BENZONIA, Mich. — Maggie Bacon is seeking men.
On a recent Friday, she attached flyers about an upcoming education and training fair to more than 500 pizza boxes, one of the ways she’s tried to persuade men in this northern Michigan town to enroll in college, a certificate program or even just a single course.
“On a Friday night when somebody wants to watch a basketball game or some other sporting event, they’re probably gonna order pizza,” said Bacon. “Part of that target was those working-age adult men.”
Bacon runs BEST Benzie County, a local group that works to support education from pre-K to college, part of a statewide network committed to building a college-going culture.
Michigan, like many other states, says it has a shortage of skilled workers, a gap that risks hurting its economy. Only 51.6 percent of working-age adults over 25 have a degree or other training beyond high school, state data shows, the lowest of any Midwestern state. The number of men in particular who are going to college has been falling steadily, despite evidence that people with postsecondary credentials tend to earn more than their peers with only a high school diploma and are more likely to be employed.
Seven years ago, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer launched an effort to boost the proportion of adult state residents with education past high school to 60 percent by 2030. In 2021, she launched Michigan Reconnect to help residents 25 and older cover the cost of community college tuition. But the number of women signing up for the program has far outpaced the number of men.
About 35 percent more Michigan women than men earn a degree or certificate, according to 2024-25 state data. Nationally, more than 1.9 million women completed a credential, such as a degree or certificate, during the 2024-25 school year, compared with 1.4 million men, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
So last April, Whitmer issued an executive order to focus more attention and resources on getting men into certificate programs and college, including by boosting support for groups like Bacon’s. “I always will continue to be a strong supporter of women’s rights and freedoms, but that’s never going to stop me from caring about and fighting for men, too,” she said in announcing the order.
Whitmer’s plan has been slow to get off the ground, in part because of a delayed state budget, and overall the state is not on pace to meet its 2030 goal. But advocates like Bacon are hopeful that added attention and funding could help move more men into higher education.
The Michigan governor is one of a small but growing number of state leaders to concentrate on male success. In Maryland, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore launched an initiative to recruit and retain male teachers. In Utah, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox is centering on male mental health and educational opportunities.
College has lost favor among some men in part because popular notions of masculinity today — including those advanced in the “manosphere,” the digital movement that subscribes to patriarchal beliefs — do not tend to emphasize or value learning beyond high school, said Ryan Wells, director of the Center for Student Success Research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“The idea of being a man is more about getting a job and supporting your family,” Wells said. “It’s sort of rational and logical to see why college could — in many cases, should — play a part, but that’s not the way it gets portrayed.” State and local efforts to attract men back to school could start to move the dial, he said, but they are up against years of a “societal attitude structure that is really hard to change.”
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Tyler Kniss is exactly the kind of student whom groups like Bacon’s are hoping to attract.
Kniss struggled during his teenage years and didn’t finish high school. He spent time in prison and in a boot camp for nonviolent offenses he committed as a minor. Around the same time, he became a father.
Once he finished serving his time, Kniss was motivated by his young family to secure a job in manufacturing. He also earned his GED along the way.
But Kniss, now 33 and a manufacturing operations manager at a Traverse City-based injection molding company, eventually began to want more opportunities for advancement. He realized that to achieve that future, he had to earn a college degree.
“I have a wealth of experience, and I’ve got these certifications,” he said. “But even I really had to kind of fight, in a sense, to even get where I’m at. I really had to be well-versed in everything.”
In 2024, at the suggestion of his employer, Kniss connected with a business instructor at nearby Northwestern Michigan College who helped him build a career plan. The college also told him about the Reconnect scholarship. Now, he’s enrolled in a degree program for business administration while continuing to work full-time, and hopes to transfer to the University of Michigan for a bachelor’s degree. The scholarship covers tuition for his two-year degree, and his employer’s education policy would cover the bachelor’s, he said.
Like Kniss, many other men are taking time to decide how to further their education — and now state officials are trying to provide them with answers.
There’s “urgency and ambition to act on this,” Jason Wilson, deputy director of strategic talent preparation at the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential, said at an event on male success organized by state officials in December. The state has held private focus groups with men across Michigan, as well as job training fairs and career pathway events for high schoolers and other outreach efforts. The state will analyze what has worked so far and release findings soon, said Aundreana Jones-Poole, a spokesperson for MiLEAP, Michigan’s lifelong education office.
Whitmer is seeking to lower the age requirement for the Michigan Reconnect Program from 25 to 21 to help more people qualify. She has also partnered with the Michigan College Access Network, a nonprofit focused on college access for all students, and regional leaders to connect men and others to work-based learning opportunities such as apprenticeships, which combine classroom and on-the-job training.
