On the recommendation of Tyler Cowen, I’ve been reading Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men. The most interesting parts of the book are the evidence that Reeves gives for boys doing much worse in school and university than girls, and the solutions that he suggests for improving things. I’m generally impressed by the evidence, but not so impressed by the solutions.
Way back when, they used to hold students back a grade if they couldn't grasp the material taught during a particular grade. Reeves seems to be suggesting that all boys need to be held back a grade. That strikes me as rather draconian, but that's probably because I'm old fashioned.
I suppose I should read the book, but I'm wondering if Reeves addresses WHY boys are so much less likely to attend college than they were in the 1980s. I'll leave out the late 1960s and early 1970s, because college was a way to avoid getting drafted during the Vietnam War. One could argue that women get a bigger payoff from attending college, since they tend to get paid less for the same jobs with the same skills. College lets them compensate for this. Could it be women finding an economic equilibrium that lets them, statistically, at least, do as well as men?
Another, more worrying possibility, is that boys don't find adult life attractive. Some of this could be because of stagnant and falling wages over the past four decades. It's hard to think of oneself as an adult when one is getting paid a decade old minimum wage with no opportunity for advancement. Urban areas used to offer many mid-level job options, but those jobs have been vanishing for decades.
It's important to keep in mind that the number of people attending college has gone up overall. So I don't think it's true that boys are less likely to attend college than they were in the 1980s. (Or the 60s or 70s.) (See, e.g., https://www.statista.com/statistics/236360/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-by-gender/; this isn't per capita (let alone adjusted by size of the age cohorts) but dividing by the size of the US population in 1983 and 2021 suggests that the proportion of boys attending has gone up slightly.) It's just that the proportion of women attending college has climbed way way faster.
Imagine two species of aliens, the boyaz and the girlaz, that are thrown into the same education system. And suppose it turns out that these two species mature at different rates. The standard starting ages for schooling suit the girlaz well enough, but the boyaz (on average, with some exceptions) aren't developmentally ready, and predictably fall behind, never to catch up.
In such a situation, it seems clear that a fairer solution would be to let the boyaz wait and begin schooling at a later age, when they are more developmentally ready (and actually on a par with the younger girlaz). There's nothing especially "fair" about holding starting age fixed, if people vary in how developmentally prepared they are at that age. And there's nothing "unfair" about letting different people start school at different ages if they develop at different rates. Age isn't an intrinsically morally relevant property. Development and maturation seem much more principled measures to use as a baseline. It's not a priori that a "6 yr old boyaz" and "6 yr old girlaz" are relevantly similar in any way whatsoever.
Of course, we tend to assume that human boys and girls are much more similar than two random alien species. But it sounds like the research you're discussing casts some doubt on how far we can take that assumption. It's not a priori that boys and girls develop at the same rate, and so it's not a priori that boys and girls of the same ages ought to be in the same classes. Why would you privilege age in such a way, if it turns out that "boy age" and "girl age" correspond to slightly different measures of expected development?
Yeah, I get the argument here, I just don't think it's particularly different to affirmative action. It seems weird to me to support redshirting but feel strongly that just adjusting up the grades of boys to account for developmental differences is a bad idea. It seems very likely we could get a very good idea of how much better boys will do with an extra year of education, so why not just adjust up their grades (or reduce standards for entry) so as to get the result you want with regards to the number of boys getting into university? Schools do actually do this, and Reeves is strongly opposed to it. His redshirting idea gets extremely similar results to adjustments, but keeps boys out of the labour force for an extra year, without many offsetting benefits as far as I can tell.
If the result you want is “boys get into college at similar rates as girls” than sure, the two are equivalent. But pretty obviously, a better goal is “boys achieve similar levels of learning and competence as girls” and I’d wager this is really what people want when they want to raise college attainment of X group. If the reason boys currently reach lower levels of educational attainment is that they are learning less or learning slower than girls due to developmental differences, then redshirting might plausibly help while your idea of artificially lowering entrance standards does absolutely nothing toward this goal. Maybe in some way you can call both “affirmative action” if you want, but it is pretty obvious to me how those two are substantially different (if you buy the mechanism for why redshirting helps).
I guess I don't really see why trying to ensure that the point at which boys/girls do their exams (or attend college) is one at which they are likely to receive equal grades (and presumably be admitted to college at equal rates) is particularly important other than to equalise rates of admission.
