Tuesday, February 4, 2025 - Women have outnumbered men on college campuses for decades, but the divergence in postsecondary success has widened in recent years, and it is both a cause and symptom of the struggles of the modern man. Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men joins the podcast to discuss the drivers of these challenges, promising interventions, and whether we should care about the plight of men in a world where they continue to wield power. This episode is made with support from the Gates Foundation, Ascendium Education Group, and The American College of Education.
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Of Boys and Men:Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It
by Richard Reeves
American Institute for Boys and Men
00:00 - Intro
04:15 - Where We Are (and Aren't) Seeing the Gender Divide
05:56 - Designing College with The Modern Young Man in Mind
12:28 - Drivers of the Higher Ed Gender Divide
16:30 - The Effects of the Pandemic
19:41 - The Larger Significance of the Problem
26:50 - Opting Out of Adulting
31:52 - Masculinity and Majors
34:22 - K12 Solutions: Nobody's Fault, Everyone's Responsibility
37:32 - What Higher Ed Can Do
41:47 - International Parallels
44:38 - Rebalancing Education Systems
49:06 - Zero-Sum Game or Growing the Pie?
Michael Horn:
So I have a pop quiz for you, Jeff. When was the last time that more males than females enrolled in college?
Jeff Selingo:
So, Michael, if I didn't have this thing called, you know, Google in front of me, I probably would have guessed sometime in the early 1980s. But the answer is, let's see here, 1978. That year there were about 4.1 million male students compared to 3.9 million female students. And since then the gap has flipped and it has widened as far more women now enroll in colleges and universities.
Michael Horn:
So to help us understand this decades-long trend and its broader implications both for higher education and frankly, society as a whole, we're joined today by Richard Reeves. That's on this episode of Future U.
Sponsor:
This episode of Future U is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity and income as predictors of student educational success. This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org for affordable degrees in education, healthcare, nursing, business or leadership, choose American College of Education. ACE hasn't raised tuition since 2016, and 86% of students graduate debt free for programs designed for today's working professionals. Visit ace.edu. subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, send it along to a friend so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.
Michael Horn:
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo:
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
When Richard Reeves came out with his book Of Boys and Men:Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It, Michael I was immediately struck by how the reality that he paints in it that the struggles that men increasingly face across so many segments of society, it was really something that has been present in colleges and universities for a long time. It's also been somewhat of a taboo subject in higher ed until rather recently, perhaps.
Michael Horn:
And let's just call it what it is, Jeff. You've been pushing me to have Richard on Future U ever since the book came out because you wanted to delve deeper into what this means for colleges, but also because you've been wanting to talk about the implications that declining male enrollment and success, frankly, in college has across the rest of society. You know, is this something we should care about? Why now? Or frankly, given the fact that men still dominate in the leadership ranks of large corporations and in boardrooms, are we missing something more? Is this really the conversation we want to be having? And what I love about Richard's work is that I think he really helps paint the nuance, Jeff, on that question about how men's struggles aren't something, frankly, that is universal across college campuses and how the fallout from where those struggles can be seen might not be in the boardrooms, but rather in other parts of our society that can easily get ignored.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, Michael, maybe that's where we should start our conversation today, rather than our usual where we talk with our guest and then react in the second half. Let's talk maybe about the highlights that caught our attention that maybe listeners might want to pay attention to as they're listening to this interview. Basically, this was a long and wide ranging interview we had with Richard. So maybe we'll put down some of these guideposts for our listeners. And it sounds like you just named the first one that this isn't a binary conversation, but it really has some nuance to it.
