5 ms·

Why American men think it's not worth going to college anymore

27 points by jnord 2y ago

jnord 2y ago
https://archive.md/ZzU14 https://archive.md/ZzU14
orionblastar 2y ago
My son earned a business management degree and had a hard time finding a job. He had to work in a movie theatre as an assistant manager that didn't pay too well. He went to trade school and earned a CDL (Commercial Driver's License) for $5000 and now drives a truck for decent money. A college degree can be expensive, and it does not guarantee a job, plus you have a huge student loan to pay off. That is why American Men think it is not worth it to go to college anymore.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  > think it is not worth it to go to college anymore. They're likely right, too. Turns out... employers minds are elsewhere. The degree no longer serves as a useful signal. In nearly two decades I still haven't found cause to finish my degree. Hell, I don't even have to practice what I was hired for. Can often find the job is 'whatever we decide'. Education, in some/several senses, is undesirable. Instead of falling for it, may find it better to be too dumb to notice or too tough to care about hoodwinking.
- _mlbt 2y ago
  Additionally going into the trades can mean joining the workforce immediately so that you can start early on buying a house and saving for retirement. Also military recruitment is way up, which is another avenue young men (and women) can take to acquire employable skills without going to college.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  But why do American Women disagree with American Men on this?
  - orionblastar 1y ago
    Not all women, there were some women in my son's class applying for the CDL. Generally, Women do not want labor jobs and enjoy a desk job instead. This is why men are paid more than women in general the labor jobs pay more and require a trade school.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
[flagged]
- _qbxi 2y ago
  Can you expand on what you mean by "outgroup"? From what I see, power/wealth in the US is still disproportionately held by white men. The balance may be shifting, but a slight reduction in privilege towards the average is not the same as becoming outgroup.
  - lunar-whitey 2y ago
    The shift parent is concerned with is perceived at the lower-middle, not at the top. People like Barbara Ehrenreich have noted the “fear of falling” in America for generations. Attitudes like this are what is seen when the fall actually happens.
- thunderfork 2y ago
  [dead]
- lunar-whitey 2y ago
  This is a phenomenon for white American men because the American middle class happens to be majority white. Behind every “DEI hire” stands a mass of others who never made it as far as you expected to. There is nothing to be gained from bitterness at being the last to rudely awaken from the American Dream.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  > Mental illness and homelessness and career troubles are plaguing people like me, The people who hoard all the money that's actually depriving you of stability have trained you with identity politics to think of these as issues that affect people "like you" rather than affecting everyone outside their top 1% in-group, regardless of identity.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  If you look at the statistics , the decline is even greater for Hispanic and black men
abracadaniel 2y ago
It’s not fashionable. There’s a growing fixation on keeping up appearances of masculinity and it’s become a common identity. Education and mental health seem to be largely getting thrown out as non-masculine.
- DaSHacka 2y ago
  Yes, I'm sure toxic masculinity is the only reason there's a growing dissatisfaction to the tradeoffs of enrolling in higher education. "Am I the one who's wrong?" "No, clearly it's the college-aged men that have to weigh the consequences of their choice who are wrong"
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    It does not need to be the only reason for it to be a reason. Basically zero macro social trends have exactly one cause.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Mental health is much worse amongst young women than young men and the gap is widening with time, so that part of your analysis is inverted. Example: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff0384d43-4cef-421d-b522-9a0e42cb4ffd_1434x806.jpeg https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
  - Moomoomoo309 2y ago
    Something that complicates that statistic is the awful one the article alludes to: Broadly speaking, women attempt suicide, men commit suicide. When you're looking at nonfatal suicide, women tend to show up much higher because the men don't get admitted to the hospital, they end up in the morgue.
    - lunar-whitey 2y ago
      Most measures that rely on self-reporting can underrepresent men; completed suicide is just the most drastic example. It’s difficult to think of a reliable measure that doesn’t have this problem.
Blackarea 2y ago
I don't want to sound too cynical but from European perspective I'd say just remove the horrendous costs of college and university by regulazing and subsidizing education. It's not communism even if many Americans would think so. But in order to get anywhere near there you'd probably have to start with replacing that orange toad and his minions with something else, anything really would do at this point
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  US has a higher proportion of university graduates than almost every European country. Especially e.g. Germany is almost 2x lower. It’s not strictly true in all cases but generally it seems that free or subsidized higher education results in rationing and lower accessibility (which is not really such a bad thing if other options like trade schools etc. are available). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...
