Tea at Trianon: Men Declining a College Educatiion

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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.)