Why the paucity of men on campus is a problem and the beginnings of how to respond

You can learn a lot about social changes by looking at one yardstick in particular: the shifting male-female ratio in college enrollment.

- Clarence Page

For example in 1970, men outnumbered women on campus, accounting for 57% in four-year institutions and 59% of undergraduate enrollment in two-year institutions, according to the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

A lot of us took that gender imbalance for granted until 1973, when the Vietnam War drew down, eliminating the reason a lot of my classmates had come to college in the first place.

Still, that gender trend for a few years outlasted the war. By 1980, gender was perfectly balanced in fouryear colleges and women outnumbered men in two-year schools, 55% to 45%.

Fast forward to today, and the script is flipped. Men are turning away from higher education at an enormous rate. At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students and men 40.5%, an all-time high imbalance.

In that academic year, U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students--compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.