You can see how this roughly operates like Affirmative Action if you consider it being implemented for other groups - you could also have low-income kids starting three years later, kids from different ethnic minority groups starting a certain amount of time later, etc.
The reductio is that we get to the point where you can create a model to tell each specific child exactly how many months they should be redshirted based on various variables that means they'll have learnt the same amount as the average pupil.
Many objections to affirmative action are based on people getting a role they’re not qualified for (so e.g. if boys’ grades were bumped up, the typical boy at uni would be getting worse grades initially than a typical girl). Redshirting wouldn’t have this problem - the average boy would be equally qualified with the average girl. Perhaps the boys would then continue to fall behind, but I suspect that difference would be relatively small compared to the contribution of the starting grade.
Your reductio would be an excellent situation, if redshirting was perfectly effective and less costly. It basically amounts to tutoring the struggling kids more until they all reach a year 12 standard.
If I were Reeves, I'd say that Affirmative Action that works just by artificially inflating men's chances at college admission may solve one problem: more women are getting into university than men. But it doesn't solve the underlying issue that girls do better in school from the start, getting the skills and grades necessary to get into college and do well. Redshirting boys, by making them a year more mature throughout the schooling process, may improve their skills directly assisting them enough to get into college and graduate at more equal rates.
Its the difference between say, a quota mandating colleges accept a proportional amount of Latino students and investment in primary school education that succeeds in improving the educational success of Latino students so that they get into college later on. Still affirmative action of a sort, but one that at least improves education not artificially mandating equality.
Interesting read, but I think we're missing a piece of the puzzle here. I'd love to know what the degree breakdown is. A lot of high-paying trades are almost completely dominated by men. Is it possible this is part of the reason fewer men have college degrees?
Despite all of the initiatives to push more young women into stem, these fields also still seem to be predominately male. So what fields are these degrees in? Are they something that is actually useful to furthering careers?
I agree that boys falling behind in school needs to be addressed, but not if the solution pushes them to be saddled with debt, for a degree they don't need to be prosperous.
I graduated high school in the 70's in Utah. I wanted to be a contractor. Ha! So I went to college and just worked on my own property instead. So, yeah, I think you have a point.
If you are going to argue that children should only attend school after hitting some developmental milestone, and group A reaches that milestone before group B, then logically, group A should go to school before group B.
If you don't care if they have reached that milestone, why do you insist on their reaching any age at all?
Other than that, it would be interesting to examine the effects of the stricter no-excuses schools. External discipline might compensate for lower internal discipline.
This reminds me of 1990 when I read a bunch of books by Erik Erikson about (among other things) how western society was failing to provide meaningful roles for young people and therefore becoming unstable. My more feminist friends said Erikson did not apply to female development because women did not experience identity crises in the same way as men. Camille Paglia agreed, much to the chagrin of my friends.
I seriously doubt there is an inherent difference in cognitive ability between teenage men and women. I think there probably is a difference in how willing they are to conform to our current system, if given proper instruction in how to conform.
I don't think it is possible to solve the young man problem without offering roles that the young men find meaningful. Since I am no longer a young man I cannot guess exactly what those roles would be, but I think we can say objectively that the roles currently on offer to young college graduates are not passing the test.
from basic misogyny : if women are taking over a social niche that means that the niche is losing social importance
think of the famous tech moguls that dropped out of higher education to actually do something or the common advice in right wing circles for young men to pick up a trade instead of chasing a degree in feminist dance therapy
so the whole "boys are doing worse in school" just might not be a problem for men
After reading Outliers, I redshirted my oldest boy in pre-K in the UK, where Jan birthdays can go forward or back. He ended up with a reputation as a "rough" kid and was poorly treated, because, I believe, boys a year older play rougher than those younger. Luckily we moved back to the states the next year and he has had a great decade since, but I've noticed him complaining about a couple boys a bit more aggressive than others throughout the years, both who were red shirted. This is just my families personal experience, but I don't think redshirting is the easy answer as presented in a Gladwell essay or as a solution in a book on academic outcomes. As other's have commented, I would be curious if, despite really not being taught in academic settings, spatial skills/IQ went up in boys or girls as a result of any of these interventions that admittedly didn't target them.
