The War Against Boys (5 page)

In 2006, the
Portland Press Herald
ran an alarming series of reports about the educational deficits of boys in Maine.
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Among its findings: “High school girls outnumber boys by almost a 2:1 ratio in top-10 senior rankings,” and “Men earn about 38 percent of the bachelor's degrees awarded by Maine's public universities.” According to the report, boys both rich and poor had fallen seriously behind their sisters. But the director of Women's Studies at the University of Southern Maine, Susan Feiner, expressed frustration over the sudden concern for boys. “It is kind of ironic that a couple of years into a
disparity between male and female attendance in college it becomes ‘Oh my God, we really need to look at this. The world is going to end.”
⁶⁷

I can sympathize with the professor's complaint. Where was the indignation when men dominated higher education, decade after decade? Maybe it is time for women and girls to enjoy the advantage. That is an understandable but misguided reaction. It was wrong to ignore women's educational needs for so long and cause for celebration when we turned our attentions to meeting those needs. But turning the tables and neglecting boys is not the answer. Why not be fair to both?

In feminist Betty Friedan's celebrated 1963 book,
The Feminine Mystique
, she said that American women suffered from severe domestic ennui—“the problem that had no name.” Today the problem Friedan described hardly exists. For most American women, especially young women, the problem is not the futility and monotony of domestic life; it is choosing among the many paths open to them. Finding male partners as ambitious and well educated as they are is another challenge. Life for women may be difficult, but the system is no longer rigged against them. The new problem with no name is the economic and social free fall of millions of young men.

Thomas Mortenson, a policy analyst at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, began to notice negative trends for young men twenty years ago. He was certain that journalists, educators, and political leaders would pick it up and run with it. When that did not happen, he wrote about it himself in a 1995 fact sheet entitled “What's Wrong with Guys?”
⁶⁸
He noted that the women surpassed men in the rates at which they graduated from college in 1991, acknowledging that the gender gap was “widening.” He asked, “When the labor market offers such rich rewards for the college educated—both men and women—why have only women responded?” Mortenson foresaw the profound negative effects of male underachievement on the American economy and the family. He also noted the high psychological toll it would exact from men themselves. As he told an education reporter, “Most men define themselves by their work and must be productively engaged.”
⁶⁹

Unfortunately, Mortenson sounded the alarm during a period when
the media, the education establishment, and the government were focused on the AAUW-engineered girl crisis. Congress had just passed the Gender Equity in Education Act, the Department of Health and Human Services had launched Girl Power!,
⁷⁰
and
Reviving Ophelia
was on the bestseller lists.
⁷¹
No one was paying attention to boys, and the problem that has no name went unnoticed. Mortenson, a mild-mannered, just-the-facts-ma'am Joe Friday from Iowa, was no match for the girl advocates and their buzz machine.

In February 2011 a small miracle happened. The Harvard Graduate School of Education, once the epicenter of the silenced- and shortchanged-girl movement, published a major study that acknowledged the plight of males. It recognized the real problem that has no name. The study,
Pathways to Prosperity,
points out that a high school diploma was once the passport to the American dream; in 1973, 72 percent of the American workforce had earned only a high school diploma—or less. Nearly two-thirds of them made it into the middle class. “In an economy in which manufacturing was still dominant, it was possible for those with less education but a strong work ethic to earn a middle-class wage.”
⁷²
Not any longer.
As the report makes clear, since the 1970s, “all of the net job growth in America has been generated by positions that require at least some post-secondary education.”
⁷³
The new passport to the American Dream is “education beyond high school.” And today, far more women than men have that passport. As
Pathways to Prosperity
reports:

Our system . . . clearly does not work well for many, especially young men. In recent years, a yawning gender gap has opened up in American higher education. Men now account for just 43 percent of enrollment in our nation's colleges, and earn only 43 percent of bachelor's degrees. Not surprisingly, women also account for 60 percent of the nation's graduate students.

This dramatic chart accompanied the report:

Figure 5: The Growing Gender Gap in Our Nation's Colleges: What Are the Implications?

Women now account for
57%
of college students

Women earn
57%
of college degrees Men earn just
43%
of college degrees

Women now account for
60%
of graduate students

Source:
Pathways to Prosperity
, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2011.

A few months later, in the summer of 2011, the Brookings Institution published a study that reinforced the message of the Harvard study. Michael Greenstone, a professor of economics at MIT and senior fellow at Brookings, along with Adam Looney, another Brookings senior fellow, released a report on the fate of marginally educated men in today's workplace. It confirmed Mortenson's predictions—and more. To give one dramatic example, for men ages twenty-five to sixty-four with no high school diploma, median annual earnings have declined 66 percent since 1969. Say the authors, “Men with just a high school diploma did only marginally better. Their wages declined by 47 percent” (
Figure 6
). Not only have men with minimal educational credentials suffered severe setbacks in wages—a large number have vanished from the full-time workforce.

Figure 6: Change in Male Earnings, 1969–2009

Source: “Trends: Reduced Earnings for Men in America,”
The Milken Institute Review.

Why have men suffered this decline? As jobs in manufacturing, construction, farming, and mining have disappeared and the United States has moved toward a knowledge-based economy, men have failed to adapt. At the same time, the education establishment, as well as the federal government, looked the other way. Male workers with only a high school degree, say Greenstone and Looney, have been “unhitched from the engine of growth.”
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According to these two economists, “Male college completion rates peaked in 1977 . . . and then barely changed over the next 30 years. This slowdown in educational attainment for men is puzzling because attainment among women has continued to rise, and higher education is richly rewarded in the labor market.”
⁷⁵

These rewards are already in evidence. In major cities across the United States, single women ages twenty-two to thirty with no children now earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts (
Figure 7
). According to the
latest Census Data, since 2007, the number of young men (ages twenty-five to thirty-four) living with their parents shot up from 14.2 percent to 18.6 percent. For young women the rates have remained steady—around 10 percent (
Figure 8
). The Population Reference Bureau notes, “The share of young men living at home has reached its highest level since the Census Bureau first started tracking the measure in 1960.”
⁷⁶

Source: Reach Advisory, New York, New York.

Figure 8: Share of Men and Women Ages 25–34 Living with Their Parents, 2000–2011

Source: US Census Bureau, Current Population Survey. Graph from Population Reference Bureau, September 2011.

At the conclusion of their report, the Brookings authors offer suggestions on “the long road back.” One of their top recommendations: more career academies for high school students that blend academic instruction with workplace experience. In other words, more schools like Aviation High School. Given the current climate, how likely is it that will happen?