When Meg Delong was in high school in the northern Georgia town of Gainesville, she was a serious student with her eye on college. Many of her girlfriends worked toward the same goal. But her younger brother and most of her male friends seemed more inclined to act like Falstaff than to study Shakespeare. "A lot of guys thought studying was for girls," says DeLong, now a junior French major at the University of Georgia in Athens. "They were really intelligent, but they would goof off, and it seemed to be accepted by the teachers."
Take DeLong's experience, multiply it a few thousand times in schools across the state, and it isn't surprising that at her campus this year, the freshman class is nearly 61% female. In a freshman English tutorial, small clusters of men sit quietly as women dominate class discussions. But outside class, the mood on campus is distinctly male friendly. Tyler Willingham, social chair of the Sigma Nu fraternity, observes that at parties, even guys without dates can choose from "many beautiful women."
This sort of gender gap is glaring and growing at campuses across America. Until 1979, men made up the majority of college students. As women won increasing equality elsewhere in society, it was natural and expected that they would reach parity in college, which they did by the early 1980s. But the surprise has been that men's enrollment in higher education has declined since 1992. Males now make up just 44% of undergraduate students nationwide. And federal projections show their share shrinking to as little as 42% by 2010. This trend is among the hottest topics of debate among college-admissions officers. And some private liberal arts colleges have quietly begun special efforts to recruit men--including admissions preferences for them.
Why the shortage? There are few hard facts, but lots of theories. Anecdotal evidence suggests that more men than women respond to the lure of high-tech jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree. Some call this the Bill Gates syndrome, after the college-dropout chairman of Microsoft. But high-tech industries employ only about 9% of the U.S. work force. Amid the hot economy of recent years, a larger group of men--especially those from lower-income families--might be heading straight from high school into fields like aircraft mechanics and telephone- and power-line repair that pay an average of $850 a week rather than taking on a load of college debt. Some social critics blame a dearth of male role models among schoolteachers, and a culture that promotes anti-intellectualism among boys. And, especially in inner cities, crime and gangs entice more boys than girls away from learning.
How pervasive is the gender gap? According to Thomas Mortenson, an education analyst in Oskaloosa, Iowa, the share of college degrees earned by males has been declining for decades. U.S. government figures show that from 1970 to 1996, as the number of bachelor's degrees earned by women increased 77%, the number earned by men rose 19%. Not all schools are feeling the imbalance; many elite colleges and universities have seen applications soar from both sexes. But the overall numbers, says Mortenson, should make us "wake up and see that boys are in trouble."