Why Are Fewer Young Men Enrolling In Higher Education? What Parents Should Know About The 40% Threshold
The fluorescent lights in the counseling office are already dimmed, the last of the parent-teacher conference cookies are crumbs on a paper plate, and my feet are throbbing from four hours of standing and sitting. It’s 7:45 on a Tuesday night, and the only person left is Mrs. Carter, here to talk about her 12th grade son Jaden. She twists the cap off her water bottle, leans forward, and says what I’ve heard from at least a dozen other moms of senior boys this year: “He has a 3.2 GPA, he’s the best kid with cars any of us have ever met, but he won’t even look at any colleges. Not even community college. What do we do?”
I pull up the enrollment intentions for our graduating class on my laptop. This year, 58% of the girls in our senior class plan to enroll in some form of higher education next fall—2-year, 4-year, trade programs, all of it. For the boys? That number is 42%. Nationally, men now make up just 40% of all undergrads in the U.S. That’s the threshold no one seems to want to talk about.
I’ve been a high school guidance counselor at this small suburban working-class school for 12 years. When I started, the split was almost even: 51% men, 49% women planning to go on to higher ed. Every year, the number for boys slips a little. Two years ago it was 45%, last year 43%, this year 42%. It’s not a sudden drop, it’s a quiet disappearance. I hosted a Common App workshop last September, and out of 31 students who showed up, 22 were girls. Only 9 boys. The ones who did come were the star quarterbacks and the AP physics kids, the ones who already knew they were going to college. The rest just didn’t bother.
A week after Jaden’s conference, I pulled him out of his auto shop class to talk. He leaned against the doorframe, work boots scuffed, and told me straight: The local tire shop offered him a full-time job paying $17 an hour as soon as he graduates. That’s $35,000 a year before taxes, right now. Why would he take on $10,000 in student debt to get a degree in automotive technology, when he can learn the job on the job right now? “What do I need a 5-page essay on To Kill a Mockingbird for to change a tire?” he asked. It’s a fair question.
A lot of the talk I see about this gap blames boys for being lazy, or blames schools for favoring girls, but that’s not what I see day to day. What I see is that for a lot of young men, higher education just doesn’t feel like it’s for them, and the immediate reward of a full-time paycheck feels way better than the promise of a better job four years down the line. A lot of them got pushed out of advanced classes in middle school because they got a couple of detentions for talking or horseplay, so they’ve already labeled themselves “not a school person” by the time they hit high school. A lot of them come from families where no one has gone to college, so filling out applications feels like trying to read a map in a language you don’t speak.
After I talked to Jaden, I didn’t tell him he was wrong for wanting to work at the tire shop. Instead, I pulled up the numbers for the automotive service management program at our local community college, and printed them out for him and his mom. Starting pay for a tech with a degree at a local dealership is $26 an hour, right out of school. After three years, you can move up to service manager, which pays an average of $72,000 a year. To get that promotion, you need the associate’s degree—most dealerships won’t hire you for management without it. That $17 an hour at the tire shop tops out at $45,000 a year, even after 10 years. We sat down and added it up: over 10 years, the degree would put him almost $300,000 ahead, even after counting tuition and the year of pay he’d give up to go to school. He thought about it for a week, then went on a tour of the program. He applied last month, and he’s starting this fall.
That’s the small, concrete thing most parents and teachers miss. We either push 4-year university as the only successful path, or we write off higher ed entirely for boys who like working with their hands. But the truth is, most of the good-paying trade jobs now require some sort of higher ed credential to get past entry level. You don’t have to push Harvard on a kid who loves fixing cars, but you do have to help him see the difference between the job he can get right now and the job he can have in 10 years with two years of school.
What does that look like in real life? Instead of asking your 11th grade son “What college do you want to go to?” ask him “What kind of work do you not mind doing every day, and what do you need to learn to get paid well for that?” If he says he wants to do construction, don’t just leave it there. Spend one afternoon looking up the requirements for a contractor’s license in your state—most require a 2-year degree or 8 years of apprentice experience to qualify. Write down the numbers for both paths, side by side, so he can see what he’s choosing. If you’re a teacher recommending students for advanced classes, go back and check your list if you have twice as many girls as boys. More boys get minor disciplinary referrals, that shouldn’t knock them out of running for classes that would open doors to higher ed later. If your son says he wants to work a year before college, help him apply anyway and defer enrollment—most schools let you do that for free, so the option is still there if he changes his mind.
Last week I saw Jaden at the grocery store, loading a bag of dog food into the bed of his new used truck. He told me he already bought his first set of tools for the program, and he was looking for an apartment near campus for the fall. We talked for five minutes, then he waved and left. As I pushed my cart down the cereal aisle, I thought about the four boys I’m working with this year who already say they don’t want to apply to any program after graduation. The 40% threshold isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet. It’s hundreds of kids every year in every high school across the country who don’t connect the dots between what they love doing and the training that can help them get paid what they’re worth. It’s quiet, it’s slow, and no one’s really talking about it. But it’s there, one parent conference, one kid, one choice at a time.
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