Why Fewer Young Men Are Enrolling In College: What Parents Need To Know About The 40% Threshold
Last spring, I sat across from a mom in my high school counseling office, twisting her car keys around her finger while her 17-year-old son Jake stared at a scuff on my linoleum. “His grades are fine,” she said. “Bs in everything, no suspensions. But he won’t open the Common App. He won’t check the box for community college. He says he’s just going to get a job with his uncle’s landscaping company, and that’s that.” I nodded, and after they left, I pulled up my semester count of seniors planning to enroll in any two or four-year degree program after graduation: 62% of girls, 38% of boys. That 38% isn’t a fluke, either. National data puts men at just over 40% of all undergrads now, a threshold we crossed a few years back that no one seems to want to discuss.
I’ve worked part-time as a college counselor at this small suburban high school for seven years, and I’ve watched the gap widen every year. Ten years ago, we were at 45% male enrollment. Seven years ago, 42%. Now we’re hovering right under 40. It’s not just low-income schools, either – our school is middle class, 90% of our students graduate on time. I see it in the class rosters too: this year’s AP Psychology class has 21 girls and 4 boys. Honors English 12 has 17 girls, 6 boys. It’s not that boys aren’t capable. Half the boys I see who don’t apply have decent grades, the same as the girls who do apply. They just check out long before senior year.
My next-door neighbor’s son Tyler graduated two years ago, and he never turned in a single application. He works full-time at a local lumber yard, makes a steady wage, and spends his weekends hunting. I asked him once why he never considered college. He shrugged and said, “All the stuff they talk about there – writing papers, internships, all that – it feels like it’s for the girls. All anyone ever tells me is I’m too loud, I sit wrong, I don’t turn my homework in on time. Why would I want to pay tens of thousands a year for someone to tell me that for four more years?” That line stuck with me. It’s not that boys don’t want success. It’s that school, for a lot of boys, has felt like a system that wasn’t built for them, for so long that by the time they get to senior year, they don’t even want to try for the next step.
It’s easy to turn this into a fight about gender politics, but that’s not helpful for the 17-year-old kid staring at his shoes in my office. What I’ve found works is small, concrete shifts that most parents and teachers can do without overhauling their whole life.
First, stop framing four-year college as the only acceptable first step after high school. When Jake’s mom stopped bugging him about applying and let him do a 10-week pre-apprenticeship for electrical work the summer after graduation, he found he liked having a skill that paid well right away. Six months in, he found out the local union requires an associate’s degree in applied science to move up, so he’s enrolled part-time at community college now, working during the day and taking classes at night. He wouldn’t have touched that degree straight out of high school, because it felt like someone else’s goal. When he got to pick the order, it became his.
Second, when you do talk about college, tie it to their specific interest, not generic lines about “getting a good job.” I see so many parents say “You need a degree to make a living” to a kid who spends every weekend rebuilding truck engines, and it goes in one ear and out the other. Instead, try “The mechanical engineering program at the state college has a student build competition for off-road trucks – you could go there and work on that, and get paid to design engines after you graduate.” It’s the same degree, but it’s tied to something he already cares about, not a vague future someone else planned for him.
Third, adjust small things in middle and high school to stop penalizing boy energy before it becomes disengagement. One of our math teachers started offering standing desks and letting kids who get fidgety walk a lap around the room every 20 minutes two years ago. She went from 12 out of 30 boys failing her class to 2 out of 30. It wasn’t that the boys got smarter – she just stopped counting their need to move as a behavioral infraction that tanked their grades and made them hate school. A lot of people still default to writing off disengagement as “just how boys are,” but that’s just as harmful as punishing every little movement. Small adjustments keep them in the game long enough to consider college later, if that’s what they want.
I have a 16-year-old son of my own, and I still catch myself defaulting to the old script. Last month, I asked him when he was going to start looking at colleges, and he pointed to the 3D printer he’s been running in our garage, printing custom parts for local racers. “Why would I go now?” he said. “I’m already making money doing this. Maybe later, if I need the degree to design bigger parts.” That makes sense to me now. We don’t need to push every 18-year-old boy into a dorm next fall. We just need to stop letting them disappear from the pipeline entirely, one quiet senior year at a time. The 40% threshold isn’t a crisis to panic about, but it’s a sign something is off. It’s long past time we started talking about it.
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