Men are falling behind very quickly, but it’s easy to miss the trend if we focus on long-term data and not recent students and graduates.
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When GMP issued the Call for Submissions regarding males in education, I knew I should respond, though I fear I have more questions than answers. I work as an educational researcher in a three-college community college district in California. I have an interest in this issue both as a researcher and as the father of a six-year-old in our educational system. Though I’ve seen some of the data, particularly for my own district and its colleges, I still have more questions than answers. I’ll list some of the questions below; maybe my fellow writers will have some answers. One of the frustrating things is that the scope of the problem is often understated. Until a generation or so ago, women still faced significant discrimination in education. They still face some challenges, particularly in fields where they are underrepresented, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The gap that had existed in educational outcomes earlier masks the dramatic shift in outcomes today. Men are falling behind very quickly, but it’s easy to miss the trend if we focus on long-term data and not recent students and graduates.
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The first issue is enrollment in the first place. Statewide in California, as of fall 2013, 53% of community college students are women; only 46% are men. That disparity is higher in all three of the colleges in my district, two of them are more than 60% female. One thing that can be instructive is to see how that disparity fluctuates over time and hypothesize about the reasons. Locally at least, we saw the biggest disparity during the housing bubble a few years ago. Homes were significantly overvalued in some of our communities and jobs were plentiful in the construction trade. In Tulare County, where I live, the unemployment rate dropped into the single digits for the first, and only, time in my memory. The trend was artificial, but it affected our enrollment. We were desperate for students during that time, especially men. The gender disparity went above 2:1 for a while. Men who could find work simply didn’t want to come to college.
Question #1: Men, when they can find work, will often forgo college for the workforce. To what extent is this due to the pressure to provide for families and how much is due to being turned off by the educational experience?
But it isn’t just enrollment. Once in school, men are failing at higher rates. We did a study using outcomes data several years ago. We defined success as achieving a degree or certificate, transferring to a four-year college, or being ready for transfer. In our study, at two of our three colleges, women were one third more likely to succeed within six years. We don’t really know the reasons, but we’d like to.
Question #2: What factors lead men to be less successful in education? Is it the programs we offer, the culture of education, the criminal justice system, economic conditions, or to some degree, all of these?
Trends in the economy and in our programs cannot be ignored. Among our most successful vocational programs leading to good jobs is nursing, a female dominated field. Many of the male-centric programs: automotive, building trades, etc. have gone by the wayside, victims of changing economic and educational trends. These programs are expensive and must continually justify their existence to state and federal funders and employers. This leads to another issue. In the first few years, as the feminization of education became a trend, it didn’t seem to matter as much. Men could get good-paying jobs without a college degree as long as they were willing to work hard. Industry trends have made this no longer the case. As Dwayne Matthews of the Lumina Foundation put it in a presentation I attended a few years ago, without at least some postsecondary education in today’s world “you will be poor.” Men are losing out just as the stakes have become very high. Then we have to wonder if the trend has become self-perpetuating. The feminization of education has led to a male leadership gap in the field of education. There may be one, but I have yet to see a male teacher at my son’s school. The trend extends to leadership at all levels. It is likely a coincidence, but all three of the college presidents in my district are women, as is the Chancellor. My boss and the two others in my department are all women. Obviously, we have men in leadership as well and I don’t know of any discrimination. Nonetheless, the long-term trend is unmistakable. Again, it is masked by historical trends in the other direction, but women are beginning to dominate at all levels of education.
Question #3: Has the feminization of education led young boys to view the field, and perhaps schooling itself and doing well in school, as a feminine attribute? To what extent does this lead them to devalue traits and skills that are becoming ever more crucial in our world?
Several years ago, our district participated in the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE), a student survey that examines how colleges are doing on a variety of measures that correspond with success. I was working at just one of the colleges at the time, and one of that college’s lowest rated items was the number of books students read, on their own, for pleasure. We broke this question out by gender and found that men were less likely to read than women. This isn’t surprising; it’s a society-wide trend. Market forces being what they are, publishers have taken notice and market heavily toward women. Book covers are designed to appeal to the female demographic and books geared toward men are less likely to be published in the first place. (I guess this means I have a trifecta of reasons to be interested in this topic. Not only am I an educational researcher and father, but I am working on my first novel. Will there be a market for it?) Part II of this two-part series scheduled for Monday, August 18. ______ Image credit: Marco Bellucci/flickr
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The post Men in Education: More Questions Than Answers (Part 1) appeared first on The Good Men Project.