Why Young Men Are Disappearing From Higher Education: The 40% Threshold Parents Need to Understand
The first time I really noticed it was during senior advising in late October. The college application window had just opened, and I had set aside a week of study hall periods to help students draft their personal statements. My roster said I had eleven seniors. Seven were girls. Four were boys. But over the course of that week, only two of those four boys actually showed up to their scheduled sessions.
I didn’t think much of it at first. Senior year has a way of making everyone go a little missing. But when the early application deadline passed, I checked the school’s tracking spreadsheet. Of my eleven seniors, all seven girls had completed at least one application. The two boys who came to my sessions had finished theirs, too, mostly with heavy prompting from their parents. The other two boys had not started a single one.
One of them, a kid named Marcus, was a solid B-average student with a sharp sense of humor. He could explain solar eclipses and the offside rule in football with the same level of detailed enthusiasm. When I caught him in the hall a week later and asked if he’d thought more about applying, he shrugged.
“I don’t know if it’s for me,” he said.
He said it lightly, not with anger or resentment. Just a statement. Like a kid saying he doesn’t think he’ll join the chess club.
“Where does that leave you after graduation?” I asked.
“Work, probably. My uncle has a construction crew. I could make decent money.”
I told him he could also work construction and go to community college part-time, that a lot of kids do that. He nodded, nice and polite, and then said he’d think about it. I knew he wouldn’t.
This is not a story about Marcus failing. Marcus will probably be fine. He works hard, he’s likable, and the trades genuinely need good people. But over the past few years, I’ve started to see Marcus everywhere. He is not the exception anymore. He’s becoming the rule.
Here’s a statistic that isn’t getting near enough attention: women now make up roughly sixty percent of college enrollment across the country. That leaves men at forty percent. And that number has been dropping for over a decade, which is why you’ll sometimes hear people call it the “40 percent problem.” The threshold is significant because once one gender falls below a certain share of enrollment, people start to treat the experience of being the minority as normal. It creates a snowball effect. Boys see that college is mostly full of girls, so they assume it’s not a place for them, so fewer boys apply, so next year’s boys see that too.
And the frustrating part is not that this is happening. Lots of complex forces are in play — grade inflation, the decline of blue-collar jobs, the rising tuition costs that make families hesitate to gamble on a degree that might not pay off. The frustrating part is that nobody in the faculty lounge or the PTA meetings seems to want to talk about it.
A few weeks after Marcus’s casual dismissal of the entire application process, we hosted our school’s college readiness night. It’s the evening when parents come in, sit in the auditorium, and hear from counselors about scholarships, FAFSA deadlines, and writing resumes. As the attendees trickled in, I sat at a table in the back and noticed the same pattern I’d been seeing all year. The audience was about eighty percent mothers. And of those parents, more were women who had daughters applying to college than any other demographic.
I remember a mother of a junior boy approaching me after the presentation. Her son, she said, was smart. He read constantly, mostly history books and war memoirs. He had worked at a local hardware store over the summer and only complained about the “boring paperwork,” not the heavy lifting. His grades were decent, but his teachers kept telling her he needed to “apply himself more” and “stop coasting.”
She looked at me with a mix of exhaustion and confusion.
“I keep telling him college is the next step,” she said. “But he just doesn’t seem to see it that way. He says school is boring and he wants to just work. Is it me? Am I not saying the right thing?”
I’ve had some version of this conversation maybe a dozen times in the last two years. Moms, especially, seem to be the ones carrying the worry, and they all say the same thing: their sons have checked out, not because they’re troubled, but because they’ve quietly decided that the version of success adults keep describing just doesn’t fit them anymore.
The truth is, there are concrete things parents and teachers can do that actually respond to this. They’re just not the things we usually reach for.
First, we have to stop leading with the shame. When a boy says he’s not sure about college, a lot of adults immediately jump to “you’re throwing away your future.” That doesn’t work. It creates a wall. A more useful response is a genuine question like: “What would have to be true for you to want to go?” It sounds too simple, but it changes the conversation from a demand to an invitation. Marcus would have had an answer for that. His answer would probably have been, “If I could take classes that felt real, not just reading and writing.” And that’s useful information.
Second, we need to stop insisting that a four-year degree is the only acceptable path out of high school. This is tough for a lot of educated parents, but the data is moving against the old model. Instead, help a young man create a five-year plan that includes starting at community college while working. It’s a much lower-stakes commitment. One concrete suggestion I’ve given to multiple parents is to sit down with their son and actually look at the class schedules and prices at the local community college. Just browsing a course catalog together can demystify the whole idea. Very often, a boy who “hates school” will surprisingly perk up at a course in welding, or auto tech, or environmental science.
Third, and this is the one I feel most strongly about, is to get them around an older male who isn’t their father and who went to college later in life. Most boys who are drifting toward the forty percent side of this statistic haven’t met a guy in their twenties who said, “I worked for three years, went back and got my degree, and it was the best thing I ever did.” They’ve only heard the terrifying version where you must have everything figured out immediately. They don’t need a lecture. They need an example.
I think about Marcus again. I saw him a few weeks ago at a football game, and he was wearing a safety vest over his hoodie. He’d picked up weekend shifts with his uncle. He told me he was making pretty good money. He also told me, almost as an afterthought, that his mom was pushing him to take one night class in the spring, so he might “try that for a semester.”
I told him that sounded like a good idea. He nodded.
And what I’ve learned, after seeing many boys like Marcus pass through that doorway, is that you don’t break this pattern with big dramatic interventions. You break it with small cracks of possibility. You keep the conversation open. You don’t shame them into decisions. You offer alternatives that don’t look like watered-down versions of the life everyone else expected.
I don’t know if Marcus will take that night class. I don’t know if he’ll get to a place where college becomes something he chooses rather than something he resists. But I do know that the forty percent threshold continues to drop for a reason. It’s not because boys are lazy. It’s because we’ve done a poor job of showing them why they belong on the other side. We’ve told them, instead, all the ways they don’t fit in.
The conversation isn’t finished. Somewhere, in a high school hallway, another senior is staring at a blank application and deciding it’s not for him. The question is whether any adult will sit down next to him and ask, without judgment, why he feels that way, and listen long enough to hear the actual answer.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Young Men Are Disappearing From Higher Education: The 40% Threshold Parents Need to Understand