We're Asking the Wrong Questions About Disparities in College Enrollment
A Wall Street Journal article about the gender gap is easy to misinterpret
***Hi! So: Based on the results of a recent poll (thanks for voting in those polls, BTW), there seems to be an appetite for more-frequent, less-in-depth stuff. So, IN ADDITION TO the longer, fancy-pants, frankly-sometimes-a-bit-too-self-serious posts that arrive on Tuesday and Friday, I’ll also send out occasional, shorter posts on more eclectic topics as the mood strikes me. Think of it this way: If the Tuesday/Friday columns are a burger at Denny’s, these columns are one of those pre-wrapped sandwiches you buy at a bus station.
This is the first one of those shorter columns, and…God damn it, it’s 1700 words. Sorry: This one got away from me a bit. But most of them will be shorter, I promise.
And everything’s still free for the time being, unless you’re one of those deeply generous souls/complete suckers who have decided to pay me.
A recent Wall Street Journal article leaves a clear impression: We’re facing a crisis in higher education. Just look at this headline and photo:
Wow. Stark. Look at the expression on his face: That would stick with you even if you didn’t know that the photographer was behind the camera yelling “Look more lost! More! MORE! Still not lost enough — look really fucking lost!!!” But I don’t mean to make light of that kid’s situation: I believe he feels lost. Even though — if you look at the far left of the photo — it seems that he has maybe won an Oscar. But for what — Argo? Obviously, the ones for Argo don’t count.
The article is full of grim statistics: At the end of the last academic year, men made up 40.5 percent of college students, an all-time low. Only 59 percent of men who start a four-year degree finish within six years, compared to 65 percent of women. Men accounted for 71 percent of the drop in college enrollment last year. The implication is clear: This is an outrage. A crisis. A worrying trend that we, as a nation, must address.
Of course, since Turd in the Punch Bowl is pretty much my brand, I’ll go ahead and ask: Is it a crisis, though?
Let’s start with this: What some have called “gap-ism” — seeing every statistical disparity as a problem that must be fixed — is a pernicious disease. Ibram X. Kendi is the High Priest of Gap-ism, but the reflex goes far beyond him and his acolytes. There’s a strain of leftist discourse that seems to believe that, in a just society, the distribution of any desirable thing — money, college degrees, good jobs — will perfectly match societal demographics along any conceivable metric. This is, of course, completely bonkers, and I’ll concede that most people who hold this view actually hold a “soft” version of it — there are few absolutists. But it’s become common to point to any statistical gap and say: “Look, discrimination! The gap itself is the proof!”
Of course, scientific thinking precludes this type of logic. And yes: I’m claiming the mantle of “scientific thinking” even though my background is in the social sciences, which hard science people generally consider to be puttering around the driveway in a Barbie Power Wheels car compared to hard science’s Formula One. I won’t dispute that characterization. But I’ll ask all the biologists and chemists out there to note that even a social science dandy like myself knows that you can’t look at a phenomenon and say “That is definitely caused by a single variable!”
The college gender gap is interesting because no reasonable person thinks it’s caused by discrimination. In fact, I think that’s a big reason why the WSJ ran this article; they wanted to ask “what else might explain this?” And I’ll give them credit for writing an exploratory article that doesn’t lead you by the nose to a single conclusion. But the article has a comedic undercurrent, because amidst all the brow-furrowing and very earnest discussion of what’s to be done, there’s a blindingly-obvious and almost-certainly-at-play variable that everybody knows but no-one in the article quite brings themselves to say.
How do I put this delicately? Guys that age are fucking morons. I was one, I know. Evolution gave us a jolt of testosterone at that age sufficient to motivate us to kill a mastodon with a boulder in the hope that someone in the tribe will find us remotely fuckable, and that physiology doesn’t translate well to sitting still during Mechanics of Composition 101. We’re absolutely blinded by horniness for about a decade; only when you leave your 20s and your brain becomes semi-functional do you realize the depths of the madness that gripped you, and you wonder why society didn’t chain you to a stake in an open field like the feral beast that you were.