Michael Horn:
That's right, Jeff. And I think it's easy to get lost in the headlines right around this issue. And for instance, you'll hear Richard point out that there's not as big of a divide in the male female enrollment at highly selective colleges. The divide is everywhere else. And I think that may explain some of the fragmentation in later life outcomes for men.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah. and highly selective colleges have more parity because of two things, Michael. One is their applicant pool, of course. Right. They're massive compared to the number of seats that they actually have available. And they yield. Most of those they say yes to historically. Right. That's also high their yield rates. So they can actively manage their application pools in ways that, you know, the vast majority of institutions can't. And their acceptance rate for men is higher than it is for women. And I saw several times when I was reporting who gets in and why, admissions officers saying things like, hey, here's a guy who wants to major in English, so, you know, let's take him. Even if his application wasn't quite as shiny as a female applicant, the fact is that these institutions have enough male applicants who shine that the distinctions between men and women aren't as great as they might be at most colleges. And while most can't manage the applicant pool the way a Harvard or a Stanford can. Right. While most institutions can't manage their applicant pools like that, for instance, what they can do, as you'll hear Richard say, is in the recruitment and outreach and be much more intentional as, hey, this is a place for guys too. This is a place you, guy, might want to go to.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, that's right, Jeff. And I'll just highlight two other things from the conversation. And first, I'll start with something that I think. I think we share in common. Although you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we were both on the older side for our classes in elementary, middle, high school. I have a fall birthday, and I was, quote, unquote, one of the older kids in my class.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, Michael, I wasn't that far behind you. I had a January birthday, and in the 1970s, I think there was a lot more flexibility to when kids can start school than there is today. So I was 5, turning 6 in January of my kindergarten year.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. And Jeff, I was effectively redshirted, which is something Richard will talk about. But in my case, I repeated kindergarten. Not a known fact, I think, by a lot of folks around me, but it definitely helped me. And Richard talks about how much the college problem is also a K12 problem, which is the thing that I want to highlight here. Boys develop later on average. Richard says our fear of tracking, or I would modify it to say personalizing. Along with the loss, frankly, of the no excuses philosophy that had been ascendant in the 90s and early 2000s, he says it's doing students no favors. And yet, as you'll also hear, Richard doesn't think we can let colleges off the hook.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, that was a good point, because we often let colleges off the hook for a lot of things, Michael, where they'll just say, well, If K through 12 didn't send us these students who can't do X, Y and Z, then we would be perfectly fine. We would have great retention rates, great graduation rates, really engaged students. They like to blame it on K through 12. And you're going to hear Richard bring up examples of marketing and even majors that can appeal to men. And what he's talking about is that college can be just as intentional about appealing to men as they are for other underrepresented students on their campuses. For example, having a men's center, for instance, and not just a woman's center or a black cultural center or an LGBTQ center. Right. Why not do more intentional things for men as he talks about?
Michael Horn:
So finally, Jeff, before we get to Richard, I just love to call attention to how he's thinking about outcomes in this conversation because he's putting them squarely in terms of the economic implications in our conversation. But I will say this is all really hard to measure because he, as he Also points out men's education journeys are less linear than women's, which as you know, and we've said to our listeners, we think is a broader trend for everyone right now across K12 higher ed in the workforce. But it's a bigger challenge, I think, for all of us as we, as we shift, I hope anyway, to worrying less about the inputs of a college and more about the outcomes. And as Richard said, why this all matters for men is that at least based on his research, on average, they need to see the relevance of what they're doing, the why, you know, they're learning these academic things. And I'm going to guess that that flows into one of your takeaways, having known you long enough at this point, is that Michael, you know exactly what.
Jeff Selingo:
I'm going to say purpose. Right?
Michael Horn:
Purpose.
Jeff Selingo:
Yes. Right. Not only do men enroll at lower levels and higher ed than women, but they also complete at lower levels. And so we not only need to engage them, but we need to keep them engaged. And I think that's where the purpose comes in. So the purpose is, you know, why to go to college. But then the purpose is like as you're sitting there and you're boarding class and you haven't found your friends or you haven't found your place on college, on campus. Right. How do we keep you engaged? And you know, we know it's why some colleges have started football teams and esports, you know, which is fine for those who play those things, but what about everything else? We know Greek life has also disappeared or has become a lot a smaller player on many campuses. But you know, those are the things that are often referred to as the beer and circus part of college. And it's not what institutions, in my opinion should be focused on when it comes to trying to appeal to men. I wonder if there's more of a pedagogical approach here, you know, so for example, can we build in a gap year or a semester program for men to find their people and maybe get hands on learning before college? We know that the hands on piece of college is critical, that experiential learning both in college and in the classroom overall, that's absolutely critical and Richard is going to mention that. So how do we create a curriculum? For example, as we have both talked a lot about with work, integrated learning. And I think that's a lot harder for colleges to do. Engaging men, giving them a sense of purpose about higher ed is about more than just putting pictures of male students in your admissions materials. It requires a much bigger intentional approach. It requires redesign of the programs and frankly, it requires time and money that I think that most colleges are just not really willing to spend. And then the signpost I'll also plant as a heads up to what Richard is going to talk about is that we can talk about this issue. It has been taboo in higher ed, I think for too long. And I also think, Michael, this is probably a matter of perspective, right? We're both fathers of daughters, which I know for me has come to shape my approach to this issue. Quite frankly, I'm probably less worried about it as a result. But when Richard's book came out, I was like, yes, I'm glad someone is calling this out because I do believe it has larger societal issues for the economy, for families, and frankly, I think basic functioning of a democracy if we forget about a significant portion of the population when it comes to education. And as Richard will point out, the results of November's election might make it that more people in higher education are going to talk openly about this dynamic and the solutions. And with that, let's welcome Richard. Not only is he the author of the book Of Boys and Men, but he's also the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. And before founding that institute in 2023, he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Richard, welcome to Future U.
