage gap, they are apparently more likely to deceive themselves into imagining that a college education may not be worth the price.

Another student seemed to be concerned that his wife will outearn him, and that could even force them to seriously consider him--the man--as the stay-at-home parent of their infant child.  I reassured him that he will not be the first, and will be joined in that "secondary" rank by many more males in the coming years.  Of course, I then sent him this piece to read as well.  A male architect writes about his life as a full-time homemaker:

All choices have a cost. My architectural skills have a shelf life, and it's likely that I am damaging my prospects for future employment. In general, architecture isn't something I can do halfway, and given the choice, I choose the quality of life we are afforded by me being a full-time homemaker. Our circumstances may change and I may be forced to re-evaluate, but for now, feeling that the benefits far outweigh the professional cost, I want to be a great homemaker supporting a fantastic spouse.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 33 percent of wives outearned their husbands (who may or may not have been employed) in 2006, one-third higher than the figure of 24 percent in 1987. As this number rises, more men will be faced with the decision of what to do when their work is no longer “necessary.” In the case of couples with children, I expect the decision is more sharply defined; for other couples with no plans for children (like us) how will things play out?
Me? The stay-at-home dude abides.

I will keep on blogging about this topic, even if one day the blind mob drives me off the campus!