Why Aren’t More Boys Going to College? What Parents and Teachers Should Know About the 40% Threshold
The last parent-teacher conference of the year ran late, and I was already turning off the classroom lights when a mom appeared in the doorway holding a crumpled college brochure. Her son, a junior, had been in my English class since September. He was a solid student—B average, sharp when he wanted to be, quick with a joke but slower with a thesis statement. She sat in the front desk and said, “I don’t know what to do with him. He keeps saying he wants to work at the dealership with his uncle. Says college is a waste of his time. Is that just him being lazy, or am I missing something?”
It wasn’t laziness. It was something bigger, and I’ve been noticing it more and more in classrooms, hallways, and kitchen tables around town. We talk constantly about how expensive college is, how the pandemic disrupted learning, how kids are struggling with anxiety and phones. But there’s a quieter story happening right in front of us—one we’re not really mentioning. Somewhere in the last decade, the number of young men going to college started to drop in a dramatic way. In many states, men now make up only around 40 percent of college enrollment. And while we’ve spent years worrying about how to get more women into STEM fields, we’ve barely blinked as the gender balance in higher education has tipped the other way.
I didn’t notice it at first. The classroom is such a female space in some ways—organized binders, reading calendars, participation rubrics that reward raising your hand at just the right moment. The boys who succeed there are often the ones who adapt quickly to that rhythm. The ones who don’t, like this student, fall somewhere in the middle, not failing but not engaged, waiting for something that feels like it matters.
The mom asked me what I thought. I told her the truth: her son wasn’t being lazy. He was making a decision based on what he saw around him. His older sister was in nursing school, his dad worked double shifts at a warehouse, his uncle had a nice truck and seemed happy. Nobody in his world was telling him that four more years of sitting in classrooms would pay off. And honestly, talking to him, I could see his point. The messages boys get about college are often either doom (“you’ll be buried in debt”) or guilt (“you’re throwing away your potential”). Neither one is a compelling reason to take the leap.
I’ve started asking my seniors, especially the boys, why they’re not applying. The answers aren’t what you’d expect. It’s not that they think they’re too dumb. It’s more that they’re tired. Tired of sitting still, tired of being judged on their ability to produce the right answer on demand, tired of feeling like school is a game with rules that keep changing. A lot of them have part-time jobs already. They see a paycheck and a schedule and a boss who respects their work ethic, and it feels more real than a degree they can’t picture.
There’s also something about the middle of the road. We focus a lot on the students who are either desperately struggling or clearly elite. The average-to-decent male student often gets overlooked. He’s not failing, so he doesn’t trigger special services. He’s not exceptional, so he doesn’t get the honors counselor’s attention. He sits in the back, passes his exams with C-pluses, and by junior year, he’s already talking himself out of the whole process. We don’t notice because he’s not disruptive. But he’s quietly disappearing from the applicant pool.
And the numbers back that up. In the United States, women now earn roughly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees. That’s not a trend—it’s a structural reality we’ve accepted without much conversation. When I bring it up at faculty meetings, people shrug. They say, “Well, women are just more motivated.” But that’s too easy. It ignores the fact that boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, more likely to be suspended, more likely to be held back in elementary school. We’ve built a system that rewards self-regulation, verbal fluency, and early organization—skills that many boys develop later, if ever. By the time they hit high school, the message has already been delivered: school isn’t for you.
That’s not to say every boy should go to college. That’s another reason this topic feels so delicate. No parent wants to hear that their son is part of a statistic, especially when the alternative—skilled trades, military, starting a small business—can be perfectly valid and fulfilling. But the quiet disappearance isn’t really about every boy. It’s about the ones who might do well in college but never get the push. The ones who are told they’re not “college material” because they can’t sit through a three-hour lecture on the American Revolution without falling asleep. The ones who would thrive in a major they haven’t even heard of, but nobody ever mentioned it.
So what do we actually do about it?
I can’t fix enrollment rates with a single conversation, but I’ve learned a few things that seem to help. The first is to change the way I talk about the future. Instead of asking, “What do you want to be?” I ask, “What kind of day do you want to have?” Kids answer that differently. The ones who want a desk job say so. The ones who want to be outside, or work with their hands, or travel, or run something—they start to see college as one possible route, not the only route. That lowers the defensiveness.
The second thing I do is introduce information early. By freshman year, I’ll casually mention that a two-year degree in welding or HVAC can lead to serious money and more job stability than a generic bachelor’s. That seems counterintuitive for a teacher who’s supposed to be promoting four-year universities, but it actually works. When we talk honestly about all the options, boys stop tuning me out. They’re used to being sold something; they’re not used to being trusted with a real decision.
Parents can do something similar. Instead of pushing applications and deadlines, they can have conversations about money, lifestyle, and long-term trade-offs—without judgment. Ask questions like, “What do you think you’d want your day to look like at thirty?” and then actually listen. When parents stop leading with anxiety, kids stop leading with defensiveness.
I also try to bring in men who went to college and didn’t become something obvious like a doctor or a lawyer. A first-generation student who now works in video editing. A guy who majored in history and got into project management. Boys need to see that college isn’t just a continuation of high school. It’s a place to meet people and learn skills in a different way. But they need examples of men who were once hesitant themselves.
Since that parent conference, I’ve kept in touch with the mom. Her son did end up taking a college tour, not because she forced him, but because his uncle had a friend who taught at a community college in the city. He saw a machining lab with five-axis machines and asked if he could use them during an open house. They signed him up for a summer program. He’s now considering a two-year mechanical engineering technology degree, which his parents had never heard of. He’s not going to be a doctor, and he’s not going to end up at the dealership. He might make it to a four-year school later, he might not. Either way, he’s back in the game, weighing actual options instead of shutting doors out of quiet resentment.
I’m not sure that’s a happy ending. It’s more like a living, unfinished one. The 40 percent threshold isn’t going to reverse because of one thoughtful uncle or one early tour. It’s going to take years of paying attention to the boys who don’t raise their hands, who aren’t failing but are fading, and who need to hear that they’re not broken for not fitting the mold. We have to ask better questions and listen more carefully to the answers.
And maybe that’s the thing we’re missing. The boys haven’t disappeared from higher education because they don’t care. They’ve disappeared because they don’t feel that it cares about them. We can’t fix that with a brochure. We fix it one conversation at a time, in classrooms and kitchens, when a mom stays late to ask what’s really going on.
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