THE END OF POLITICAL SUMMER – AT 9:28 P.M. ET: We've noted before that there are two calendars, the calendar of the sane people, and the political calendar.  We're on the political calendar here.  Who needs sanity?   Well, there's a guy named Biden, but let's move along.

We like to report trends, and I just saw one that's troubling, and not new.  The number of men in American colleges is declining dangerously.  From Hot Air: 

There’s an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal today about the declining enrollment of men in 2 and 4-year colleges. This gender enrollment disparity is a trend that has been happening for a while now, but at this point the divergence between men and women is becoming pretty dramatic.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline, the Journal analysis found.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

The situation has become bad enough that some colleges are already offering more slots for boys in an attempt to bring the enrollment back into parity. The WSJ says this is “higher education’s dirty little secret,” i.e. schools are now practicing a kind of affirmative action for men.

There’s a chart included in the story which breaks down the admittance of men and women by both race and income. What the chart shows is that white men come in near the bottom at every income level.

COMMENT:  This should be studied further, if we can find a scholar with enough integrity to do the study correctly.  I just wonder if men are discouraged by the way they're treated in woke, party-line schools.  They can be charged with almost anything and thrown out on a whim.  They're constantly told that they must rid themselves of "toxic masculinity," the very traits that win a war. 

There may be a silver lining here.  If more and more men drop out, the colleges could take the hint and make themselves more welcoming to the male variety.  And the situation may awaken a heretofore unorganized constituency – mothers of sons.  They can't be happy about the way their boys are treated, and they have the numbers to make things happen.

September 6, 2021