Successful measures to push more girls into college have combined with a persistent erosion in the number of boys enrolling to create a growing gender imbalance on campus.
The Topic: Fewer men than women go to college.Why It Matters: The trend is threatening the goal of having more people with degrees.
Men made up 58 percent of American college students in 1970, but the ratios have now almost exactly reversed.
The same thing is happening in the U.K., where The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus traveled to see programs that are trying to encourage boys to go to college.
Unless the trend is reversed, it threatens a further slowing of growth in the proportion of people who have the kind of university degrees required to fill jobs in the knowledge economy.
Marcus talked about this phenomenon with the public-radio program Here & Now. Listen to the segment here.