Extra Ordinary Ideas

Easily Solved?

Last week Glenn Sacks and Phillip Cook published the most recent of a growing number of panicky columns about the "mystery" of the alleged gross decline in men’s academic performance. Titled “Mysterious decline – Where Are All The Men On Campus?” the article cites such terrifying statistics as “Men earn only 43% of college degrees” as proof that women as a group are sailing ahead of men in terms of academic accomplishment.

“We have thrown the gender switch,” AEI scholar Christina Hoff Summers warns, “What does it mean in the long run that we have females who are significantly more literate, significantly more educated than their male counterparts?” The article rattles on feverishly about the “loss in national productivity that this trend [of male ‘decline,’ presumably] portends.”

Thus, according to Cook, Sacks and Sommers:

1) Men are in “decline” academically;
2) The fact that women form more than 50% of college students indicates indisputably that women as a whole are outperforming men; and
3) The above are new and disturbing trends.

But in fact there is a very simple alternative explanation for the recent college gender imbalance that makes it seem pretty benign to anyone not seeking to secure a date in freshman econ. Men are over represented at the extreme ends of most measures of intellectual or academic achievement, both good and bad. Women, by contrast, tend to be over represented near the middle. This is not a new phenomenon; it’s been true as long as empiricists have bothered to notice.

And so it appears to be today. True, the young ladies have been making slightly better high school grades, of late, but boys still outscore girls just a little on most standardized tests. Thus, you can probably graph male and female overall college preparedness about like this:

Women form the higher, narrower bell curve. There are a lot of them in the middle, and fewer on the edges. By contrast, men (represented here by the thicker line) will form more than half of the students who ace everything, and more than half who flunk out of school.

Now imagine drawing a straight vertical line through both bell curves at the 50th percentile mark, and sending every student on the right side of that mark to college. College bound men and women would be even-steven, with 50% of each gender in a degree program. This is true because the men and women represented on this graph are – taken as a whole – equally academically prepared.

Now suppose we hypothesize that more than half of these high school students attend college. Let’s say that 60% do. We can draw a vertical line through these same bell curves at the 40th percentile mark, and send the 60% of students to the right on to college. The graph would then look like this:

As you can see, the result is that more women will be attending college than men, if we send the majority – but not all – of our high school students.

Well, Americans may be doing just that. The National Center for Education Statistics informs us that 62.9% of high school graduates went directly to college in 1999. That number doesn’t account for high school dropouts, but nor does it account for students who go back to school after taking a year or two off.

So why the hysteria over boys suddenly experiencing a “mysterious decline?” Ah yes, crises sell articles, don’t they? Books too!

It seems more likely to me that women simply happen to comprise more than half the group of beneficiaries of a general expansion of college opportunities, due to very long-term demographic factors explained above. I never thought I'd be agreeing with a statement issued by the American Association of University Women, but spokesperson Jacqueline Woods is right on. Those concerned about the percentages of men on college campuses "are playing a zero sum game," she says. "I refuse to play."

Posted by Marie Gryphon on May 6, 2003