I’m being glib for comic effect. I don’t mean to minimize the challenges young guys face, or to imply that their challenges are singular (young women face challenges, too!). But we all know that the late-teens/early 20s period of a guy’s life is…let’s say “interesting”. So, it’s likely that that is a variable, and maybe even the primary variable explaining the gap. It may, therefore, be the case that a 60-40 split represents the distribution of people who are ready and able to go to college. Unfortunately, because this split doesn’t match demographics, colleges frequently discriminate against women. That fact is addressed in the article:
“Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant who previously led the admissions offices at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. “The question is, is that right or wrong?”
I lean heavily towards “wrong”. There’s a bit of nuance here, which I’ll unpack in this footnote.1 But this strikes me as a not-minor injustice enacted to “solve” something that might not even be a problem. Hilariously, the New York Times ran a response article that bluntly agrees: “…some selective colleges discriminate against women in admissions to maintain a gender balance.” I wonder if the New York Times will be as forthright with the word “discriminate” when covering the upcoming Supreme Court case about Harvard discriminating against Asian-Americans. I seriously doubt they will be; my money is on “semantic tap-dance that tries to elide just how profoundly some on the left have their nuts in a vice on this issue.”
The second reason why I’m not convinced that there are “too few” men in college is that I don’t believe that more college is always better. I went to college, and I liked it — I half-read a few good books, and, crucially, it allowed me to get the fuck out of Great Bridge, Virginia. So, it worked for me. But for other people, college won’t be the right way to go. Whether or not to go to college has a lot to do without your individual goals, aptitudes, preferences — it’s a highly personal decision. For anyone to look at less-than-sky-high college attendance rates and conclude that something must be wrong seems symptomatic of an elitist worldview that’s often the unfortunate byproduct of a four-year degree.
Consider one of the young guys profiled in the article: Daniel Briles, a recent high school graduate with a good GPA from Minnesota. Here’s his situation:
He took a landscaping job and takes home about $500 a week. Mr. Briles, a musician, also earns some income from creating and selling music through streaming services, he said, and invests in cryptocurrencies.
“If I was going to be a doctor or a lawyer, then obviously those people need a formal education. But there are definitely ways to get around it now,” Mr. Briles said. “There are opportunities that weren’t taught in school that could be a lot more promising than getting a degree.”
Part of me thinks that this kid is going to be a Dogecoin billionaire in six months. I can sit here at my laptop, reading the Wall Street Journal and thinking “No, young man — invest in your future!” And then he’s going to make insane money selling a song to a video game, or through some Robinhood pump-and-dump stock scam, and then he’ll buy a Maserati and come do doughnuts in front of my modest apartment while yelling “Who’s smart now, Professor College?!?!?”
Again, I’m being glib (though only a bit). But I don’t immediately see what’s wrong with Daniel’s situation. He’s young — he’s figuring things out. We should acknowledge how deeply unfair it is that any of us have to make decisions at that age; the brain isn’t fully developed until age 25, and I hope that future studies suggest an even later age, because I’m 41 and am still sort of waiting for my brain to find another gear. It’s true that a knowledge-based economy puts a premium on certain skills, but that still leaves room for large numbers of people to acquire skills for good careers through avenues other than college. Whether or not to go to college remains a highly-personal decision, and that kid doesn’t need me to accost him on the street, throw him into a van, and say “for your own good, I’m enrolling you in a creative writing seminar at Oberlin!”
It’s also difficult to reconcile the idea that we must have higher college enrollment with the idea that Americans take on too much college debt. And I do believe the latter thing; it’s become clear in recent years that getting people to take out huge loans for degrees of dubious value is a shady business practice at best, and an outright scam at worst. We could boost male college enrollment by encouraging more men to spend $200,000 on a General Studies degree from East South Dakota Technical Bible College, but I’m not sure that would be good. Furthermore, it’s difficult to reconcile the idea that we have to increase college enrollment with the idea that we put too much emphasis on credentialism, which is another thing I believe.