  - lunar-whitey 2y ago
    Does this hold if one only compares attainment of degrees in fields that are in demand? US policy has specific features that have resulted in many people of limited means pursuing degrees that confer no professional qualification at all.
  - Blackarea 2y ago
    That was an interesting conundrum. I used the gpt research feature to explore that so maybe take it with a grain of salt but I think it's not too bad: > In short, Americans attend college in greater numbers partly because they feel they must (to secure good jobs), whereas many Germans do not feel they need a university degree to have a good career, thanks to the established apprenticeship system and different employer expectations. https://chatgpt.com/share/680c8d76-d6a8-8010-a4cd-48155198f973 https://chatgpt.com/share/680c8d76-d6a8-8010-a4cd-48155198f9... This matches my own experience as a german citizen, that german "Ausbildung" is a very valid and accepted option. Maybe university enrollment or tertiary education on its own isn't drawing the full picture? Worth to think about
jqpabc123 2y ago
A college degree is much more expensive than it was decades ago. The cost of higher education has increased well beyond inflation for a very long time. Nowadays, anyone with only moderate skills/qualifications can obtain a college degree --- the primary requirement is money/debt. Consequently, the marketplace has been flooded with degrees of questionable substance and value. Lots of people know a degree holder working a job that doesn't require a degree (like truck driver or retail manager) while being saddled with college debt.
- lunar-whitey 2y ago
  The public school and financial systems in the US are set up to retain ignorant students in economically worthless degree programs and saddle them with the costs for the rest of their lives. Not pursuing any degree at all (because one cannot identify which degrees might be valuable enough to avoid this trap) is an obvious reaction.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  That completely fails to explain the gender gap, unless women are just less savvy than men.
  - jqpabc123 2y ago
    The facts I presented transcend gender. But here are some that are gender related. Women make up 58% of all college students. Women hold 67% of all student loan debt. Personally, I looked but failed to find much to discredit your "less savvy" explanation.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    There is some evidence that part of the effect is explained by women needing to go to college more than men in order to get decently paying jobs. This is less true today than 20 years ago, as we've seen real wages of men without college degrees drop since the financial crisis, but the trend of more women attending college started well before that.
altairprime 2y ago
Previously on HN, with some discussion spread across four posts over the past year: Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col... > What has changed is an increase in girls. When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college. We’re just not talking about it. > For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. > “There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.” Whatever other factors may exist, college is now at or past the 60% women threshold, so of course men are quitting college. We can expect — to such a degree of certainty, given historical U.S. data that we could place a safe bet on a market about it — that college will be 80% women and in perhaps ten years or less. It’s cute that Bloomberg is focusing on all the rationalizations that men are coming up with for this — at least some of them have the courage to say that it’s just the “vibes”. A little self-awareness would go a long way towards understanding, but Bloomberg doesn’t go there. Honestly, they should be assessing gender trends at trade schools over the past twenty years and see if those are at risk of becoming incompatible with U.S. masculinity next. What would it do to their president’s domestic manufacturing dreams if men refused to attend trade schools?
- trod1234 2y ago
  This is 5GW, and many of the statements you link are entirely value based. The simple fact of the matter is there are hidden biases against men completing college, that favor women completing college. The same holds true to a large degree in employment with few exceptions. Making a supposition that the pool of female to male candidates for college is interconnected is a fallacy. It is independent, and based on factors with no current visibility, and there are no guaranteed prospects even if men can somehow complete the struggle session to a degree. What's worse. Women don't date down. So all those women who got degrees will have a harder time finding mates, will be the bread winner which leaves the men in a role that is unattractive to them, and they will be highly dissatisfied as a result of simple math and gender selection differences. You don't survive by ignoring reality, and birthrate collapse is going to happen given the myriad of issues that people can't seem to get a mental grasp enough to recognize the underlying problems. When there is a problem, and people can't communicate sufficiently to organize to recognize said problem, nothing gets done. You can't react, and the problem grows until it can't grow any more (at existential crisis). Cascading failures are diabolical because people cannot believe that certain little things cause great big things in time. Evolutionary selection eventually destroys societies based in total control, as those members cannot adapt and fail Darwinian fitness.

