Why So Many Boys Are Skipping College: The 40% Shift We’re Not Talking About
The gymnasium smelled like rain and old rubber from the wrestling mats stacked in the corner. I was three rows back in the folding chairs at the senior awards ceremony, turning a program over in my hands. My daughter had graduated a few years earlier, but I still came to these things when a neighbor’s kid was up for a scholarship.
The principal worked through the academic honors. Twenty students, one after another, crossing the stage to shake hands and hold up a certificate. When it was over, I counted the names in the program. Four boys.
I wasn’t shocked. I’d taught high school English for eleven years before my own children came along, and the shift had been gradual enough that you didn’t notice it until you looked at a full roster. But on that night, in a gym full of parents who were mostly there for their daughters, the quietness of it bothered me.
The numbers have been public for years. Men now make up roughly 40 percent of college enrollment, down from nearly 60 percent in the 1970s. When I bring this up with other parents, I usually get a shrug. It’s the trades, they say. Or: boys just mature later. Or: maybe college isn’t for everyone, and we should accept that. All of those things can be true, and still, 40 percent is a strange threshold. It took decades to get there, and nobody seems to have agreed it was a good idea. It just happened.
I remember a student from my last year in the classroom. Marcus was bright in the way that never made it onto a report card. He wrote dialogue better than most of the adults I worked with, and he could argue a point until you forgot what the original question was. He was also the kind of senior who showed up to class without a pencil and had to borrow one, who returned essays a week late with the edges of the paper rolled up. In the spring, he stopped coming to the college counseling meetings. When I asked him about it, he said, “College is just more paperwork with better lighting.”
I laughed at the time. But I’ve thought about that sentence a lot. He wasn’t wrong. The application process, the financial aid forms, the immunization records, the housing deposits—none of that actually requires a high IQ. It requires a kind of organized persistence, the ability to ask for help without knowing what question to ask. And for a lot of boys, that’s precisely the skill they were never explicitly taught.
I don’t mean that girls are naturally better at paperwork. I mean that somewhere around seventh grade, your average boy is told to “write it in your planner” and then left to figure out the planner. He doesn’t write it down. He loses the planner. His parents think, He just needs to try harder. But nobody showed him what the steps actually look like, because we assumed he’d absorb them the way his older sister did. Some kids watch their parents organize a binder and just pick it up. A lot of boys aren’t watching.
My friend Elena called me last fall about her son, Jake. He was a junior, a genuinely funny kid with a hoodie permanently attached to his head. He did okay in classes he liked and failed anything he found boring. Elena said the phrase that every parent of a teenage boy knows: “He just doesn’t seem to care.”
We were at her kitchen table, and Jake was in the other room playing a video game. I asked her a different question. I didn’t ask if he had a plan for college. I asked if he knew what the FAFSA was. She said she’d planned to sit down with him at the beginning of the year, but he kept putting it off. I pointed at the closed door to his room. “Would you let him put off getting his driver’s license forever?” I said. “Same approach. You don’t ask if he’s ready. You put on your shoes, walk him to the car, and drive to the office.”
That’s the practical thing I wish more parents knew. If your son is disorganized, you don’t get him organized by nagging. You do the overwhelming task beside him, slowly, while saying almost nothing. You sit at the same table with your own laptop and fill out your own tax forms while he grumbles through his part. You don’t sell it. You don’t say “this is important for your future.” You just say, “I’ll do this with you tonight, for forty-five minutes, and then you’re free.”
It sounds childish. It isn’t. It’s the difference between a task that feels like a mountain and a task that feels like a chore. A lot of boys never learned how to break a mountain into chores because nobody ever stood next to them and demonstrated it.
The other thing I’ve noticed is how rarely we get boys onto a college campus for any reason that isn’t an official tour. My daughter visited schools with her friends in tenth grade. Her brother didn’t step onto a campus until his own orientation. For some boys, a university is an abstract, expensive building where you go to sit in a lecture hall. They can’t picture themselves there, so the whole project feels like a foreign country you’d have to emigrate to. One of the most useful things a parent can do—if you can manage it—is find a speech tournament, a robotics competition, a basketball game, anything that gets a male student on a campus for a reason unrelated to higher education. Let him walk around and see that it’s not a museum. It’s just a place where people eat bad pizza at midnight.
I’m careful not to say too much about trades or apprenticeships because I worry it can become a way of quietly agreeing that boys don’t need college. I have enormous respect for trades. My brother is an electrician, and he makes a steady living doing honest work. But the choice between college and a union apprenticeship shouldn’t be made because the application confused your son and he gave up in November. That’s not a choice. That’s an accident.
Elena ended up sitting down with Jake for three evenings. They filled out the FAFSA, requested transcripts, and—at my suggestion—she made him write his common app essay in the living room, where she could lay out the index cards and they could talk through the structure. He complained the whole time. She told me later that the moment she realized something had changed was when he asked her, “Do you think they actually read these or just scan them?” It wasn’t passion. It wasn’t motivation. It was a question about the mechanics of the process. For him, that was progress.
I think about that threshold of 40 percent a lot as my own son moves through eighth grade. He’s not like Marcus. He’s not like Jake. He’s a decent student, but I can already see the drift. When he loses an assignment sheet, he doesn’t look for it. He assumes it’ll show up. His backpack is a disaster zone. His teachers are patient, and I am trying to be, but we’re all working against the same current. The current says college isn’t really a place for him unless he gets with the program. And nobody has ever shown him—specifically, step by step—what getting with the program actually means.
I don’t have a solution. I don’t think anyone does yet. But I’ve started to believe the first fix is just talking about it out loud. Not the grand culture war version, but the kitchen table version. Four out of ten. Forty percent. That’s a lot of boys. And if we’re not careful, the quiet drift will just keep drifting.
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