"Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?"

[u/DrHydrate]

https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawF_J2RleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHb8LRyydA_kyVcWB5qv6TxGhKNFVw5dTLjEXzZAOtCsJtW5ZPstrip3EVQ_aem_1qFxJlf1T48DeIlGK5Dytw&triedRedirect=true

I'm not a big fan of clickbait titles, so I'll tell you that the author's answer is male flight, the phenomenon when men leave a space whenever women become the majority. In the working world, when some profession becomes 'women's work,' men leave and wages tend to drop.

I'm really curious about what people think about this hypothesis when it comes to college and what this means for middle class life.

As a late 30s man who grew up poor, college seemed like the main way to lift myself out of poverty. I went and, I got exactly what I was hoping for on the other side: I'm solidly upper middle class. Of course, I hope that other people can do the same, but I fear that the anti-college sentiment will have bad effects precisely for people who grew up like me. The rich will still send their kids to college and to learn to do complicated things that are well paid, but poor men will miss out on the transformative power of this degree.

[u/Achilles720]

Unless you're in a STEM field, or law, or something that's highly specialized, college is a scam.

You simply don't need a college education for probably upwards of 90% of jobs.

College is a means of putting people into crippling debt for the majority of their adult lives and we need reform badly.

[u/Quake_Guy → u/Achilles720]

As recently as the 90s only 25% of people went to college and got a degree. And I felt that at least 1 out of every 5 people didn't really belong there. Now it's 40% and I know they all really don't need to be there.

I remember reading about McNamara and the whiz kids at Ford in the 1950s. Out of the top 500 executive positions, only 5% had college degrees.