We're asking the wrong questions about disparities in college enrollment. We’re asking “How do we achieve equity in higher education?” We should be asking “What barriers to higher education do people face?”
If someone doesn’t want to go to college and doesn’t go, that’s not a tragedy. It’s only a tragedy if they want to go, but can’t. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but a jet ski bought with cryptocurrency earnings is fucking dope, so factor that in, too.
When we assume that the distribution of people who want to go to college is demographically identical to the general population and view any disparities between the two numbers as ipso facto evidence of a problem to be solved, we’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope. We’d do better to find people who want to go to college but find it difficult, and learn about their challenges. Are the primary barriers financial? Discriminatory? Something else? We can’t know by just looking at statistics. And we should remember that the goal isn’t to make ourselves feel good by engineering Number A so that it matches Number B; the goal is to create a society in which a person’s opportunities aren’t limited by the circumstances of their birth.
As is often the case with preferences in college admissions, there are some extreme cases in which I think they might make sense. The argument here is probably best-made in a 2006 op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz (the same woman quoted in the WSJ article, who I then quoted in this article). I feel that Delahunty Britz distills the issue when she writes: “…gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”
So, that seems to be the concern: Past a certain “tipping point” (a phrase she uses), a school might enter what I’ll call an “estrogen spiral” that makes it less appealing to male and female applicants. This is the problem she describes, and I have no reason to doubt that it exists in some places.
To my mind, Delahunty Britz is making what I see as the “good” argument for preferences: That using preferences to engineer diversity can create benefits that are conferred on the larger group. I agree that this benefit can be real. However, I also think that this benefit is often overstated, and, in fact, I feel that Delahunty Britz makes just such an overstatement in the WSJ article. She says: “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”
This strikes me as an extremely nebulous claim. “That just makes a better society”…does it? What research are you drawing on to reach that conclusion? Also, if we skew our admissions patterns to admit more not-quite-ready-for-college guys, are we really producing “more educated” men? Could we possibly be sending more men through the high-cost diploma mill of poorly-rated colleges? And aren’t you maybe using education as a proxy for earning power, and isn’t it possible that men could increase their earning power by pursuing careers where college isn’t part of the path? She’s making an awfully-big claim that doesn’t seem to have much empirical support.
And you have to weigh that alleged benefit against the very-real damage of discriminating against women. It takes a lot for me to say “okay, yes, the thing to do here is discriminate.” That is: You’re going to have to convince me that the benefit conferred on the group is very real. I’ve conceded that the “estrogen spiral” might be real, and it might be worth discriminating in order to avoid that. But it would almost certainly not be worth discriminating to correct a lesser imbalance; to my mind, a 60-40 split that remains stable is perfectly fine. Whenever we decide to take the major step of discriminating against people based on their ascriptive traits, we’d better have a damn good reason for doing so.
We're Asking the Wrong Questions About Disparities in College Enrollment
Everyone assumes the gender gap means young women are thriving, but some of it comes from socialization that isn't healthy. Women worry more about their performance and what others think. They are twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety disorders. Maybe we should consider backing off instead of pushing an equal number of boys to pick at their skin in secret because they can’t handle not being perfect.
I am really happy that I got an undergrad degree even though I'm not "using" my English degree to "make money." (Is anyone, really?) I'm the type of person who enjoys the book-learning process though. (I also met my husband of 17 years in college--we married at the incredible age of 21 with zero objections from our parents, which now makes me question both our upbringings. Worked out, though.)
That being said, my 8 year old watches this idiot on YouTube known for doing destructive stunts in his mansion and a "24 hours in my Lambo" challenge and I'm like well, fuck.