Why Aren’t More Young Men Going to College? A Teacher’s View on the 40% Threshold
The conference table in the high school counseling office had the usual stack of brochures, a half-empty mug of cold coffee, and a mother sitting across from me with her son’s progress report folded in her lap. Her name was Denise, and her son, Marcus, was a junior I’d taught the year before. He was sharp, funny, and perfectly capable of doing the work—when he decided it was worth doing. Lately, he’d decided it wasn’t.
“He just says college isn’t for him,” Denise said, not looking at me. “But he doesn’t have a plan either. He just plays video games after school and sleeps half the weekend. I keep telling him this is the time to figure it out, but he won’t even look at applications.”
I asked what Marcus had told her about why. She shrugged. “He said school is ‘pointless’ and that he doesn’t want to sit in a classroom for four more years. He says he’s not stupid—he just doesn’t see the point.”
Marcus wasn’t the first boy to say that to me. He wasn’t even the tenth. Over the past several years, I’ve seen it again and again: capable, decent kids—mostly boys—quietly slipping out of the college track, not because they couldn’t do it, but because they couldn’t tell me what it was for.
Nobody is talking about the number, but the number is hard to ignore. In the mid-1970s, men made up a solid majority of college enrollments. Now it’s flipped. Depending on the year and the report, men hover somewhere between 40 and 44 percent of undergraduate students. Forty percent. That means for every ten students walking into a freshman orientation hall, six are women and four are men. That’s not a small gap, and it’s not going away. It’s been creeping in that direction for decades.
And yet, when I sit in faculty meetings or scroll through education news, I don’t hear much about it. We talk about STEM pipelines, student debt, and the cost of textbooks. We talk about college readiness and mental health. But we don’t talk about the way so many boys seem to be giving up on the whole idea before they even see what it might offer.
I remember Marcus in my class. He wasn’t a problem student. He just did the minimum. Finished his work early, stared out the window, cracked jokes at the right moments. One day I asked him what he thought he’d do after high school. He shrugged.
“Maybe work with my uncle’s landscaping crew. He says he can use me year-round.”
“Is that what you want?”
He gave me a look—not hostile, just tired. “I don’t know. It’s not that bad. I’m good at it. And it’s real work, not sitting around writing essays.”
I didn’t argue. The landscaping thing was real. He wasn’t wrong about that. But something in his tone made me think he wasn’t actually saying “I have a great career plan.” He was saying “I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do, and nobody’s given me a good reason to try.”
That’s the part I wish more parents understood. A lot of boys aren’t rejecting college because they have a clear alternative. They’re rejecting it because college has become this vague, expensive thing they’re supposed to do, and nobody has helped them see why a degree might actually matter for the life they want.
So what can parents and teachers actually do? Not the big, dramatic intervention. The small, everyday things.
First, stop asking “What do you want to be?” and start asking different questions. Boys especially tend to shut down when they hear that, because it’s too big and too abstract. Instead, ask things like: “What does a really good day at work look like to you?” or “Would you rather work outside or inside for eight hours a day?” or “Who do you know whose job seems worth doing?” These questions don’t require a plan. They get a conversation going.
Second, talk about money in concrete terms—not as some theoretical “future” thing, but as the actual cost of a life. A lot of boys don’t respond to “education is valuable for its own sake.” They respond to specific numbers. Sit down with them and look up what a bachelor’s degree actually adds in lifetime earnings—or what it doesn’t. Show them what a monthly payment looks like for a $30,000 student loan. Show them what rent costs in their town. Some of them will glaze over. But some won’t. And for the ones who won’t, that’s the beginning of a real conversation.
Third, make sure college doesn’t get framed as the “smart” path or the “soft” path compared to trades. I’m always careful when I talk to students about trades and two-year programs. I want them to know those are legitimate, useful options. But I also don’t want to use trade school as a way to quietly shuffle less-motivated boys out of the college conversation. Marcus talked about landscaping like it was already decided. It wasn’t. It was just the easiest answer he had.
What I ended up doing with Marcus was pretty simple. I pulled him aside one day and said, “I’m not going to tell you that college is something you have to do. But I want you to do me a favor. Look at the websites of three community colleges and pick out one program that looks even remotely interesting. Doesn’t have to be academic. Could be welding. Could be business. Just one. Then tell me what you find.”
He sighed, but he did it. A week later, he came back with a printout for an automotive technology program at the local community college. He said the words “associate’s degree” like they were a foreign language. But he didn’t throw the paper away.
I’m not going to pretend that was a breakthrough. Marcus may still go to landscaping. He may enroll in that program or he may not. The point wasn’t to force him into a decision. It was to show him that the future isn’t one giant binary—college or nothing. There are graduated steps. Two years. A certificate. A degree he can earn while working.
The larger issue is not something one conversation can fix. The 40% threshold feels alarming because it’s a symbol of a bigger shift. Young men are not disappearing from campuses because they’ve all found other paths. Many of them are just drifting. They’re not pursuing anything at all. They’re sleeping late, working part-time, playing games, waiting for something to make sense.
That’s the part that worries me more than the enrollment statistics. Not that boys are choosing trades or apprenticeships—those can be great choices. The worry is that too many boys aren’t choosing anything. They’re just falling out of the system and calling it freedom.
I still don’t know what happened to Marcus. His mom called me once at the end of the school year to say he’d applied to the community college program but hadn’t committed yet. He was still talking about landscaping, but he’d also mentioned the automotive program to his uncle. She said it with a mix of hope and exhaustion.
I told her that sounded about right. Most of the boys I know don’t make one dramatic decision. They make a hundred small, uncertain ones. And if the adults around them can keep asking questions, keep showing them numbers, keep leaving brochures on the table without judgment—maybe that’s enough. Maybe not.
But no one else is doing it. And the quiet disappearing isn’t going to reverse itself.
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