27 points by jnord 2y ago

https://archive.md/ZzU14 https://archive.md/ZzU14

My son earned a business management degree and had a hard time finding a job. He had to work in a movie theatre as an assistant manager that didn't pay too well. He went to trade school and earned a CDL (Commercial Driver's License) for $5000 and now drives a truck for decent money. A college degree can be expensive, and it does not guarantee a job, plus you have a huge student loan to pay off. That is why American Men think it is not worth it to go to college anymore.

bravetraveler 2y ago
> think it is not worth it to go to college anymore. They're likely right, too. Turns out... employers minds are elsewhere. The degree no longer serves as a useful signal. In nearly two decades I still haven't found cause to finish my degree. Hell, I don't even have to practice what I was hired for. Can often find the job is 'whatever we decide'. Education, in some/several senses, is undesirable. Instead of falling for it, may find it better to be too dumb to notice or too tough to care about hoodwinking.
_mlbt 2y ago
Additionally going into the trades can mean joining the workforce immediately so that you can start early on buying a house and saving for retirement. Also military recruitment is way up, which is another avenue young men (and women) can take to acquire employable skills without going to college.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
But why do American Women disagree with American Men on this?
- orionblastar 1y ago
  Not all women, there were some women in my son's class applying for the CDL. Generally, Women do not want labor jobs and enjoy a desk job instead. This is why men are paid more than women in general the labor jobs pay more and require a trade school.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

[flagged]

_qbxi 2y ago
Can you expand on what you mean by "outgroup"? From what I see, power/wealth in the US is still disproportionately held by white men. The balance may be shifting, but a slight reduction in privilege towards the average is not the same as becoming outgroup.
- lunar-whitey 2y ago
  The shift parent is concerned with is perceived at the lower-middle, not at the top. People like Barbara Ehrenreich have noted the “fear of falling” in America for generations. Attitudes like this are what is seen when the fall actually happens.
thunderfork 2y ago
[dead]
lunar-whitey 2y ago
This is a phenomenon for white American men because the American middle class happens to be majority white. Behind every “DEI hire” stands a mass of others who never made it as far as you expected to. There is nothing to be gained from bitterness at being the last to rudely awaken from the American Dream.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
> Mental illness and homelessness and career troubles are plaguing people like me, The people who hoard all the money that's actually depriving you of stability have trained you with identity politics to think of these as issues that affect people "like you" rather than affecting everyone outside their top 1% in-group, regardless of identity.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
If you look at the statistics , the decline is even greater for Hispanic and black men

abracadaniel 2y ago

It’s not fashionable. There’s a growing fixation on keeping up appearances of masculinity and it’s become a common identity. Education and mental health seem to be largely getting thrown out as non-masculine.

DaSHacka 2y ago
Yes, I'm sure toxic masculinity is the only reason there's a growing dissatisfaction to the tradeoffs of enrolling in higher education. "Am I the one who's wrong?" "No, clearly it's the college-aged men that have to weigh the consequences of their choice who are wrong"
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  It does not need to be the only reason for it to be a reason. Basically zero macro social trends have exactly one cause.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Mental health is much worse amongst young women than young men and the gap is widening with time, so that part of your analysis is inverted. Example: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff0384d43-4cef-421d-b522-9a0e42cb4ffd_1434x806.jpeg https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
- Moomoomoo309 2y ago
  Something that complicates that statistic is the awful one the article alludes to: Broadly speaking, women attempt suicide, men commit suicide. When you're looking at nonfatal suicide, women tend to show up much higher because the men don't get admitted to the hospital, they end up in the morgue.
  - lunar-whitey 2y ago
    Most measures that rely on self-reporting can underrepresent men; completed suicide is just the most drastic example. It’s difficult to think of a reliable measure that doesn’t have this problem.

