Why the College Gender Gap Is Growing—and What Parents Can Do About It
The college brochure sat on the kitchen table for three days before my son finally pushed it aside. We’d been circling the topic for weeks—college visits, application deadlines, the word “future” hanging in the air like a smoke alarm. “I just don’t see the point,” he said, not angry, just tired. “Everyone keeps telling me I should go, but nobody can tell me why it’d be worth it.”
I wanted to give him a tidy answer. Instead, I noticed something I’d been missing: he wasn’t lazy, and he wasn’t scared. He just didn’t believe the story anymore.
That conversation stayed with me, partly because it matched a pattern I’d started seeing everywhere. At school pick-up, I’d listen to the senior boys talk about cars, video games, and how many hours they could work at a warehouse. The girls were comparing scholarships and dorm lists. My son’s school sends dozens of girls off to four-year universities every year. The boys? A lot of them just drift.
The numbers back this up. Women now earn roughly 60% of all bachelor’s degrees. Men’s college enrollment has been falling for years, even before the pandemic made everything worse. The gap isn’t small, and it isn’t getting better. It’s now completely normal for a high school classroom to have a handful of boys who say they’re “not college people” before they’ve ever actually tried.
But here’s what I kept circling back to: this isn’t just a problem for boys. It’s an economic crisis for all of us.
When men don’t pursue higher education, they earn less over their lifetimes. They’re more likely to be unemployed or out of the workforce entirely. They’re less likely to marry, and more likely to live with their parents into their thirties. Neighborhoods and towns lose the tax base and the small-business energy that educated workers bring. The economy doesn’t care about gender—it cares about skills. And if half the population is checking out of the system that builds those skills, we all feel it eventually.
The tricky part is figuring out where the disconnect starts.
I remember sitting in the bleachers at my son’s baseball game, talking to another mom. Her son, a straight-A student in middle school, had just told her he wanted to be an electrician. She was proud, but also worried. “I don’t know how to help him anymore,” she said. “The school keeps saying college, college, college. But he keeps saying he wants to do something with his hands.”
That’s when I started to understand. For many boys, college has become an abstract, expensive, four-year delay to real life. They don’t see themselves in it. They don’t hear about professors who love their subject—they hear about debt and GPA requirements. They don’t get a vision of a future that feels meaningful. They get a checklist.
So what can parents and teachers actually do? A few things helped in our house.
First, I stopped asking, “Where are you going to college?” and started asking, “What kind of life do you want when you’re twenty-five?” That changed the conversation completely. My son said he wanted a house with a garage and a job where nobody breathing down his neck. Instead of arguing with him about applications, I showed him what different paths could get him there. We looked at salaries for trade jobs, community college programs, and yes, four-year degrees in fields he actually cared about. The point wasn’t to push college. It was to help him connect an everyday future to the work he’d have to do now.
Second, I stopped treating reading like a school assignment. Boys often fall behind in reading early, and by high school, many have decided they’re “bad at it.” But my son would read forum posts, game guides, and Wikipedia pages for hours. That’s still reading. We started talking about things he cared about—how engines work, the economics of streaming, why wars start—and I’d find books or articles on those subjects. One night, I read the same article about supply chains he was reading, and we argued about it for an hour. That argument taught me something: boys don’t need to be forced into books. They need to see that reading is how you learn things you actually want to know.
Third, we made a deal about asking for help. My son had never once gone to tutoring. In his mind, it meant he was stupid. I told him a story about my own first year of college, when I failed a statistics class and had to retake it over the summer. I didn’t tell him to be better. I just told him how it felt. Then we agreed he would try one tutoring session for a class he was struggling in, with no judgment, and if it didn’t help, he didn’t have to go back. He went three more times. The teacher said he just needed someone to explain it differently.
And finally, I tried to shift how I talked about effort. Too many boys hear, “You’re smart, you’re just lazy,” or “Boys mature later.” That lets everyone off the hook. It treats struggle as a character flaw instead of a normal part of learning. I started saying things like, “That assignment doesn’t make sense yet, and that’s okay,” and, “You’re allowed to be confused for a bit.” It sounds small, but it took the pressure off. He didn’t have to have all the answers. He just had to stay in the room.
None of this is a perfect solution. My son didn’t suddenly fall in love with college applications. We had a long, slow spring where he worked at a coffee shop and watched his friends go off to school. He’s now taking a couple classes at the community college, not because he wants a degree yet, but because he wants to try an auto mechanics program. I don’t know if he’ll ever get a bachelor’s degree. Maybe he won’t. But he’s not checked out anymore.
The gender gap in college enrollment won’t close overnight. It will close in kitchens and classrooms, through conversations that feel a little awkward, through reading about things boys love, through letting them fail and ask for help without shame. We can’t make every boy want college. But we can stop letting them slip away before they ever decide.
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