I think since men have held the money and social power in society for such a long time the social issues within the demographic of men and boys has been overlooked for two primary reasons: 1) money, power, and social status are compensatory for mental and social dysfunction, 2) since men held/hold the primary social power, our society would like to aid the worse off demographics first, and may dismiss men's problems because of the power dynamic. I don't hold anything against people who are in the #2 camp, however, (hot take) if some of men's issues were addressed then their abuses of power and some negative social norms would be lessened which are in line with the goals of people in camp #2.
One of the factors for boys not pursuing higher education is socially driven from their peers, male mentors, and some social factors. I'm personally familiar with this and have read a few things related to it recently.
Brief history of masculinity: prior to industrialization masculinity was generally viewed as something inherent to men, industrialization happens and eventually masculinity becomes something which a man expresses through the things he does. This shift brought us ideas like: women stay at home, because men work; men smoke tobacco and women don't (or, didn't, until the tobacco companies realized they were really missing out); men drive trucks (anyone remember the TV show "The Fall Guy"? That's what inspired my Dad to get into trucks); and etc.
This 'crisis in masculinity' isn't something which was done to us, it's something we did to ourselves as a maladaptive answer to roles in society shifting with industrialization. I don't see how any of the post-industrialization maladaptive traits men have accumulated have been worked out on a societal scale and they still harm boys of today.
Think of the idea of the Self-sufficient Entrepreneur. This idea is rooted firmly in 19th century America and is as popular as ever with hustle culture and crypto-bro stuff. The funny thing is, this is the career path I found myself on and found some success with it. NOTHING IS AS ADVERTISED. Entrepreneurial success is one of the most mentally destabilizing things I've ever experienced. By no means do I feel like more of a man because of my minor economical success. It's insane how much social pressure and marketing is involved in pushing people to pursue entrepreneurship as a viable career path. I think this is a large factor for men not pursuing higher-education. I meet a lot of men who are participating in the informal economy trying to hustle their way out of barely getting by and, statistically speaking, most of them won't.
On a positive note, I also meet a lot of men who are increasingly interested in joining the trades. This is my largest counter-point to the argument that it's a bad thing men aren't interested in going into higher education. Many trades, especially in the states, are desperate for qualified people and the income opportunity is growing to rates that are really becoming notable for people. Construction is my industry and I've always been able to find a well-paying job. Now that I own my own company I'm also able to pay my employees very competitively and frankly, what we do is quite a low-skill barrier of entry. I'm actively looking for a young man with a passion for this industry to make partner in the business so I can eventually focus on other endeavors. This, currently non-existent, young man stands to pull a six-figure income with not even a high-school diploma requirement. I also see how some of these maladaptive traits in masculinity are keeping people from being responsible or studious enough to fill that partner role I'm looking for. So, take this with a grain of salt.
I'm trying to get at the "WHY boys are so much less likely to attend college than they were in the 1980s" that Kaleberg mentioned below. It's a combination right? Like anything sociological, it's not only that boys are less emotionally developed than girls at the same age. It's also true that some are pursuing entrepreneurship, others the trades, and others still have given up on advancing in society. My point is that addressing some of these post-industrializaiton maladaptions would have the widest impact. However, I'm aware that this is a multi-generational project of helping men to become more comfortable in their skins within societies/cultures that doesn't have many traditionally masculine roles. That way they wouldn't reach for destructive things to do in order to feel like men, they would simply feel like men because they are men. The idea that masculinity is something which can be lost is what seems to drive men towards the toxic-masculine traits.
This doesn't quite sum up my thoughts but I think it hints to most of the themes I've been chewing on for this topic. Apparently, I have enough material on this and should write an article myself instead of burdening your comments section. Lastly, I enjoyed your take!
I haven't read Of Boys and Men, but the impression I got was that it was broader than this: is it really focussed so narrowly on educational outcomes, or is that just what you decided to focus on for this review? (Fair enough if it's the latter.)
If the former, that's quite disappointing, because it seems like the whole thing is vulnerable to a generalised version of the argument you make: if girls do better in school not because of anti-male discrimination or anything, but just because *girls are better* in some relatively-intrinsic sense (maybe they're better suited to the school environment?), then it seems just completely unfair to try to see this as a 'problem' to be solved. It's rarely seen as a problem in and of itself that you can split any given school up into 'higher-achieving' and 'lower-achieving' kids - some kids are just better-suited to school than others - and certainly nobody proposes these kind of drastic remedies for it, especially when those remedies are unfair on the higher-achieving kids. People get upset about inequalities caused by different treatment - e.g., private schools vs comps - but if two kids get exactly the same teaching in exactly the same setting (and neither faces discrimination or has issues at home etc.) and one does better than the other, nobody really minds: this is just a thing everyone knows happens. Reeves hasn't proven that these gaps are wider than anyone assumed before, or that the general level of educational quality is worse than we'd thought before; he's just shown that educational inequalities are correlated with sex. Why does adding 'and they're mostly boys' to 'some kids do worse in school' turn it from just another fact about school to a deep issue?