Richard Reeves :
Thank you for having me on.
Michael Horn [00:12:28]:
Terrific. So let's just jump right into the numbers themselves. The one that everyone focuses on and knows about is the ratio. In the US women make up nearly 60% of the undergraduate population at this point, while men represent about 40%. A gap that's grown steadily, as you know, since the early 1980s. And all kinds of reasons are given for the gap from boys being disciplined more in K12, learning differences between genders, boys not being encouraged by a teaching profession in in K12, boys being attracted to hands on jobs that don't require a college degree. There's a long list I would love to hear from your perspective and what you know from your research. What do you find to be the number one reason driving the gap?
Richard Reeves:
Well, the main reason is what happens before college. I think it's, you know, a truism but in this case also true that the level of academic preparation that takes place in K12 just explains a huge amount of what happens across a lot of these differences. And boys are coming out of K12 kind of in a very different place on average to girls. So if you just look at high school GPA, for example, 2/3 of the top 10% of high schoolers are girls compared to a third of boys. So you've got twice as many girls in that top decile. Now that's obviously just one bit of the distribution, but it's a linear relationship all the way through. And so 2/3 of the bottom decile of high schoolers are boys. And so you've got a population that's already very gender skewed that colleges are looking at. And so I think a large part of it is what happens before. But, but it's also an opportunity, Michael, to point out that, you know, we've started, I'm sure we'll dig into this. We've started with like just the enrollment, overall enrollment kind of ratio. And that's a very natural thing to think about. You sort of look around and say, look who's here, who isn't here, right? Just the number of bodies. But if you then look at like who goes on to get degrees, who actually completes a kind of college degree, there's a completion gap. And so there's like it's two sides to this coin. One is the gender gap in enrollment, just going to college, and then there's the gender gap in getting through college. So it's to and through where we see the gap. And by a very, very rough approximation, it looks like about half of the completion gap. In other words, the gender gap in people actually getting degrees is in enrollment, but the other half is in like the guys go, but they don't stay or they don't finish.
Michael Horn:
What's your take on that latter piece of what's driving the completion gap?
Richard Reeves:
Well, so that's also partly about just coming in less well prepared. So just at the average, the enrolling male student is just a little bit less ready. The whole phrase about kind of college ready students, I like Sarah Goldrick-Rab change to that, which is we actually need student ready colleges. I like that. But just on the average the, the boys or the young men arrive just a little bit less ready than they are. So they just need more intentional support, as you would for other groups. And the second thing is, and maybe we can get into this a little bit, but there's actually just growing evidence that the college environment, the sense of belonging, the guys just don't feel quite as comfortable there. That could be part of it. And then I guess the last thing to say is that it looks as if guys are just a bit easier to kind of pull away with other opportunities. And so how Good those opportunities are is another question. It might be that they're just a very good labor market and they just, I don't need, I don't need this. And I can get an amazing job without this. And I'm off. It could also be that your friend has a great idea for an app that you're going to build in his garage. And that may not be such a great reason to stop out of college. And so there's probably a mixture of those.
Michael Horn:
So just to follow up on all that, Richard, the pandemic, of course accelerated though the decline in men outcomes in higher ed and enrollment for enrollment, it's fallen nearly 10%, nearly 700,000 students. And just to put that in context, it's the size of the entire undergrad population at three UC systems, like all 10 of its campuses. Now, to be fair, female enrollment fell too, but at about half the rate. So what's been going on since the pandemic with men in particular?
