Nationally, female undergraduates surpassed the number of male undergraduates in 1978, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The proportion of men and women earning four-year college degrees on the national scale has completely reversed since 1970. That year, men earned 57 percent of the degrees, compared to 43 percent in 2001, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. It took a number of years for the trend to hit UCSD, but it did happen in the late 1990s, according to Bill Armstrong, director of Student Research & Information.
Among other concerns for the welfare of boys in the U.S. are that gangs are primarily composed of boys; male suicide rates are on the rise, while female suicide rates are on the decline; the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world and 90 percent of the incarcerated are men; more and more men are disengaging from families; and male voting rates have declined at twice the rate of declining female voting rates.
Now, Mrs. Bush is looking for strategies that will help boys do better in school, go to college and stay productive in society.
The K – 12 Experience: No Picnic for Boys
Laura Bush is not the only one concerned with the difficulties that boys face in school and society. “We need to bring men along on the trajectory that women are on,” said Tom Mortenson, higher education policy analyst with Iowa-based Postsecondary Education Opportunity, who has been working to get this issue in the spotlight for years.
Mortenson warns against hearing how well women and girls are doing, as compared to boys and men, and simply celebrating women-power. When men struggle, women are affected too, he reminded, especially considering that men are women’s sons, fathers, husbands, brothers and friends.
Males are having a tough time growing up, said Mortenson. And their educational experiences are not helping (while girls seem to be responding well to the same educational situations). “The K-12 experience gets boys off on the wrong foot. That elementary experience becomes crushing and they begin to turn off by middle school.”
“The only solution to all of these problems is to keep boys actively engaged in education, beginning in elementary school,” said Mortenson. We need to prepare boys for responsible roles in the workforce, he added. “Boys need very different kinds of training, and lots of it [to keep up in the modern workplace].”
In the Workplace
Still, in the workplace at least, neither men nor women may feel an immediate effect from the societal gender imbalances that favor women.
“There are so many ways that men on average do better in the workforce [that the gender imbalance in college] probably won’t have a great effect any time soon,” said Mary Blair-Loy, associate professor of sociology at UCSD.
For one thing, men are still paid more than women are, with women earning 74 cents to the dollar, as compared to men, according to the U.S Census Bureau. Blair-Loy doesn’t see that equalizing any time soon. “The pay gap is tenacious,” she said. “Even when women are better educated, men still earn more.” Women also won’t be taking away jobs from men, she said, since, in general, men and women continue to work in different industries.
According
to Mrs. Bush, such inequalities
for girls and women need
to be paid attention to,
as well. "We've probably
all failed by not paying
attention to boys and
by putting boys in [stereotypes],"
she recently told National
Public Radio. "Let me
say that I also think
girls need more attention.
Statistics for girls are
much, much better than
for boys, but they are
also more and more likely
to be involved in drugs
or alcohol abuse or other
things than girls for
many generations were
not involved in at all."
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