To be sure, educational differentials can have serious knock-on effects later in life, which could cause serious social problems if women end up being better-educated than men. But then *this* is the issue, which needs to be analysed and solved at the level of a social problem, not the level of educational policy. If Reeves does this work, then that's credit for his book, but if he just stays at the level of educational differentials, that's a bit disappointing.
Older boys in class with younger girls - will spell even bigger trouble when puberty kicks in (for nerds: a boy at 14 may be infatuated about that red-haired girl next desk - but she is usu. into that lad two years older. - I think A Tabarrok noticed first.)
We might want boy-schools and girl-schools again. Which would help girls in STEM, too.
Over all: I see no problem with less boys going to college. Too many go anyway. "Don't let all your boys grow up to MBAs: Let'em be plumbers and builders and such".
The fairest solution is to delay the school starting age for everybody. There is no benefit in starting schooling earlier because advancing in school subjects depends on mental development not total time spent in school. The starting age used to be 7 everywhere and now in England is 4.
As long as college positions are a zero sum game every policy that doesn't help everyone in the same measure is affirmative action. I guess you agree we should ditch campaigns encouraging girls to go to college, curriculum reforms towards that end etc?
Haven't looked into the evidence - could be the case for instance that e.g. campaigns encouraging girls to do STEM subjects result in better STEM students overall if you have a load of talented girls applying who otherwise wouldn't have considered it. But in general, I'm fairly sceptical of the value of those sort of campaigns, yes.
My experience in schools is just that boys mess about more and don't do as much work as girls (probably as a consequence of being less mature). 'Zero tolerance' schools might reduce the gap given that the scope for messing about in class and not doing homework seems much smaller than in other schools.
The Michaela school in London apparently got the best value added score at GCSE of any school in the country last year, and has a well-known zero tolerance policy. It's possible they did that by boosting boys' grades a lot.
Way back when, they used to hold students back a grade if they couldn't grasp the material taught during a particular grade. Reeves seems to be suggesting that all boys need to be held back a grade. That strikes me as rather draconian, but that's probably because I'm old fashioned.
I suppose I should read the book, but I'm wondering if Reeves addresses WHY boys are so much less likely to attend college than they were in the 1980s. I'll leave out the late 1960s and early 1970s, because college was a way to avoid getting drafted during the Vietnam War. One could argue that women get a bigger payoff from attending college, since they tend to get paid less for the same jobs with the same skills. College lets them compensate for this. Could it be women finding an economic equilibrium that lets them, statistically, at least, do as well as men?
Another, more worrying possibility, is that boys don't find adult life attractive. Some of this could be because of stagnant and falling wages over the past four decades. It's hard to think of oneself as an adult when one is getting paid a decade old minimum wage with no opportunity for advancement. Urban areas used to offer many mid-level job options, but those jobs have been vanishing for decades.
It's important to keep in mind that the number of people attending college has gone up overall. So I don't think it's true that boys are less likely to attend college than they were in the 1980s. (Or the 60s or 70s.) (See, e.g., https://www.statista.com/statistics/236360/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-by-gender/; this isn't per capita (let alone adjusted by size of the age cohorts) but dividing by the size of the US population in 1983 and 2021 suggests that the proportion of boys attending has gone up slightly.) It's just that the proportion of women attending college has climbed way way faster.
Imagine two species of aliens, the boyaz and the girlaz, that are thrown into the same education system. And suppose it turns out that these two species mature at different rates. The standard starting ages for schooling suit the girlaz well enough, but the boyaz (on average, with some exceptions) aren't developmentally ready, and predictably fall behind, never to catch up.
In such a situation, it seems clear that a fairer solution would be to let the boyaz wait and begin schooling at a later age, when they are more developmentally ready (and actually on a par with the younger girlaz). There's nothing especially "fair" about holding starting age fixed, if people vary in how developmentally prepared they are at that age. And there's nothing "unfair" about letting different people start school at different ages if they develop at different rates. Age isn't an intrinsically morally relevant property. Development and maturation seem much more principled measures to use as a baseline. It's not a priori that a "6 yr old boyaz" and "6 yr old girlaz" are relevantly similar in any way whatsoever.