Richard Reeves:
Yes, you're right. It's one of the things that I really noticed in my own work was just that big gender gap in the change in enrollment around the pandemic. And it just did seem to derail male educational trajectories a lot more than female. And it looks as if some of that was a delay. So we've seen now a bit of a bounce back, but. And some of it was actually something very mechanical. It was just actually that more of the courses that men do can't be taught online. And so actually if you look at quite a bit of that was being driven by trade schools, community community colleges or, or courses that just required more hands on kinds of learning. And so that there were a bunch of factors going into it. But for me, what it really did reveal, and I think this is, this is more of a story, a chronic problem, than just the acute pandemic problem, is that male college trajectories just got knocked off course. And I think that's combined with this growing fear among many young people, but especially young men, that maybe college isn't worth it after all. In some ways, I think it added fuel to the fire in the sense there was a growing skepticism among many whether or not college was worth it in the first place. And then the pandemic just derailed so many anyway. And so I think we've got a little bit of a combination of different factors now that have kind of played into this disproportionate effect on men. And I think it's more of a general finding actually. It's relevant to the conversation that we're just having about completion, which is just on the average, it looks as if the male educational journey is a bit more zigzaggy compared to a slightly more straightforward linear journey for kind of women. And so guys a bit less likely to go straight from high school to college if they do start, a bit more likely to stop out then sometimes to drop out. And so one of the most, one of the interesting, you know, this is a very nerdy point, but if you look at things like graduation rates at 4 years, 6 years and 10 years in a 4 year college, the gender gap is bigger. At 4 it's about 10 points at 4. It's about 6 points at 6 and then it drops to 4 or something at 10. And so it's like it just looks as if that guys are just struggling to go, to stay on track a bit more. And so I think what the pandemic acted as was just this giant derailment event, especially for men.
Jeff Selingo:
So it could be possible that they might get back on track at some point. And it kind of leads to a bigger question here, Richard, about why this may matter in the long run about college in particular. And does it matter? Right. We, we had Jonathan Koppell, the president of Montclair State in New Jersey, who was formerly a dean at Arizona State. He was recently on Future U and he was talking about this male problem at even Montclair State and about the larger societal issues of men not going to college. And he mentioned marriage, for example, that college educated people tend to marry each other. So there might be fewer marriages eventually and maybe fewer kids. And then there's the political piece of this. We know the divide in the electorate, for example, between those with college degrees and those without. Is this a problem we're trying to solve for colleges? Is this a problem we're trying to solve for the economy, for larger society, for all of it? Like what's the problem we're trying to solve here?
Richard Reeves:
Yeah, that's a great set of framings. So I should say first of all, I don't share the concern that people have about marriage. That's a very common one. People make the, I think intuitive calculation that if people want, if a college graduates typically going to marry college graduates and there are fewer male college graduates, then then almost mathematically you can see less marriage. I'm not, I'm just not. I just. The reason I'm not as worried about that is I just don't see it. I mean, as Michael said at the beginning, like this overtaking a college took place, you know, in the 80s and 90s. And so we've had plenty of time actually where there's been a really significant gender gap in the male and female educational profiles of those who have marriageable age. Right. We've gone through that. And what's really striking is that actually college graduates are much more likely to be getting married than everybody else. Right. And so marriage is holding pretty steady among college graduates and has for the last few decades. And so I sort of think if we were going to see that dropping off in any significant way, we would have seen it by now. And I will say, I think sometimes what's happening here is that we're forgetting a little bit what most people actually do at college and what more sort of middle class families are like. So just give a personal example. In my family, there's a couple, I live in Florida and she's a nurse and he's a plumber. I have no sense that she thinks she's married down. He does not have a four year degree. By definition, she does because she's a nurse. And I just think out there in the real world, nurses are marrying plumbers and teachers are marrying roofers. It's not happening in quite the same way. And I think that's because we're a little bit obsessed sometimes with the top of the distribution. And of course at the top of the distribution in Ivies, there's much less of a gender gap anyway. So I sometimes get like the mum whose daughter's at Berkeley freaking out about who she's going to marry. She doesn't have to worry. There are lots of men going to Berkeley and she'll find somebody and maybe he won't have a master's degree. But he'll be, he'll be fine. And so I think what's happening is that college educated women want to have children within marriage and so the they're still selecting very strongly into marriage. Now, will this carry on? Could things change? Sure, but that's not the one that worries me. What worries me much more is the economic point you made. The return on investment from college generally is not very different to men or women. And so I do think we're underutilizing some male economic capacity for sure. I do think that if we were able to attract and retain more men in high quality college courses, those men would go on to do better economically. So I think for me it's more of an economic argument than it certainly is, than a marriage argument. And then we'll just see how the politics of this plays out. We did see a huge swing to the right among young people generally. You're right that there's a diploma divide, but I think right now politics feels more like a kaleidoscope that's been shaken. We just don't know where the patterns are going to land than it is anything that's easy to predict. And so I'm I'm much more focused, if you like, on the sort of more straightforward arguments about college, which is I just think we're leaving too much male talent on the table.
Jeff Selingo:
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Michael Horn:
This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non profit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost postsecondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners and rural community members. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.
