A college degree can be expensive, and it does not guarantee a job, plus you have a huge student loan to pay off. That is why American Men think it is not worth it to go to college anymore.
They're likely right, too. Turns out... employers minds are elsewhere. The degree no longer serves as a useful signal.
In nearly two decades I still haven't found cause to finish my degree. Hell, I don't even have to practice what I was hired for.
Can often find the job is 'whatever we decide'. Education, in some/several senses, is undesirable. Instead of falling for it, may find it better to be too dumb to notice or too tough to care about hoodwinking.
Also military recruitment is way up, which is another avenue young men (and women) can take to acquire employable skills without going to college.
Generally, Women do not want labor jobs and enjoy a desk job instead. This is why men are paid more than women in general the labor jobs pay more and require a trade school.
"Am I the one who's wrong?"
"No, clearly it's the college-aged men that have to weigh the consequences of their choice who are wrong"
Basically zero macro social trends have exactly one cause.
Example: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
It’s not strictly true in all cases but generally it seems that free or subsidized higher education results in rationing and lower accessibility (which is not really such a bad thing if other options like trade schools etc. are available).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...
US policy has specific features that have resulted in many people of limited means pursuing degrees that confer no professional qualification at all.
I used the gpt research feature to explore that so maybe take it with a grain of salt but I think it's not too bad:
> In short, Americans attend college in greater numbers partly because they feel they must (to secure good jobs), whereas many Germans do not feel they need a university degree to have a good career, thanks to the established apprenticeship system and different employer expectations.
https://chatgpt.com/share/680c8d76-d6a8-8010-a4cd-48155198f9...
This matches my own experience as a german citizen, that german "Ausbildung" is a very valid and accepted option. Maybe university enrollment or tertiary education on its own isn't drawing the full picture? Worth to think about
Nowadays, anyone with only moderate skills/qualifications can obtain a college degree --- the primary requirement is money/debt.
Consequently, the marketplace has been flooded with degrees of questionable substance and value.
Lots of people know a degree holder working a job that doesn't require a degree (like truck driver or retail manager) while being saddled with college debt.
Women make up 58% of all college students.
Women hold 67% of all student loan debt.
Personally, I looked but failed to find much to discredit your "less savvy" explanation.
Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col...
> What has changed is an increase in girls. When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college. We’re just not talking about it.
> For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.
> “There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Whatever other factors may exist, college is now at or past the 60% women threshold, so of course men are quitting college. We can expect — to such a degree of certainty, given historical U.S. data that we could place a safe bet on a market about it — that college will be 80% women and in perhaps ten years or less.
It’s cute that Bloomberg is focusing on all the rationalizations that men are coming up with for this — at least some of them have the courage to say that it’s just the “vibes”. A little self-awareness would go a long way towards understanding, but Bloomberg doesn’t go there. Honestly, they should be assessing gender trends at trade schools over the past twenty years and see if those are at risk of becoming incompatible with U.S. masculinity next. What would it do to their president’s domestic manufacturing dreams if men refused to attend trade schools?
The simple fact of the matter is there are hidden biases against men completing college, that favor women completing college.
The same holds true to a large degree in employment with few exceptions.
Making a supposition that the pool of female to male candidates for college is interconnected is a fallacy. It is independent, and based on factors with no current visibility, and there are no guaranteed prospects even if men can somehow complete the struggle session to a degree.
What's worse. Women don't date down. So all those women who got degrees will have a harder time finding mates, will be the bread winner which leaves the men in a role that is unattractive to them, and they will be highly dissatisfied as a result of simple math and gender selection differences.
You don't survive by ignoring reality, and birthrate collapse is going to happen given the myriad of issues that people can't seem to get a mental grasp enough to recognize the underlying problems. When there is a problem, and people can't communicate sufficiently to organize to recognize said problem, nothing gets done. You can't react, and the problem grows until it can't grow any more (at existential crisis). Cascading failures are diabolical because people cannot believe that certain little things cause great big things in time. Evolutionary selection eventually destroys societies based in total control, as those members cannot adapt and fail Darwinian fitness.
I simply don't buy this. A social gathering spot of common age where the male:female ratio is 4:6 or better for men should be swarmed with men. When I was young, I worked in a geographic area that had demographics like that among the 20-30 year old women and it was the sole time in my life that I was "popular".
The problem is the school pipeline. The average girl does significantly better than the average boy across the board (this is documented ad nauseam). If they all apply to college, then with no adjustment, more girls will get admitted than boys.
What happened is that college became required, which means that the "average" high school student must now go to college where in the past only the "upper" high school students would go to college.
The differential between boys and girls is much smaller the higher the average achievement of the "demographic slice" you take.
jnord•9mo ago