Many male high school graduates are making the decision to forgo college as rising costs coupled with a politically correct campus culture has increasing numbers of young men questioning the benefit of higher education.
Asa Sedam, 20, for example, graduated from Patagonia High School in Arizona with a 4.3 GPA. After watching both of his parents earn college degrees, Mr. Sedam grew up believing that everyone needed to attain higher education; however, after graduation Mr. Sedam decided that he would benefit more from bypassing the traditional four-year school and immediately entering the workforce.
“I considered college and after evaluating the pros and cons made the decision that I could accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in life faster and more efficiently without a four year degree,” said Mr. Sedam. “I wanted to learn from people who are actively doing what I want to do, and I could do that all online through private courses and at a fraction of the cost.”
“I think college would be a waste of my time and resources, and it would set me back further, distracting me from my ultimate goals,” Mr. Sedam added.
The mass exodus of men opting out of American colleges that many had feared has become a reality. Today, there are close to three women for every two men in college in the United States, according to data acquired by The New York Times. The majority of liberal-arts colleges are close to 60 percent female, and the gulf is even larger at community colleges. Further, men have been dropping out of college at a much higher rate than women.
During the last 50 years, the conventional wisdom was that if you wanted to achieve the American dream, it began with earning a college diploma. Before the 1950s, college attendance had been dominated by men. In the 1960s and 1970s, the number of women seeking higher degrees started soaring. By the early 1980s, more women were attending college than men.
However, over the past few years a shift in both the wider cultural perception as well as the conversation over the value of higher education has begun to emerge—especially for men entering a field largely dominated by a fringe feminist element, according to a scholar.
In an essay published in City Journal titled, “The Great Feminization of the American University,” Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald cited that 75 percent of Ivy League presidents, 66 percent of college administrators, and 58 percent of recent graduates are now female.
“Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma,” she writes. “When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminized bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity.”
During an Oct. 20th episode of Real Time, host Bill Maher received applause when during a discussion of the conflict in the Middle East he warned parents not to let their kids go to college.
“College life today is a day spa combined with North Korean re-education camp,” said Mr. Mahar. “It’s a daycare center with a meal plan, except the toddlers can fire the adults … If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market.”
“And if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid,” the comedian and social commentator continued.
However, it isn’t just men who have become skeptical of academia. College enrollment overall dipped from 21 million students in 2010 to 18 million in 2021. By August 2023, the number had fallen even further, with less than 17 million students enrolled. A March report from Fortune magazine cited that undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8 percent from 2019 to 2022. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the largest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal and the University of Chicago, 56 percent of all Americans no longer believe a four-year college degree is worth it, citing debt and the belief that tangible job skills aren’t always attained.
Education officials found that students today have adopted a more empirical worldview when weighing the tangible cost with the potential benefits of a college degree.
“This generation is different,” Jamia Stokes, a senior director at SCORE, an education nonprofit, told Fortune. “They’re more pragmatic about the way they work, about the way they spend their time and their money.”
However, while many have presented this decline as a national emergency, declining college attendance may actually be a positive. By skipping school, many are saving themselves from accruing unnecessary debt for a degree. In a global economy where merit has become increasingly more determinative than credentials, some don’t see the value of college or question if it has the career relevance it did in the past.
For Mr. Sedam, in the two years since leaving high school he has earned his real estate license, started a lucrative side business, and continues to increase his skill set through independent online classes as he grows his new business venture in real estate marketing. He has earned enough money to live in his own apartment in the exclusive Foothills area of Tucson, Arizona, and is excited about his debt-free future.
“I want to travel and work for myself, and it’s just easier to do without the ball and chain of college debt wrapped around my neck,” said Mr. Sedam.
In hopes of boosting male attendance, officers at some colleges, including the University of Georgia, automatically award male candidates additional points on their application. However, if colleges are to have any hope of attracting young men back to campus, it will take more than reforming the admittance criteria, and would instead take a complete structural overhaul, according to Mr. Sedam.
“If I could skip the prerequisites and only take the classes I needed, and not have to deal with all the political garbage, then maybe I would consider it,” said Mr. Sedam.
“But I don’t think that is likely to happen anytime soon,” he added.
