Why Fewer Boys Are Going to College — and What Parents and Teachers Notice Too Late
The first thing I noticed was the quiet. Not the kind of quiet that settles over a classroom during a test, but the heavier kind—the quiet of a boy who used to argue about everything from history class to homework policy, and who now just shrugs. His name was Marcus, and I taught him sophomore English. By junior year he was still in my class, but he wasn’t really there. Head down, hood up, earbuds in. When I asked him to stay after class one day, he didn’t resist. That’s what worried me most. He just sat there, waiting for the conversation to end.
“You’re not even going to fight me on this?” I asked.
“What’s the point?” he said. Not angry. Just tired.
That was two years ago. Marcus didn’t apply to college. Neither did a lot of his friends. I remember looking at my roster that spring and realizing something odd: of the 28 seniors I was advising, only 9 were boys headed to a four-year school. Nobody else in the building seemed alarmed. We had a district-wide conversation about girls in STEM, which was important. But nobody was asking where the boys were.
The numbers are actually stark, if you look. About 40 percent of college students in the United States are now men. That’s down from 57 percent in the 1970s. Female undergraduates outnumber male undergraduates by a wide margin—roughly three to two nationally, and in some states it’s closer to two to one. And in many K-12 classrooms, boys are already behind: they receive the majority of discipline referrals, they dominate special education placements, and by high school they’re significantly more likely to be disengaged.
We talk about this in the teacher’s lounge, sometimes. Then someone says something like “boys mature slower” and we move on. But that’s not really an explanation. It’s a way of not looking at the problem.
What I started to notice, after Marcus, was a pattern. The boys who drifted away from school weren’t disinterested in learning. They were disinterested in what learning had become—a constant regimen of worksheets, deadlines, and compliance-based tasks that started in elementary school and intensified every year. By middle school, many of them had decided that school wasn’t for them. And by high school, they’d built an entire identity around that rejection.
I remember having a conversation with Marcus’s mother at parent-teacher conferences. She sat down, looked me in the eye, and said, “I don’t know what to do with him anymore. He used to love building stuff. He’d take apart my toaster just to see how it worked. Now he won’t even do his math homework.”
He still does the work when he’s interested. He’s just not interested.
We talked for a while about what Marcus’s day actually looked like. He woke up at six, sat through seven hours of classes, most of which involved listening to teachers talk or staring at a screen. Then he had two hours of homework he didn’t see the point of. On weekends, he worked at his uncle’s auto shop and could tell you exactly how a brake system works, why one engine oil is better than another, and how to fix a motorcycle from ’87 with duct tape and determination. He was capable. He was smart. He just didn’t score well on the standardized tests that mattered.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe, after teaching for over a decade: a lot of boys aren’t disappearing from college applications. They’re disappearing from school itself, long before senior year.
There’s research on this that’s worth paying attention to. Boys are more likely than girls to be held back in elementary school. They’re more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and to be suspended. They read less for pleasure, and by eighth grade their writing scores lag significantly behind girls’. Much of this isn’t biological destiny—it’s a mismatch between how boys tend to learn and how schools are structured. Kindergarten now looks like first grade did a generation ago. The expectation is that five-year-olds sit still and decode words by January. But a five-year-old boy’s fine motor skills develop, on average, more slowly than a girl’s. The result isn’t that he catches up later. The result is that he gets labeled “behind” and starts to believe it.
I saw it with my own son. He’s ten now. He’s brilliant in ways that have nothing to do with school—he can build anything out of cardboard, he remembers every fact about every planet, he notices when I’m sad and asks if I want a hug. But he’s struggling in math because the curriculum demands he show his work in a specific format, and he gets frustrated when his method doesn’t match the teacher’s. We’re working on it. But I think about how easy it would be for him to decide that school isn’t for him either.
What can parents and teachers actually do? I’m not offering a grand solution here—I don’t think there is one. But there are some small, concrete things that make a difference.
First, it helps to separate “effort” from “output” when talking to boys about school. Instead of asking, “Why didn’t you finish your homework?” try, “What was getting in the way?” This sounds simple, but it changes the conversation from one about character to one about problem-solving. Marcus’s mom would later tell me that when she stopped asking him why he was “lazy” and started asking him what felt impossible, he actually talked to her.
Second, schools need to make room for projects that involve building, fixing, and doing. This doesn’t have to be a full woodshop class—though that would help too. It can be a history teacher who offers extra credit for making a diorama, or a science teacher who allows a student to demonstrate a concept through a physical model rather than a slideshow. When Marcus’s biology teacher let him build a functioning model of a heart out of a water bottle and balloons, he passed that unit with an A.
Third, and this is the hardest one for parents: let them take a year off. If your son finishes high school and isn’t ready for college, that doesn’t have to be a failure. Plenty of boys need a year of working, earning money, and figuring out what they actually want. One of my former students worked at a landscaping company for a year before enrolling at a community college. He’s doing well now, and he says that year of physical labor is why—it gave him a reason to want something different. The pressure to go straight to a four-year university is real, and it’s often counterproductive.
Here’s the part that unsettles me, though. Some of the boys who disappear are not failing. They’re just not playing the game. They’ve looked at the cost of tuition, the debt they’d carry, the uncertain job prospects, and they’ve decided it’s not worth it. And you know what? In some cases, they’re right. The labor market for trades is wide open. Electricians and plumbers can make excellent money without a bachelor’s degree. The problem isn’t that these boys are making bad decisions. The problem is that we pretend any other path is invisible.
So why isn’t anyone talking about the 40% threshold? I think because it’s uncomfortable. It challenges the narrative that the system is working if you just try hard enough. It forces us to ask whether we’re holding boys to standards that don’t fit them, and whether we’re willing to redesign schooling to meet them where they are.
I don’t have a tidy answer. Marcus is 19 now. He’s got his own small tool set and he’s working full-time at a shop in town. He tells me he might take a community college course in auto mechanics next year. I hope he does. But I’m not going to push him. What I’ve learned is that pushing boys doesn’t usually get you where you want to go. Listening—and making room for the things that actually matter to them—does.
We’re a long way from fixing this. But I’ve started paying attention to the quiet differently now. It’s not always disengagement. Sometimes it’s a boy thinking carefully about what he sees ahead of him, and deciding that the path everyone expects isn’t the one he wants to walk. The question is whether we’ll make other paths visible, or keep acting like there’s only one road that counts.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Fewer Boys Are Going to College — and What Parents and Teachers Notice Too Late