Why the College Gender Gap Should Worry Every Parent (Not Just Parents of Sons)
The senior college application meeting ran late, and I could see the exhaustion in the room. Parents were crowded into the school library, clutching packets of deadlines and scholarship forms. In the back, a group of boys sat slouched in plastic chairs, half-listening. One of them, Marcus, had started at a four-year university the previous fall and dropped out by Thanksgiving. Now he was at our meeting with his mom because he was considering a local community college.
“I don’t know why I have to go at all,” he said, not loudly, but enough that the mom next to me turned her head. “My cousin did two years of college and he works at the Amazon warehouse making twenty-three an hour. My dad says college is a racket.”
His mom sighed. She looked tired of arguing. I’ve seen this scene play out a lot lately, in different versions: a son who says school isn’t for him, a nephew who doesn’t see the point, a brother who takes one online class and gives up when the login doesn’t work.
It’s easy to read these moments as individual teenage complaints. But taken together, they’re part of something bigger. The gender gap in college enrollment is no longer a small gap. Across the country, roughly 60 percent of college students are women, and men’s enrollment has been falling for years. It affects every community, and it’s not just a “men’s issue.” It’s an economic problem for everyone.
The uncomfortable part is that many boys aren’t rejecting college because they have a clear plan. Marcus had a vague idea that trade school might work, but he hadn’t applied anywhere. He hadn’t looked up salaries or shared housing costs or what happens when the warehouse shift runs out. He just had a strong feeling that college was for other people—mostly girls, mostly people who liked sitting in classrooms.
That feeling doesn’t come out of nowhere. By the time boys reach high school, many have had years of school experiences that quietly tell them they don’t belong in the academic world. In middle school, they’re more likely to get detention for blurting out answers. Their handwriting is messy, so teachers mark them down. They want to read hunting manuals or graphic novels, and the school library is stocked with realistic fiction about emotions. None of this is anyone’s deliberate choice. It’s just how the system has evolved, and boys have adapted by checking out.
The economic part is where it gets serious. College degrees still lead, on average, to higher lifetime earnings and lower unemployment. When a large group of men stop getting degrees, they miss out on income growth. But the rest of us also lose: employers face a smaller pool of skilled workers, especially in fields like nursing and teaching that already struggle to attract men. And because women are now earning more than men in many young households, families become more fragile financially. If a relationship ends or one person loses a job, there’s less of a buffer.
At the classroom level, I see teachers doing their best, but they’re stretched thin. The biggest change isn’t a new curriculum. It’s the way we talk with boys about their futures.
I watched Marcus again a few weeks later when he came to my office to sign up for a college-prep workshop. He didn’t want to be there. His mom had pushed him. The workshop leader asked everyone to say one career they were curious about. Marcus said “welding,” almost defiantly, then added, “But I’m not doing that either, probably.”
The leader didn’t push back. She asked, “What’s the first step to find out if welding is a good fit?”
Marcus shrugged. “Take a class?”
“Where would you take one?”
“I don’t know. The career center?”
“Let’s look it up,” she said, pulling out her phone.
This small moment mattered. She didn’t ask Marcus to revise his dream or pretend the four-year degree was the only path. She just pushed past the dead end of “I don’t know” into a concrete next step. That’s what a lot of boys are missing. They hear the message that college is valuable, but they also hear that the entire college application process—the essays, the test prep, the FAFSA—is designed for someone who already believes the game is worth playing.
Many parents I talk to assume that if a son says he doesn’t want to go to college, the best response is to respect it and back off. But there’s a difference between respecting a choice and letting a premature dismissal harden into a forever plan. One practical way forward is to shift the conversation from “Are you going to college?” to “What kind of life do you want to live, and what training will you need to get there?” This sounds simple, but it changes the question from an identity test to a logistical one.
Parents can also help by doing the math out loud. When my own son was in high school, he was convinced he would do an apprenticeship in construction. That may work for him—I wasn’t dismissive. But I asked him to look up three things: starting wages for an apprentice versus a journeyman, the cost of living in our area, and what retirement benefits looked like at a small construction company. He did it, mostly to prove me wrong. He came back surprised at how much the starting wage was, but also curious about the ceiling. That curiosity is more important than any final answer.
Teachers can play a role too, but it has to be low-key. A male English teacher I know assigns one non-traditional book a semester—like Into the Wild or The Perfect Storm—and invites boys to discuss it during lunch. No assignment, no grade. Just food and conversation. About seven boys show up consistently. He doesn’t turn them all into literature fans. But they start to realize that school can be a place where their interests are taken seriously.
The larger issue is that this gap isn’t going to solve itself. When I see national headlines about the economy needing more nurses engineers and electricians, I notice that the “nurses” part is directed at women and the “electricians” part is directed at men. We’re still sorting kids by old categories while the actual job market blurs them. Men need to go into nursing and teaching too, and women need to go into cybersecurity and plumbing. But the brightest kids are the ones who get past those categories, and right now, too many boys are opting out of the entire higher-education system because it feels like a foreign country.
Marcus ended up applying to the community college in the spring. He enrolled in a machining certificate program and one general education class. His mom sent me an email saying he was annoyed about the English requirement. But he went to class the first week and did the readings. She wasn’t celebrating—she said it could fall apart any semester. I appreciated her honesty.
There’s no clean ending to this story. The gender gap won’t close because one boy applies to community college or one teacher reaches out. It will close in small decisions, made over years, by parents who keep asking questions and kids who keep being allowed to change their minds. For now, I’m just watching Marcus on a Tuesday afternoon, carrying a backpack that seems a little less empty than it was in October. That might be enough for today.
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