Of course, we tend to assume that human boys and girls are much more similar than two random alien species. But it sounds like the research you're discussing casts some doubt on how far we can take that assumption. It's not a priori that boys and girls develop at the same rate, and so it's not a priori that boys and girls of the same ages ought to be in the same classes. Why would you privilege age in such a way, if it turns out that "boy age" and "girl age" correspond to slightly different measures of expected development?
Yeah, I get the argument here, I just don't think it's particularly different to affirmative action. It seems weird to me to support redshirting but feel strongly that just adjusting up the grades of boys to account for developmental differences is a bad idea. It seems very likely we could get a very good idea of how much better boys will do with an extra year of education, so why not just adjust up their grades (or reduce standards for entry) so as to get the result you want with regards to the number of boys getting into university? Schools do actually do this, and Reeves is strongly opposed to it. His redshirting idea gets extremely similar results to adjustments, but keeps boys out of the labour force for an extra year, without many offsetting benefits as far as I can tell.
If the result you want is “boys get into college at similar rates as girls” than sure, the two are equivalent. But pretty obviously, a better goal is “boys achieve similar levels of learning and competence as girls” and I’d wager this is really what people want when they want to raise college attainment of X group. If the reason boys currently reach lower levels of educational attainment is that they are learning less or learning slower than girls due to developmental differences, then redshirting might plausibly help while your idea of artificially lowering entrance standards does absolutely nothing toward this goal. Maybe in some way you can call both “affirmative action” if you want, but it is pretty obvious to me how those two are substantially different (if you buy the mechanism for why redshirting helps).
I guess I don't really see why trying to ensure that the point at which boys/girls do their exams (or attend college) is one at which they are likely to receive equal grades (and presumably be admitted to college at equal rates) is particularly important other than to equalise rates of admission.
You can see how this roughly operates like Affirmative Action if you consider it being implemented for other groups - you could also have low-income kids starting three years later, kids from different ethnic minority groups starting a certain amount of time later, etc.
The reductio is that we get to the point where you can create a model to tell each specific child exactly how many months they should be redshirted based on various variables that means they'll have learnt the same amount as the average pupil.
Many objections to affirmative action are based on people getting a role they’re not qualified for (so e.g. if boys’ grades were bumped up, the typical boy at uni would be getting worse grades initially than a typical girl). Redshirting wouldn’t have this problem - the average boy would be equally qualified with the average girl. Perhaps the boys would then continue to fall behind, but I suspect that difference would be relatively small compared to the contribution of the starting grade.
Your reductio would be an excellent situation, if redshirting was perfectly effective and less costly. It basically amounts to tutoring the struggling kids more until they all reach a year 12 standard.
If I were Reeves, I'd say that Affirmative Action that works just by artificially inflating men's chances at college admission may solve one problem: more women are getting into university than men. But it doesn't solve the underlying issue that girls do better in school from the start, getting the skills and grades necessary to get into college and do well. Redshirting boys, by making them a year more mature throughout the schooling process, may improve their skills directly assisting them enough to get into college and graduate at more equal rates.
Its the difference between say, a quota mandating colleges accept a proportional amount of Latino students and investment in primary school education that succeeds in improving the educational success of Latino students so that they get into college later on. Still affirmative action of a sort, but one that at least improves education not artificially mandating equality.
Interesting read, but I think we're missing a piece of the puzzle here. I'd love to know what the degree breakdown is. A lot of high-paying trades are almost completely dominated by men. Is it possible this is part of the reason fewer men have college degrees?
Despite all of the initiatives to push more young women into stem, these fields also still seem to be predominately male. So what fields are these degrees in? Are they something that is actually useful to furthering careers?
I agree that boys falling behind in school needs to be addressed, but not if the solution pushes them to be saddled with debt, for a degree they don't need to be prosperous.
I graduated high school in the 70's in Utah. I wanted to be a contractor. Ha! So I went to college and just worked on my own property instead. So, yeah, I think you have a point.
If you are going to argue that children should only attend school after hitting some developmental milestone, and group A reaches that milestone before group B, then logically, group A should go to school before group B.
If you don't care if they have reached that milestone, why do you insist on their reaching any age at all?
