The College Gender Gap Isn’t Just a Men’s Issue—What Parents Need to Know
Last Thursday, my son was sprawled across the kitchen table with his phone in one hand and a half-empty bowl of cereal in front of him. His college application was open on his laptop, but he hadn’t typed a word in twenty minutes. When I asked how it was going, he shrugged and said, “I don’t even know why I’m doing this. I could just work at the warehouse with Marcus and make twenty-two bucks an hour.”
I didn’t have a good answer. Not because he’s wrong about the money, but because I’ve been hearing some version of this from him since junior year. He’s not lazy. He’s not failing school. He just doesn’t see college as something for him. And according to every enrollment report I’ve read, he’s not alone.
This isn’t a story about one unmotivated kid. It’s a pattern. Women now make up close to 60 percent of college students, and the gap has been widening for years. For every 100 women who enroll, only about 74 men do. At the current rate, this fall’s freshman class is going to be even more lopsided. And while a lot of coverage treats this as a “men’s issue,” the truth is that it affects everyone. If we keep letting boys drift away from higher education, we’re not just shortchanging them. We’re creating an economy that doesn’t have enough trained workers to fill the jobs that actually pay well.
I didn’t become a college counselor or an economist. I’m just a mom who sat through too many parent-teacher conferences wondering why the boys in the room always seemed a little more checked out than the girls. By middle school, my son’s reading scores had started to dip. He told me he hated English because “we just sit and write about feelings.” His teachers said he was bright but unfocused. They used the word “potential” a lot. Nobody ever said, “Here’s a concrete plan for how to get him from point A to point B.”
That, I think, is part of the problem. We treat college as a natural next step for girls, but for boys we often leave it as an open question. And an open question is easy to answer with an easy job.
I started paying closer attention when I noticed that the boys in my son’s friend group talked about college the way adults talk about jury duty. It was something you did because you had to, not because it would help you. One of his friends said, “What’s the point if I’m not gonna be a doctor or whatever?” Another said, “My dad didn’t go and he’s fine.” Nobody around them was saying, “Look, statistically, a four-year degree still leads to higher lifetime earnings and lower unemployment.” Nobody was saying, “The trades are great, but not every kid who says he wants to work with his hands actually wants to be an electrician—some of them are just scared of being in a classroom for four more years.”
That last part really hit me. My son loves fixing bikes. He can rebuild a brake system in under an hour. He’s genuinely mechanically talented. But when he says, “I’m not a school person,” what he often means is, “I don’t like sitting still and being tested on things I don’t find relevant.” Those are two different problems, and we treat them the same way.
There’s a lot of research about why boys are falling behind. They’re more likely to be disciplined, more likely to be diagnosed with learning differences, and less likely to read for fun. But I don’t think the primary issue is ability. It’s that school feels like a foreign country to a lot of boys. They don’t see themselves reflected in the curriculum, and they don’t have enough male teachers or mentors who talk about school as a path rather than a punishment.
As parents, we can’t fix the entire education system, but we can change how we talk about the future in our own homes. That starts with being specific.
Instead of asking, “Do you want to go to college?” ask, “What would need to be true for you to think college is worth it?” That question changes the conversation. My son told me he’d consider it if he could take classes he actually cared about and if there was a path to a job that didn’t require sitting in a lecture hall for four years. So we looked up schools with strong engineering technology programs. We found one that has a plastics and composites program where students actually make things. He was still skeptical, but he was interested.
Another thing that helped was visiting a campus without any pressure. We didn’t schedule a tour. We just walked around, ate at the cafeteria, and sat in the student union. I didn’t say a word about applying. He saw other guys who looked like him—some in hoodies, some carrying skateboards, some with dirty work boots. It sounded small, but he said, “These are just normal people.” He had imagined college as either a fraternity party or a library full of people smarter than him. Seeing it as a place with regular people was more useful than any admission counselor’s pitch.
I’ve also started pushing back on the idea that college is only for people who know what they want to do. That’s backward. College is where you figure that out. My nephew went in wanting to be a pharmacist, switched to business, and now works in logistics. He’d probably tell you he wasted a few credits, but he’d also tell you he wouldn’t have landed his job without the degree. We don’t expect eighteen-year-olds to have their whole lives figured out. But somehow, when a boy says “I don’t know what I want to do yet,” we treat that as a reason to skip college rather than a reason to explore it.
For teachers, the practical shifts can be even simpler. In my son’s freshman English class, his teacher assigned a project where students could write about a hobby, a job, or an object that mattered to them. My son wrote about rebuilding a lawnmower engine. He got a B, but more importantly, he wanted to write something again. That assignment didn’t require a huge curriculum overhaul. It just gave him a way into the subject.
I’m not saying every boy needs a four-year degree. The trades are essential, and I wish we pushed them more, honestly. But we’ve created a false choice where you’re either “college material” or you’re not, and the line usually gets drawn in middle school. If a boy is quiet in class, slightly disorganized, and more interested in building than reading, adults start saying, “He’s not academic.” That label sticks. By high school, the kid himself believes it.
We also need to stop acting like the only reason to go to college is future earnings. That’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. College builds networks, exposes people to careers they didn’t know existed, and develops the kind of thinking skills that show up in every field. My son asked me, “Why would I go into debt just to get a piece of paper?” I told him, “The piece of paper isn’t the point. The point is that the people who hire, promote, and approve loans tend to expect it. It’s a signal. It’s stupid, but it’s real.” He didn’t love that answer, but he understood it.
I don’t know if he’ll end up enrolling next fall. Some days he’s into it, some days he’s not. We’ve got a few months left, and I’ve learned not to turn every meal into a college counseling session. But I’ve stopped pretending this is just about him. When a whole generation of boys starts falling out of education, we can’t say it’s their fault and move on. They’re responding to a world that hasn’t given them a strong reason to stay.
So we’re trying something different. We talk about college the way we talk about learning to drive—it’s not about whether you love cars, it’s about whether you want to get where you’re going. We talk about the money, but we also talk about what happens at twenty-five, thirty-five, and forty-five. We talk about how the economy is changing and how the jobs that used to support a family without a degree are getting harder to find. None of that turns my son into a future honors student. But it’s keeping the conversation open, and right now, that might be enough.
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