Monday, June 12, 2017

Men Declining a College Educatiion

From the Denver Post:
A higher percentage of Colorado’s female high school graduates than male graduates were enrolled in college from 2009 through 2015, according to state records. In 2015, 61.2 percent of Colorado’s recent female high school graduates attended college in the fall, compared to 51.8 percent of male graduates, according to the Colorado Department of Higher Education.

A similar trend is occurring nationally. Although more people than ever are attending college, the ratio of male to female students is nearly 1:2. Compare that to 1960, when there were 1.6 males for every female graduating from a U.S. four-year college and 1.55 males for every female undergraduate, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Today, women hold almost 60 percent of all bachelor degrees, and women now account for almost half of students in law, medical and business graduate programs.

Meanwhile, over the past decade about 30 percent of male college students have dropped out during their freshman year, according to education consultant and blogger Daniel Riseman. He is among those in higher education circles that calls the declining number of college males a “silent epidemic.” “For two decades, I have helped hundreds of young men and women navigate college admissions,” Riseman said. “While none of my female students have dropped out, several male students return home without degrees and often with a sense of disappointment and despair.”

Kim Hunter Reed, new executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, says the issue of males eschewing college demands more study. “This is very concerning to me,” Hunter Reed said. Young men — like all students, she emphasized — need support from a variety of groups to thrive in higher education. “The most successful have a sense of place in college,” she said.

Stark, 28, studied computer science for a year and a half before leaving Metro State University to study on his own. Now a software engineer for a music company in Denver, Stark also DJs at some of the area’s most notable nightclubs. “What I was getting in the classroom just didn’t jibe with me. I felt I could teach myself on the Internet,” he said.

He worked a fast-food job and then took a corporate gig to support himself while he studied on his own. The alternative, he said, was to work four years to get a bachelor’s degree and then another year or two to earn a master’s degree, then “go to work for some huge company and go home at night and live my life with my family. And that just didn’t sound appealing to me at the time.” (Read more.)
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