Jeff Selingo:
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I want to talk a little bit about disengagement because we've been talking a lot about this on the show on Future U over the last couple of months and in your book Of Boys and Men you highlight that boys are increasingly disengaged from education. And I recently got a note from one of my sources for my forthcoming book and she sent this to me. She said in our circle of friends, family, and my husband's high school students. He's a teacher.
Jeff Selingo:
I'm seeing a very concerning trend of late teen and early twenty males opting out of adulting. They don't attend college, they drop out of college. They don't seem to work either, you know, so why aren't men engaged in school or even young adults right out of school? You've talked about vocational education, but I'll tell you that Michael and I went to the College of Western Idaho recently. We just did this show on the CHIPS Act, and we visited its massive center where students get degrees in everything from auto body repair to mechatronics to welding. And there were men there, but it wasn't like teeming with young male students. If anything, the male students were much older and probably making a career switch. So what's going on, particularly with young males and whether that's of college age or right after college age?
Richard Reeves:
Yeah. So here's an issue where I think the issue is deeper than just what we see in the college enrollment numbers or completion numbers. And I do think it's a broader and deeper disengagement. I think that is a more cultural, even an anthropological issue, actually. I think I say at some point in the book that we need anthropologists, not economists. And the reason I say that is because I do think there's a cultural challenge here around the disengagement of young men, period. And of course, that shows up in education, but it shows up in lots of other ways, too. We see it in family life, we see it in social life, we see it in dating. We see it in the lower chances of men moving away from home. Young men are much more likely to still be living with their parents, about 10 percentage points more likely in their early 20s to be living with their parents. And so I actually see this as more of a general. Let's label it the young male disengagement syndrome. And I think education is just one of the variables that shows that to a very large extent, many young men just aren't quite sure that these institutions or that these norms or that these pathways are actually going to work for them. There's a sense of uncertainty about the direction they should go in. And so the way I think about this is that in the past, the reason to go to college or to leave home or to get a better job or whatever was, even if it wasn't explicit, it was kind of implicit. It's because, like, we're going to need you to be a breadwinner. We're going to. We're going to. There's a role for you out there and it's pretty scripted and in some ways quite sexist, arguably. But there was, there was a. There was a script that you had to follow and education could be part of that reason. My dad went to college and he was the first in his generation, wasn't because of some kind of love of learning. It was because he thought, I'll make more money and I'll have a family to look after. And I'll be able to marry and raise my kids. And that's what he did. And so it wasn't. There was no sort of Socratic thing around it for him. It's just that he thought he would do better and be able to therefore look after his family better. And I don't think that's a script now that's as obvious for young men. And so there's a sense of like, why bother almost, not just why bother with anything.
Jeff Selingo:
So what changed, Richard? Why did the script change?
Richard Reeves:
Well, it changed for a really good reason on the one hand, which is that the economic relationship between men and women just was revolutionized. And so it's just much less clear for me and certainly for my sons who are in their 20s now, that, that, that sort of call from society on you, which is you're gonna, you're gonna be a provider. Well, is that clear? That's not clear that you will be anymore. And that's really, that's because 40% of breadwinners are women now. And that we've seen this huge economic catch up partly because of these educational gaps we started with. And so the distinctive script for both men and women has been torn up. It was torn up for women. You're going to be a housewife and mother and replaced with you can be anything you want to be. And that's amazing. That's great. We've had this real liberation and this powerful new script for young women now, which is, you go girl, you stand on your own two feet, you get, you get educated, etc. And that's just affected probably a couple of gen, at least one, probably two generations of women now, that amazing uplift story. We also tore up the old script for men, which is get a job, get yourself educated, because you're going to need to be the provider. We tore that script up as well, but we didn't replace it. And so I feel there's a certain scriptlessness to the lives of many young men now, which is that they kind of have A sense of what they're not going to be, but they don't really know what they are going to be. And I think that sense of like, we're going to need you to do this X or Y thing has just dropped away a little bit. And I think what that's led to is a general. To come back to where you started with the question, Jeff, is a bit of something of a disengagement and just an uncertainty that these investments are going to be worth it and pay off.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, so I want to dig a little bit deeper on what they're not going to be because when I was in admissions offices for my last book, you know, the unicorn that they were always looking for was that male student who wanted to study the humanities. Can you talk a little bit about societal expectations of masculinity and identity when it comes to even just the simple thing as a college major? I'm sure some of it is that what majors men perceive also make more money after college. But, you know, it's amazing to me when we are in, especially at these more selective colleges you were talking about, there's not as much of a divide at selective colleges overall in enrollment, but there definitely is a divide within schools and disciplines and majors. It's really hard to find a lot of males in the humanities, for example.
