Fewer and fewer men want to go to college. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal they are now trailing female college students at record levels. At the close of the 2021-2022 academic year women made up 59.5% of college students, which is an all time high, and men made up 40.5%. All told, U.S colleges and universities have 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
The main question coming out of this study is - why is college and its intended experience being sold effectively to American women as necessary to advance in their lives but not to American men?
There are all the obvious reasons men are opting out of college in a post-covid world. What was once seen as an almost necessary next step in order to launch into adulthood is now getting a second look. The rising cost of college is leaving young adults entering their twenties with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt for degrees with little guarantee of a job afterward.
Fewer and fewer men want to go to college. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal they are now trailing female college students at record levels. At the close of the 2021-2022 academic year women made up 59.5% of college students, which is an all time high, and men made up 40.5%. All told, U.S colleges and universities have 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline
And who wants to attend college when they miss out on the social elements of the experience – fraternities, sororities and in-person learning – but are forced to do remote learning from their room, yet still end up paying the same tuition as during regular pre-covid times.
I have nothing against the Ivy League. I went to Columbia University and for the most part, aside from the fact that I was one of what felt like four Republicans on the entire campus, I enjoyed my time there and got much - both educationally and socially - out of what is considered one of the most premier institutions in America.
But today, attending an Ivy League school tends to inspire a very different reaction than it once did. Like everything in the culture war, Ivy League degrees are now seen as being synonymous with having a level of contempt for many Americans, and inspire in other people visceral disdain for the elites who believe it is their right to run our country.
Today's college experience has already exported much of this culture war outside the Ivy League – into less exalted colleges and also into the companies and government departments that now employ them.
I used to give speeches at colleges regularly. But after an incident with some particularly angry students who felt the very presence of a conservative woman on their campus offensive, I thought the entire experience however was ultimately not worth the insufferability of trying to reason with what seemed like spoiled, radical overgrown children, not young adults about to take on society.
Comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have spoken out about the absurdity and impossibility of trying to perform comedy in front of college audiences just waiting to be triggered.
While going to college was once a rite of passage for education and socialization and a foundation of a better career, now, it seems more like a place of hysteria, irrationality, and speech codes, a place filled with landmines both in and out of the classroom.
Two white students at Arizona State University have been forced out of a 'multicultural learning space' after activists took issue with Police Lives Matter stickers emblazoned on their laptops
The conservative cliche is that this is just an example of leftist professors indoctrinating naive young people. But in reality, the opposite seems to be true - it is the students who are the aggressors, deplatforming and
