Richard Reeves (mentioned in this article), had what I thought was an informative discussion of exactly this topic on EconTalk recently.

They discuss the pipeline problem and shifting behavioral expectations that no longer favor boys in education. In short, one of the major theories proposed is that education has grown to place much more emphasis on conscientiousness, relative to aptitude or performance. For whatever reason, girls and women outperform men in conscientiousness in pretty much every culture. This mirrors my observation of changes in education. When I went to a top high school and college, and the advanced coursework was characterized by a focus on performance over conscientiousness. Testing would determine 90% of the grade, and homework was largely an optional tool to prepare.

This contrasts with what I see from young family members, where school seems to be a test of endurance and compliance. They routinely have >4 hours of homework and busywork day.

The podcast also seaways into the shifting role of adult men and masculinity in US culture, particularly as it relates to the atomization of our communities and loss of third places.

Here is the podcast if anyone is interested:

The Problems of Boys and Men in Today's America (with Richard Reeves)

https://www.econtalk.org/the-problems-of-boys-and-men-in-tod...

I think the author is reversing cause and effect and so not coming to a terribly useful conclusion. It rather seems to me that fewer men (proportionally) are attending college because the value proposition has substantially declined. Similar things have happened in many other careers formally dominated by men.

In some cases this is simply due to oversupply leading to declining salaries. For example decades ago a Bachelors of Philosophy would qualify you for a number of high paying jobs. Now it qualifies you to be a checkout clerk. You can't expect to approximately double the number of candidates without reducing wages.

In the particular case of college it's been ever more clear for more than ten years now that college is mostly only valuable if you treat it as a trade school (ie. BSc of CS into software development), if you need it for immigration purposes (eg. the booster Masters), or if you are part of the academic or political elite where a PhD or two is table stakes. For everybody else college costs too much in time and treasure for the employment advantages.

In other cases the underlying market has changed. One interesting example of this is Science Fiction writers. Starting about a decade and a half ago a ton of mid-career mid-listers who wrote science fiction switched to other genres, mostly mystery, because the market for SciFi kind of dried up. You see many more female writers in SciFi than you used to, but they don't make the same kind of money SciFi writers would have thirty years ago -- the money simply isn't in the genre anymore.

If you look at the authors examples I think most of them fit this latter case. Being the tutor to the scion of a business magnate is probably just as good and competitive gig now as two hundred years ago, but 'teaching' as a market has filled out immensely since then and is now at least 25% day care -- something which cannot be prestigious because it is common and cannot command large wages.

The author is confusing "toxic masculinity" with "masculinity."

Posing their question another way - why aren't we talking about why there's been a rise in toxic masculinity, since that is a big factor in explaining why fewer men are going to college?

I don't know if I agree with the hypothesis that college or an education is seen as "effeminate" and therefore turning off male students.

The proposal in the footnote:

    > If you actually wanted a solution for boys to want to go to college, bring back male-only colleges. Watch college suddenly become really popular for boys again.

Were men always such snowflakes?

Edit: the comments are just as ridiculous:

    > I hadn't thought about it before, but if sizeable numbers of women started entering the workforce I would leave.  Workplaces with large female cohorts are substantially different...Also.. at the risk of making people angry, have you considered that when all the men leave, things get a bit shit? 

Embracing ignorance is a trait of masculinity? Ok. That's a plausible evaluation.

The author links to a piece about how "it's harder to be a man than a woman", which basically asserts (I'm generalizing liberally) that people are too weak to question social norms and are simply unwitting victims of what society teaches them. Perhaps what's discussed there can be applied to college enrollment.

If the issue, which the author appears to suggest, is that men can't help but try to be and want to be what they're taught and told they should be, then that leads to wondering what can be done about it. But so long as these masculine insecure men lean right, perhaps at least in part due to their inability to see beyond us-versus-them, and so long as it's socially acceptable to be right leaning, with all the implied racism, sexism, xenophobia and so on that go with it, things won't change much.

Growing up, I was staunchly anti-religion. Religions have done more to harm humankind than any other thing, yet we're taught to "respect" religion and religious beliefs, even when those religions support misogyny, war, slavery, pedophilia, et cetera. I saw through that and marveled at how hard it was for most other people to see through it. But now, in 2024, we (most of us) at least try to squelch our desire to punish the victims when they speak out, which is a start.

Perhaps it's time to do the same for toxic masculinity and right-leaning tendencies. Perhaps it should be socially acceptable to call men out when they're being assholes, to lean in to what they derisively refer to as cancel culture. Perhaps right-leaning beliefs should wholesale be called out for encouragement of unacceptance, particularly and especially when using religions as justification, while at the same time wanting those same religious beliefs to be "respected" because they include some good. Frankly, I'm tired as hell at the same people who want to punish immigrants and poor people saying that they believe in following Jesus, as though Jesus would say, "sure, send those needy fuckers packing".

It's not like men are nice and accepting when people toe the line. Let's lean in to being the assholes that "masculine" men already tell us we are.