So far, more than 200,000 Michiganders have applied to the Michigan Reconnect program. But that isn’t nearly enough for the state to meet Whitmer’s 2030 goal.
State data shows that between 2018 and 2024, the share of adults with a degree or credential rose by just 2.7 percentage points.
Just 54.6 percent of the Class of 2025 enrolled in college within six months, a decade-long low.
The trends are similar in other states, which have also seen a slight improvement in college-going rates over the last few years following a pandemic drop. Overall, public four-year undergraduate enrollment grew by 1.4 percent in fall 2025, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Wells of the University of Massachusetts said that while states want to reach men, policies designed specifically for males can be unpopular or even politically problematic. President Donald Trump, for example, has included gender among the categories it does not want colleges to consider in admissions.
“They’re really in a tricky bind, because your goal is to have a specific kind of gendered outcome for a policy or program, and you’re unwilling or it’s just unfeasible to actually incentivize or build gender into it,” Wells said.
In Benzie, about 45 percent of residents have degrees, on par with other nearby counties. To work toward Whitmer’s goal of 60 percent, local leaders say, they set their own goal of more than 2,000 people earning a degree or credential by 2030. Currently, some 400 have earned a certificate since last June, said Traverse City Mayor Amy Shamroe, who runs the industry-focused arm for the Northern Michigan Attainment Collaborative, a 10-county campaign that started last year with funding from the state.
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It took Jose Lujano, who lives near Grand Rapids, years to even consider college. His parents wanted him to pursue a degree but lacked money to cover the costs, and they frequently reminded him he would need good grades to earn a scholarship. Lujano struggled in his early high school years, so he thought college was out of reach.
Still, he took a couple of community college classes after graduating from high school in 2018, but quickly ran out of money. Then he tried retail and factory roles, before starting work at a preschool in 2021. Now a paraprofessional at a Wyoming, Michigan, charter school, he wants to go back to school to become a teacher.
This past October, he started talking to officials at Grand Rapids Community College about obtaining a teacher certification. The 26-year-old learned last year that he qualified for the Reconnect Program and that it would cover most of his tuition. But he hesitated, wondering if he could balance school and work, as well as planning for his wedding this May.
Ultimately, he decided the scholarship was too great an opportunity to pass up. He enrolled at Grand Rapids for the summer session and hopes to get his associate’s degree within two years, then possibly transfer to Grand Valley State University.
Lujano said he believes the temptation of a paycheck draws many men directly into the workforce. “I wanted the money,” he said, “and that’s truly why I decided to pursue just hopping from job to job. That’s really what it was my first few years, until I just got so sick and tired of it.”
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Every region is coming up with its own approach to falling college enrollment and sharing what works, said Shamroe, the mayor.
In this part of northern Michigan, she said, strategies include bringing in students — mostly men — for noncredit classes at Northwestern Michigan College with hopes they will pivot later to a credit program or degree.
Elizabeth Sonnabend, program coordinator for extended education and training at Northwestern Michigan College, said the college tries to figure out what might draw men into higher education — often it’s hands-on, work-based learning — and then helps them identify an academic path that allows them to get credit for prior learning in the workforce.
Shamroe recruits businesses willing to create a pathway to education or apprenticeship for employees — which she notes can help employers as well as their workers.
“It’s all part of this reimagining or revisioning of what college or a degree or certification actually looks like,” Shamroe said. “We want to meet people where they are, their work experience counts.”
She said the collaborative tries to capitalize on the area’s “small-town feel.”
“Somebody knows somebody, and they’re going to recommend them,” Shamroe said. “We have so many partners already. We continue to add them. It only makes us stronger, a stronger resource for businesses and industries.”
Still, there are barriers. For Shirl Martin, the collaborative’s student navigator, a big challenge is being ghosted by people she’s trying to recruit as they weigh their options.
“I’ll call and check in and then crickets,” Martin said. “Then three months later, they resurface.”
Another barrier — one that affects many rural students — is that the Reconnect program only covers a portion of tuition for those who attend a community college that isn’t local to them. That can lead to stopouts, or temporary withdrawals, Bacon says.
And there’s the challenge of simply getting people to show up. At the job fair in March, only five male job seekers did.
In a meeting the next day, collaborative members noted that the local plumbing union, with its job fair sign detailing potential pay of $41 an hour for a new apprentice, attracted the most attention. Shamroe suggested being more direct about the potential financial payoff of taking college classes or joining a credential program.
“If we can get them in a classroom and see that it’s not as daunting, I think that’s our best bet,” Sonnabend said.
Men, she added, often think they aren’t ready for further learning. “But they’re capable of doing the work,” she said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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