Other than that, it would be interesting to examine the effects of the stricter no-excuses schools. External discipline might compensate for lower internal discipline.
This reminds me of 1990 when I read a bunch of books by Erik Erikson about (among other things) how western society was failing to provide meaningful roles for young people and therefore becoming unstable. My more feminist friends said Erikson did not apply to female development because women did not experience identity crises in the same way as men. Camille Paglia agreed, much to the chagrin of my friends.
I seriously doubt there is an inherent difference in cognitive ability between teenage men and women. I think there probably is a difference in how willing they are to conform to our current system, if given proper instruction in how to conform.
I don't think it is possible to solve the young man problem without offering roles that the young men find meaningful. Since I am no longer a young man I cannot guess exactly what those roles would be, but I think we can say objectively that the roles currently on offer to young college graduates are not passing the test.
don't start boys a year later
start girls a year earlier
also
from basic misogyny : if women are taking over a social niche that means that the niche is losing social importance
think of the famous tech moguls that dropped out of higher education to actually do something or the common advice in right wing circles for young men to pick up a trade instead of chasing a degree in feminist dance therapy
so the whole "boys are doing worse in school" just might not be a problem for men
After reading Outliers, I redshirted my oldest boy in pre-K in the UK, where Jan birthdays can go forward or back. He ended up with a reputation as a "rough" kid and was poorly treated, because, I believe, boys a year older play rougher than those younger. Luckily we moved back to the states the next year and he has had a great decade since, but I've noticed him complaining about a couple boys a bit more aggressive than others throughout the years, both who were red shirted. This is just my families personal experience, but I don't think redshirting is the easy answer as presented in a Gladwell essay or as a solution in a book on academic outcomes. As other's have commented, I would be curious if, despite really not being taught in academic settings, spatial skills/IQ went up in boys or girls as a result of any of these interventions that admittedly didn't target them.
I think since men have held the money and social power in society for such a long time the social issues within the demographic of men and boys has been overlooked for two primary reasons: 1) money, power, and social status are compensatory for mental and social dysfunction, 2) since men held/hold the primary social power, our society would like to aid the worse off demographics first, and may dismiss men's problems because of the power dynamic. I don't hold anything against people who are in the #2 camp, however, (hot take) if some of men's issues were addressed then their abuses of power and some negative social norms would be lessened which are in line with the goals of people in camp #2.
One of the factors for boys not pursuing higher education is socially driven from their peers, male mentors, and some social factors. I'm personally familiar with this and have read a few things related to it recently.
Brief history of masculinity: prior to industrialization masculinity was generally viewed as something inherent to men, industrialization happens and eventually masculinity becomes something which a man expresses through the things he does. This shift brought us ideas like: women stay at home, because men work; men smoke tobacco and women don't (or, didn't, until the tobacco companies realized they were really missing out); men drive trucks (anyone remember the TV show "The Fall Guy"? That's what inspired my Dad to get into trucks); and etc.
This 'crisis in masculinity' isn't something which was done to us, it's something we did to ourselves as a maladaptive answer to roles in society shifting with industrialization. I don't see how any of the post-industrialization maladaptive traits men have accumulated have been worked out on a societal scale and they still harm boys of today.
Think of the idea of the Self-sufficient Entrepreneur. This idea is rooted firmly in 19th century America and is as popular as ever with hustle culture and crypto-bro stuff. The funny thing is, this is the career path I found myself on and found some success with it. NOTHING IS AS ADVERTISED. Entrepreneurial success is one of the most mentally destabilizing things I've ever experienced. By no means do I feel like more of a man because of my minor economical success. It's insane how much social pressure and marketing is involved in pushing people to pursue entrepreneurship as a viable career path. I think this is a large factor for men not pursuing higher-education. I meet a lot of men who are participating in the informal economy trying to hustle their way out of barely getting by and, statistically speaking, most of them won't.
On a positive note, I also meet a lot of men who are increasingly interested in joining the trades. This is my largest counter-point to the argument that it's a bad thing men aren't interested in going into higher education. Many trades, especially in the states, are desperate for qualified people and the income opportunity is growing to rates that are really becoming notable for people. Construction is my industry and I've always been able to find a well-paying job. Now that I own my own company I'm also able to pay my employees very competitively and frankly, what we do is quite a low-skill barrier of entry. I'm actively looking for a young man with a passion for this industry to make partner in the business so I can eventually focus on other endeavors. This, currently non-existent, young man stands to pull a six-figure income with not even a high-school diploma requirement. I also see how some of these maladaptive traits in masculinity are keeping people from being responsible or studious enough to fill that partner role I'm looking for. So, take this with a grain of salt.
