Why Fewer Boys Are Going to College—and What Parents and Teachers Can Do About It
The junior parent night at our high school smelled like every school event I remember from my own childhood: floor wax, damp coats, and coffee that had been sitting too long. I sat in the third row with Jack, who had made it clear he didn’t want to be there. The guidance counselor was walking us through the Common App, financial aid, and college deadlines. Jack had his arms crossed and his eyes on his phone. My daughter, two years younger, had already made a list of schools. Jack couldn’t tell me what subjects he liked.
At one point, the counselor put up a graph showing that women now make up nearly 60 percent of undergraduates. A parent in the back asked if that was new. The counselor said it had been trending that way for decades. Then she moved on to scholarship deadlines. Nobody gasped. We just sat there in our folding chairs like it was trivia.
But it’s not trivia. It’s a quiet crisis happening in homes like ours, in classrooms full of boys who aren’t failing and aren’t succeeding either. They’re just drifting.
Jack isn’t the kind of student who gets into trouble. He gets B’s. He turns things in. But when I asked him what he thought he might do after high school, he said, “Get a job, I guess.” When I asked what kind of job, he shrugged. That shrug scared me more than a bad grade would have.
Part of this is about how schools teach and when boys learn.
Boys are more likely than girls to be suspended, to repeat a grade, and to drop out by the end of high school. In college, they’re more likely to be the first ones to leave. And by the time they reach eleventh grade, many of them have already decided that school isn’t for people like them.
I’ve spent years in classrooms, and I’ve seen the pattern up close. Schools tend to reward early reading, neat handwriting, sitting still, and organizing tasks. None of those are bad things. But a seven-year-old boy who develops language skills later, or who needs to move his body to focus, can easily get labeled as difficult. By ten, he’s learned to shut down. By fourteen, he’s stopped asking questions.
This is not about every boy. Plenty of boys love school, and plenty of girls struggle too. But the overall trend is hard to ignore. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy working to help girls pursue STEM fields and leadership roles. That work matters. But in the same hallways, we’ve quietly let boys slip backward. And when a young man says college isn’t for him, we sometimes accept it as just the way boys are.
Jack used to build elaborate contraptions with his grandfather. He loved watching videos about how engines worked. Somewhere around eighth grade, those conversations stopped. Teachers weren’t asking what he was building anymore. They were asking about reading logs and essay outlines. He passed everything. He just stopped caring about the next step.
Then something changed. Not because I said anything brilliant, but because I stopped pushing college brochures and started paying attention to what he actually did with his time.
His grandfather came over one weekend to fix an old riding mower. Jack sat on the driveway and watched. My father-in-law didn’t lecture him about career paths. He just handed Jack a wrench and said, “You’ll feel when it’s loose.” Jack spent the afternoon doing the oil change. By dinnertime, he was explaining how small engines work.
I almost opened my mouth to make a joke about him becoming a mechanic. I’m glad I didn’t.
Instead, I looked up the community college’s evening program. They had an introductory class on small-engine repair specifically for high school students. I left the webpage open on his computer. Three days later, he said, “Can we go see the shop?”
We walked through the garage, met the instructor, looked at the equipment. Jack didn’t say much. But he wasn’t slouching. For the first time in months, he looked like someone who had a reason to pay attention.
If you have a son or a student who is drifting, the hardest part is not knowing where to start. The college talk often makes it worse. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is too abstract for a kid who can barely tell you what he wants for lunch. Try different questions. Ask, “What class makes you look at the clock the most?” That answer tells you more about boredom than “What’s your favorite subject?” Ask, “What would you do on a Tuesday if you didn’t have school?” Then listen without correcting him.
In the classroom, the most important shift is making work less abstract. I remember teaching an argument-writing unit years ago. The boys in my class couldn’t get excited about a generic prompt like “Should school uniforms be required?” It meant nothing to them. When I changed the prompt to a real local issue—whether the city should build a skatepark behind the middle school—those same boys started writing actual paragraphs. The difference wasn’t their ability. It was the connection.
That’s the lesson I keep coming back to. For many boys, a task has to feel real before it feels worth doing. Reading about a topic is one way. Building a model is another. Acting out a scene, making a video, teaching the class, doing a five-minute presentation on a question they picked themselves—all of it counts as learning. The activity doesn’t have to be flashy. It just has to connect thinking to doing.
We also need to stop treating everything that isn’t a four-year degree as a consolation prize. Community college, trade school, apprenticeships, the military—these are not fallback options. For a lot of young men, they are better choices. But when adults talk about college as the only real ticket to success, we tell boys who are headed somewhere else that they’re already behind. That message is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This year, Jack is taking that engine class at the community college two evenings a week. He still leaves his English essay until Sunday night. He still rolls his eyes when I remind him about deadlines. But he also told me the diesel program might let him skip two courses after he graduates. He has a plan now. Not a perfect plan, not a finalized one, but he’s no longer pretending he doesn’t have a future.
I don’t know if he’ll finish the program or decide to go somewhere completely different. Six months ago, I would have needed a neat answer. Now I think the answer can stay open. What matters is that he feels like someone who belongs in the story of his own life.
The college gender gap isn’t going to close just because we tell boys to try harder. It’s going to close when we make school feel less like a waiting room and more like a place where what they actually care about counts for something. That’s going to take longer than one evening parent meeting. But it’s worth the time. That kid in the third row, slouched in his chair—he isn’t lost yet.
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