Richard Reeves:
Yeah. So it's very clear that young men in particular are making more of an economic calculation. Right. If they are going, it is because they have bought into the sense that it's going to pay off economically. I mean, I have my own son is one of my kids is still in college and he's kind of obsessed with what different majors are going to earn. Right. He's constantly. He's tried to switch to computer science because he'd looked at the charts. And first of all, I'm like, the variation around these means is huge.And by the way, you'd be better off getting a good GPA in whatever he's doing economics. So what you are doing than trying to switch up. But I got the sense that that was a real conversation among him and a lot of his male friends that wasn't quite the same, maybe among the women. And so what does that mean? I think it means that colleges have to do a better job of making sure that the overall offering is more kind of economically attractive. Right. But it also probably means that they have to do a better job of sort of breaking down some of the gender stereotypes around some of those roles. Right. Actually, are those jobs the ones that are not going to pay as well. I mean, you've mentioned humanities, but I think it's very interesting that we see real declining shares of men in areas like psychology and some of those mental health professions. And so where, yes, it's a lot of education, but that's not a terrible living or ed schools into teaching. K12 teaching is an area I'm a little bit obsessed with and I think relates to our earlier conversation about why boys aren't doing so well in K12, or maybe the 10 percentage point drop in male teachers from 33% to 23% hasn't helped. But getting kind of men into those sorts of courses as well might in some ways be even more important than getting them into the humanities.
Michael Horn:
So let's actually start to turn into the K12. And we have a lot of listeners who are parents, some are K12 educators. Of course, we have the higher ed faculty and those who lead colleges and universities, but you said a lot of this stems earlier. So let's spend the rest of the time starting to think about solutions. And I'd love to hear from you, like, where does that solution start? Is it at home? Is it in the preschool or elementary school or somewhere else? And what's the change in your view that starts to, that we need to see happen at that place that you identify?
Richard Reeves:
Yeah, so I mean, there's the slightly sort of boring answer, and the slightly defensive one is at every level, I think that these are the sorts of problems that I like to describe as being nobody's fault, but everybody's responsibility. And so even though I said that a lot of what happens in higher education can be predicted in K12, that I think in no way lets higher education off the hook. And I have noticed in education sometimes what will happen is that the college presidents will say, well, what are you going to do? It happens. Look at the high school results like the ones I shared. And then the high school principals will say, well, look at the middle school. Like it's all happening in middle school. And then the middle school, it's happening in elementary. And then they'll say it's kindergarten. And the kindergarten teachers say, I don't know, it's the parents. And so actually everyone just pushes the blame down earlier and earlier during the cycle. And I really want to avoid that. So when you point out the problem start early, that in no way means that they can only be solved early. They have to be solved throughout the system. And so I do think we should start early. I mean, there's a huge gap in school readiness, kindergarten readiness among. Between boys and girls. And so one of my proposals there is to start boys in school later. Like they develop later. So red shirting the boys for academic reasons is one of my proposals or at least have the option to do that and see how that works out because the boys are just maturing later. And that maturity gap really shows up in middle and high school. But then if you look at like when, when do you boys really start to fall behind, especially in literacy, that does really seem to be middle. Middle school. So by eighth grade, you know, in the average school district boys are almost a grade level behind in English and literacy skills. It's a big gap and they never obviously, that never closes. And so, and I've really come to believe those middle school years and into adolescence, early high school are huge as well. But then also in high school, like there's no reason why we couldn't be doing a better job with some of those grades that we're talking about. And there I think that the male teacher thing might be more and more important. I've slightly shifted my view on this. I used to be a bit more obsessed with the lack of male teachers in the earlier years in elementary and whilst that's a problem, I actually think that the big drop has actually been in middle and high. And I'm, I can't. We're doing work on this right now at the American Institute for Boys and Men. But actually I'm, my intuition is that if I could, if I could wave a magic wand and have more male teachers, I think it would be in those middle and high school years actually because the role model effects are huge there and I really do see a lot of the grade differences start to open up in those years. And once adolescence hits then it's a different world.
Michael Horn:
It's so interesting because the middle school time period obviously is also one when people are still open to identity and career formation sort of in a much more open ended way. I'm curious now if we shift into the higher ed conversation and we start to say we don't let the college leaders off the hook, so to speak, what's your advice for them? What's the plan if you will, for college leaders and that they should do right now, perhaps over the next five years if they're thinking more mid, starting to get into long term solutions. And I'm curious, I'd love your take on this is part of the answer perhaps broadening what we've thought of as higher education historically to have more integrated work-based pathways count, if you will, as a college or university education.
