June 4, 2007

Missing males puzzle colleges
Men are only 42% of the U.S. student body
By MARLA JO FISHER
The Orange County Register

It's only been three decades since women marched in the streets to demand the right to go to all-male universities. But today some experts wonder if men themselves are becoming the endangered species.

Nationally, women make up 58 percent of college and university students, with the percentage of men shrinking every year. The trend is even more pronounced among some ethnic groups and in some areas, attracting attention from researchers nationwide.

Women outnumber men 2-to-1 among the 40 percent of undergraduates age 25 or older, according to the American Council on Education.

"This has been going on for some time, but no one ever wanted to speak about it, because it's not politically correct," said retired Cal State Fullerton physics professor Mark Shapiro, who studies the trend. "The only people who would talk about it were college admissions officers, who were wondering where the heck all the men are."

The California Postsecondary Education Commission, which looks at higher education trends, is among the agencies studying the issue.

Experts say California already has too few college graduates to meet the demand from employers, requiring the state to import educated workers from other states and even other countries.

Policy leaders are becoming concerned about the untrained men left behind, without enough education to succeed in an increasingly technological world where more jobs require higher-level thinking.

At Cal State Fullerton, women make up 59 percent of the student body, according to state figures--21,226 women to 14,695 men.

Nationwide, male students are also much more likely than women to drop out of school, have lower grades, have run-ins with campus judicial systems and even commit crimes.

"People are just now starting to become aware of this," said Frank Harris III, an assistant research professor at USC who studies the behavior of male students.

UC Irvine's campus police arrested 203 men and 34 women in 2006, according to police.

"A lot of times it's fighting, vandalism, damaging property," Harris said. "The overwhelming majority of the time it involves alcohol."

Men are more likely to abuse alcohol in college than women. Harris said male students drink as partly as a cultural experience to prove masculinity and partly to drown out problems such as troubles in school.

In a national study last year by the American College Health Association, 11 percent of male students reported being in a physical fight, compared with xxxx females. Nineteen percent of men said they used alcohol 10 to 29 days out of the past 30, compared with 13 percent of women.

Experts also say men are less likely to seek help from tutors, teachers and counselors than women – one reason they probably drop out more often.

"It's hard for a guy to ask for help," UCI public-health student Kenny Lee said, remembering when math anxiety hampered his attempt to learn calculus. "It was difficult for me. I was embarrassed. When I did ask for help, it got better."

Between 1900 and 1930, about the same number of men and women were enrolled in college, though people were much less likely in those days to seek a college education. After that period, enrollment fluctuations were attributed to war veterans' use of their G.I. Bill benefits after World War II, pressure on women to be homemakers and a surge in male enrollment during the Vietnam War from men who didn't want to be drafted.

During the early years of the women's movement, as women entered college and the workforce in growing numbers, universities opened women's centers and developed women's studies programs.

Today, with growing recognition that men's lives are also affected by sex roles, some academic programs are dropping the "women's studies" label and renaming themselves "gender studies."

University professionals are also becoming more interested in serving the specific needs of male students. In the past decade, groups have sprung up to help them, such as the Standing Committee for Men – part of the American College Student Personnel Association – and The Institute on College Males at Morehouse College in Georgia Male studies is now a research arena for graduate students, though only a few colleges have undergraduate programs. Typically, male studies looks at masculinity and culture, including what it means to be a man in different societies and the roles men are expected to play.

A recent conference of the 110-member American Men's Studies Association held sessions on scholarship involving fatherhood, suicide, violence, masculine power, sexual identity, prison and religion.

"There's been a significant problem of the underrepresentation of minority men on college campuses that has gotten worse," said Mark Justad, a board member of the association. "Recently we've started to see this impact the middle-class white male, and now we're starting to pay attention to it."

Justad said top-tier colleges and universities don't show much of a gender gap, but the trend becomes pronounced in middle-tier schools.

UCI had 12,655 male students and 12,427 females in fall 2006, according to a campus spokeswoman.

While the trend falls across all racial groups, Asian-Americans tend to have the closest parity between men and women, Shapiro said. Blacks have the largest biggest disparity.

"African-American males all over the country are severely underrepresented in higher education," said UCI Assistant Vice Chancellor Thomas Parham, who is black.

Parham said black parents often put more pressure on girls than boys to behave and do well in school.

Also, boys of all races generally do worse in school because they are more physically active and find it harder to sit and study or listen to a lecture, he said.

Experts also say fewer men go to college than women because boys will more likely drop out of high school than girls, leaving the university applicant pool smaller.

So where are all the men?

"They go out and get jobs. They get busted and go to jail. Some go into the military," Shapiro said. "An awful lot just go into dead-end jobs."