I'm trying to get at the "WHY boys are so much less likely to attend college than they were in the 1980s" that Kaleberg mentioned below. It's a combination right? Like anything sociological, it's not only that boys are less emotionally developed than girls at the same age. It's also true that some are pursuing entrepreneurship, others the trades, and others still have given up on advancing in society. My point is that addressing some of these post-industrializaiton maladaptions would have the widest impact. However, I'm aware that this is a multi-generational project of helping men to become more comfortable in their skins within societies/cultures that doesn't have many traditionally masculine roles. That way they wouldn't reach for destructive things to do in order to feel like men, they would simply feel like men because they are men. The idea that masculinity is something which can be lost is what seems to drive men towards the toxic-masculine traits.
This doesn't quite sum up my thoughts but I think it hints to most of the themes I've been chewing on for this topic. Apparently, I have enough material on this and should write an article myself instead of burdening your comments section. Lastly, I enjoyed your take!
I haven't read Of Boys and Men, but the impression I got was that it was broader than this: is it really focussed so narrowly on educational outcomes, or is that just what you decided to focus on for this review? (Fair enough if it's the latter.)
If the former, that's quite disappointing, because it seems like the whole thing is vulnerable to a generalised version of the argument you make: if girls do better in school not because of anti-male discrimination or anything, but just because *girls are better* in some relatively-intrinsic sense (maybe they're better suited to the school environment?), then it seems just completely unfair to try to see this as a 'problem' to be solved. It's rarely seen as a problem in and of itself that you can split any given school up into 'higher-achieving' and 'lower-achieving' kids - some kids are just better-suited to school than others - and certainly nobody proposes these kind of drastic remedies for it, especially when those remedies are unfair on the higher-achieving kids. People get upset about inequalities caused by different treatment - e.g., private schools vs comps - but if two kids get exactly the same teaching in exactly the same setting (and neither faces discrimination or has issues at home etc.) and one does better than the other, nobody really minds: this is just a thing everyone knows happens. Reeves hasn't proven that these gaps are wider than anyone assumed before, or that the general level of educational quality is worse than we'd thought before; he's just shown that educational inequalities are correlated with sex. Why does adding 'and they're mostly boys' to 'some kids do worse in school' turn it from just another fact about school to a deep issue?
To be sure, educational differentials can have serious knock-on effects later in life, which could cause serious social problems if women end up being better-educated than men. But then *this* is the issue, which needs to be analysed and solved at the level of a social problem, not the level of educational policy. If Reeves does this work, then that's credit for his book, but if he just stays at the level of educational differentials, that's a bit disappointing.
Older boys in class with younger girls - will spell even bigger trouble when puberty kicks in (for nerds: a boy at 14 may be infatuated about that red-haired girl next desk - but she is usu. into that lad two years older. - I think A Tabarrok noticed first.)
We might want boy-schools and girl-schools again. Which would help girls in STEM, too.
Over all: I see no problem with less boys going to college. Too many go anyway. "Don't let all your boys grow up to MBAs: Let'em be plumbers and builders and such".
The fairest solution is to delay the school starting age for everybody. There is no benefit in starting schooling earlier because advancing in school subjects depends on mental development not total time spent in school. The starting age used to be 7 everywhere and now in England is 4.
As long as college positions are a zero sum game every policy that doesn't help everyone in the same measure is affirmative action. I guess you agree we should ditch campaigns encouraging girls to go to college, curriculum reforms towards that end etc?
Haven't looked into the evidence - could be the case for instance that e.g. campaigns encouraging girls to do STEM subjects result in better STEM students overall if you have a load of talented girls applying who otherwise wouldn't have considered it. But in general, I'm fairly sceptical of the value of those sort of campaigns, yes.
My experience in schools is just that boys mess about more and don't do as much work as girls (probably as a consequence of being less mature). 'Zero tolerance' schools might reduce the gap given that the scope for messing about in class and not doing homework seems much smaller than in other schools.
The Michaela school in London apparently got the best value added score at GCSE of any school in the country last year, and has a well-known zero tolerance policy. It's possible they did that by boosting boys' grades a lot.