Richard Reeves:
Yeah. So. Well, I think the first thing is thinking about outreach and making sure that you're being very intentional as you go to high schools or you market your materials or you're just in the community trying to get more people to kind of enroll, that you're very intentionally male friendly in that. Just you have to really make sure that you look and sound like this is a place where guys go. Right. And so that does really matters who you send out. It really matters what the material looks like. And so just like this, you can't be it if you can't see it is one of the most important phrases to come out of the women's movement. And so I really noticed that a lot of colleges, very inadvertently and for good historical reasons tend to look quite. They tend to feature more women, for example, in their marketing materials. That's probably not a great idea now given your enrollment rates. Actually you want more men on the front of your brochures and you want men going out into the classrooms. And so being intentional about that. The second thing is, and I'll get to the work and the earn and learn thing in a moment, but in the way you, you do some of those community outreach things, just be intentionally building relationships that are a bit more pro male. I really love the fact that the University of Vermont does this entrepreneurship thing for people who are interested in college. They do like a business competition. And it doesn't, it's not restricted to boys. But one of the reasons they've done that is because their research showed that that was going to be something that kind of boys were going to get into to. Like an entrepreneurial competition just skews male. So do that and then making it more applied, which is. That's maybe one example of. Because every level of education, but perhaps particularly in this transition from high school into postsecondary, it does look as if young men need to know why before they'll do what. They have to be a bit more convinced that there's a point to this and there's a real world application to this. And that's why I think this idea of integrating it more into career paths with employers is a way to signal that this is going to be something that's kind of valuable in the long run. But also just the nature of the learning is a bit more applied. I think it's one of the reasons why more vocational forms of learning seem to skew male in their outcomes. This is not shop class. This is not, oh, boys need to use their hands. What this is, is that boys need to see the point of this. They're just a little bit less compliant about doing abstract academic work because their teacher told them to.
Just girls are a bit better at that. The boys need, well, sorry, why am I doing this again? What's the point? And so I do think that kind of making sure that all of your coursework, your pedagogy, but also the integration with employers is a little bit more what's the point? And the last thing I'll say on college presidents is that a lot of surveys, I mentioned this earlier, find that a lot of young men, especially if they're from lower income backgrounds, young men of color, actually even white men too, from rural backgrounds will very often say on belonging surveys they just don't feel like they belong on campus. And so almost every university and college has a women's resource center. That's a great idea. But almost none of them have a men's resource center or men's mentoring groups or men's peer support groups. And that is a mindset shift that all college presidents need to make now, which is you've got to be able to do both of those things at once.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, we're going to get to that in a minute. I want to talk about those resources. But Richard, I know you've also looked more globally at this issue. And this is a global issue. Right. And so has anyone kind of figured out a different pathway for this, A different way that maybe U.S. institutions, a lot of our listeners are in the U.S. that U.S.institutions might be able to learn from?
Richard Reeves:
Well, every major advanced economy, as you say, has a gender gap in postsecondary education. Actually the widest gaps are in Scandinavia. And so you'll see in the Scandinavian countries close to 20 point gaps now in college going rates between men and women and full free count among policymakers. The Norwegian government have created a commission on this, the Danish government are looking at schools like their whole education system now is really, I think, marked by huge gender gaps. The interesting thing is that the countries where the gender gap in postsecondary is less are the ones that do have stronger vocational systems, like Germany. I know Germany comes up all the time in these conversations, but it is striking nonetheless that that is even there. There's a gender gap, but it is much, much less. And I do think that one of the ways that those systems work is by creating more of an obvious link to vocational courses. The pedagogy tilts a bit more vocationally as you go into the workplace. I was listening to a podcast. Toby Luttke, who's German, Canadian, founder of Shopify, he was raised in Germany and so he did an apprenticeship in coding at the age of 14. Everyone had an apprenticeship, right? So he got into a computer place and he got interested and ended up going to college and ended up founding, being a tech founder and now lives in Canada. And so. But it's really interesting that like the German system was encouraging that link to employment, which is Michael's point from earlier. Very, very, very early. And I, I think in the US that the understandable fear of tracking young people into more vocational learning because of the history around racism in the US and to some extent classism too, there's a real fear that we're just going to track some kinds of kids into those vocational tracks. Our kids won't go. Our kids, the kids of posh people won't go. And I get that fear. But the problem is that the current system is failing those kids we are most worried about anyway. And so we should be sensitive about tracking. But the fear of tracking and the insistence on this universalistic model is failing our most vulnerable students. And it's time for the US to get over its resistance around early vocational learn and earn policies.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah. It's amazing that we don't even meet in the middle on that in some way. And so, Richard, as we wrap up, I'm just kinda curious. Is it possible to get to parity in higher ed as to be honest with you, is that what we really want? And how do you respond because, to those, female leaders who say, you know, what's the problem here? Right? Because for generations, men dominated enrollment in higher ed. I know I saw you speak at AEI about a year or so ago, and the room was really divided, especially around gender. And there was this, all the discussion was around, you know, is this a zero sum game, where if we increase enrollment for men, those gains come from women? Or is there some positive sum approach here that we could see this as, you know, rising boats lift all tides. Like, is that what we are is that, or rising tides lift all boats, I should say. Is that what we're you know, what are we trying to get to here?