Blackarea 2y ago

I don't want to sound too cynical but from European perspective I'd say just remove the horrendous costs of college and university by regulazing and subsidizing education. It's not communism even if many Americans would think so. But in order to get anywhere near there you'd probably have to start with replacing that orange toad and his minions with something else, anything really would do at this point

wqaatwt 2y ago
US has a higher proportion of university graduates than almost every European country. Especially e.g. Germany is almost 2x lower. It’s not strictly true in all cases but generally it seems that free or subsidized higher education results in rationing and lower accessibility (which is not really such a bad thing if other options like trade schools etc. are available). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...
- lunar-whitey 2y ago
  Does this hold if one only compares attainment of degrees in fields that are in demand? US policy has specific features that have resulted in many people of limited means pursuing degrees that confer no professional qualification at all.
- Blackarea 2y ago
  That was an interesting conundrum. I used the gpt research feature to explore that so maybe take it with a grain of salt but I think it's not too bad: > In short, Americans attend college in greater numbers partly because they feel they must (to secure good jobs), whereas many Germans do not feel they need a university degree to have a good career, thanks to the established apprenticeship system and different employer expectations. https://chatgpt.com/share/680c8d76-d6a8-8010-a4cd-48155198f973 https://chatgpt.com/share/680c8d76-d6a8-8010-a4cd-48155198f9... This matches my own experience as a german citizen, that german "Ausbildung" is a very valid and accepted option. Maybe university enrollment or tertiary education on its own isn't drawing the full picture? Worth to think about

jqpabc123 2y ago

A college degree is much more expensive than it was decades ago. The cost of higher education has increased well beyond inflation for a very long time. Nowadays, anyone with only moderate skills/qualifications can obtain a college degree --- the primary requirement is money/debt. Consequently, the marketplace has been flooded with degrees of questionable substance and value. Lots of people know a degree holder working a job that doesn't require a degree (like truck driver or retail manager) while being saddled with college debt.

lunar-whitey 2y ago
The public school and financial systems in the US are set up to retain ignorant students in economically worthless degree programs and saddle them with the costs for the rest of their lives. Not pursuing any degree at all (because one cannot identify which degrees might be valuable enough to avoid this trap) is an obvious reaction.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
That completely fails to explain the gender gap, unless women are just less savvy than men.
- jqpabc123 2y ago
  The facts I presented transcend gender. But here are some that are gender related. Women make up 58% of all college students. Women hold 67% of all student loan debt. Personally, I looked but failed to find much to discredit your "less savvy" explanation.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  There is some evidence that part of the effect is explained by women needing to go to college more than men in order to get decently paying jobs. This is less true today than 20 years ago, as we've seen real wages of men without college degrees drop since the financial crisis, but the trend of more women attending college started well before that.

altairprime 2y ago

Previously on HN, with some discussion spread across four posts over the past year: Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col... > What has changed is an increase in girls. When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college. We’re just not talking about it. > For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. > “There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.” Whatever other factors may exist, college is now at or past the 60% women threshold, so of course men are quitting college. We can expect — to such a degree of certainty, given historical U.S. data that we could place a safe bet on a market about it — that college will be 80% women and in perhaps ten years or less. It’s cute that Bloomberg is focusing on all the rationalizations that men are coming up with for this — at least some of them have the courage to say that it’s just the “vibes”. A little self-awareness would go a long way towards understanding, but Bloomberg doesn’t go there. Honestly, they should be assessing gender trends at trade schools over the past twenty years and see if those are at risk of becoming incompatible with U.S. masculinity next. What would it do to their president’s domestic manufacturing dreams if men refused to attend trade schools?

trod1234 2y ago
This is 5GW, and many of the statements you link are entirely value based. The simple fact of the matter is there are hidden biases against men completing college, that favor women completing college. The same holds true to a large degree in employment with few exceptions. Making a supposition that the pool of female to male candidates for college is interconnected is a fallacy. It is independent, and based on factors with no current visibility, and there are no guaranteed prospects even if men can somehow complete the struggle session to a degree. What's worse. Women don't date down. So all those women who got degrees will have a harder time finding mates, will be the bread winner which leaves the men in a role that is unattractive to them, and they will be highly dissatisfied as a result of simple math and gender selection differences. You don't survive by ignoring reality, and birthrate collapse is going to happen given the myriad of issues that people can't seem to get a mental grasp enough to recognize the underlying problems. When there is a problem, and people can't communicate sufficiently to organize to recognize said problem, nothing gets done. You can't react, and the problem grows until it can't grow any more (at existential crisis). Cascading failures are diabolical because people cannot believe that certain little things cause great big things in time. Evolutionary selection eventually destroys societies based in total control, as those members cannot adapt and fail Darwinian fitness.