Richard Reeves:
So to answer your first question, I cannot easily envisage a world where we get back to gender balance in higher education. I think that the advantages that girls and young women have in the traditional education system that leads into higher education are not going to go away. And they've been revealed by the move towards equality that we've had recently. So to that extent, good. If you have a more level playing field and one team of slightly better players, then they're going to win more often. And I just think that though partly as I mentioned earlier, because of just this maturity gap, right, that just 16, 17, 18 year old girls are just on average older than 16, 17, 18 year old boys. They just are. And that's not going to change kind of anytime soon. So we need better alternatives. We need to make sure that boys are doing better, et cetera. And so. But look, part of the way I think about this is that when we saw similar gender gaps in the 70s, but the other way around, like when men were as far ahead of women in the seventies as, as women are now ahead of men, we did think it was a problem. We did think we should look, and we did. And the way we did that was to say we need to just make sure that the structures of education, that the culture of education, the pedagogy, the assessment systems, the admission systems are not biased against women or they're not based around a default male norm. And we made a lot of changes as a result. I do think we need to do the same the other way around. And I do think that the education system as a whole is now somewhat more female friendly than male friendly somewhat. And that we should rebalance that. So more male teachers, more vocational learning, maybe a later start for boys, more recess. I could go on, but just right now there's just a way in which within certainly the K12 system, boys are sometimes treated like malfunctioning girls.
Jeff Selingo:
And Richard, what's the reception you get whether it's in K12 or higher ed when you advocate for that?
Richard Reeves:
Well, you have to back it for data. I mean, you have to prove the point. I mean, so look, and actually what I find is that in K12, the statement that the K12 system is just working a bit better for girls now than it is for boys is only controversial in very, very narrow circles. Like if you say that in any school, right. My son is now a teacher in Baltimore City public school system. And like, everyone goes, well, duh, yeah, like you say to parents, right? Try, try. Everyone's like, yes, of course, we know, of course it's working better for girls. And so we could we just to make sure that it's just, we have, we're not inadvertently creating systems of education that favor one sex over the other. And we used to have one, a system that's favored boys over girls. And now I think that to a, you know, I'm not going to overstate it, but I think if you go into the average school now and even may want to average kind of campus, it's just structured and assessed and designed in a way that just fits a little bit better to the average woman or girl than the average boy or man. And we need to try and make it as level as possible. Doesn't mean we'll get to equality, but it means that we'll get closer and it means that the inequalities that remain are not ones that are the result of structural disadvantages.
Jeff Selingo [00:49:06]:
Right. And what I hear you saying here is that this isn't a zero sum game. So the gains that men could have under this are not going to be taken away from women.
Richard Reeves:
Yeah. In this space, I don't think this is zero sum. I mean, you might say, look, there's only so many college slots. Well, is that true? And first of all, most of these colleges I'm worried about, they're facing mass, as you said, massively disenroll rates.
Jeff Selingo:
Right, right. It's not, it's the less selective places that have the biggest gender they're trying.
Richard Reeves :
And they're the ones who are trying to fill their seats. And so that's. But look, there are some areas of life that what happens is that people think about, I don't know, Congress, we need more women in Congress, which by the way, we really, really do. That is, that is zero sum. Right. And if you want more Fortune 500 women, then you need fewer Fortune 500 men. That is zero sum. And so what people do is they take, take a mindset that is formed by actually zero sum competitions and assume that that's what's going to happen in other areas. And it's not true, but it creates a reflexive opposition to the idea of helping boys and men because they falsely think it will mean doing less for women and girls, even though in this case that is absolutely not true.
Jeff Selingo:
Richard Reeves, thank you so much for joining us on Future U.
Michael Horn:
And with that, that will wrap up this episode of Future U. We hope you got as much out of it as we did and we look forward to talking with you next time.
