The Masculine and Virtuous Reasons to Attend College

Are young men avoiding college because it's too feminine?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

In a popular and fascinating article,

Celeste Davis

has argued that the main reason male enrollment in college is decline¹ is that they don’t see college as a masculine venture: “School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.” You can read her whole argument and consider its merits here. In discussing this with my wife, she pointed out that an academic gap begins long before college. For example, boys are much more likely to have to repeat kindergarten than girls. To her credit, Davis notes that this isn’t the whole explanation for declining male enrollment in college, but I think she may be onto something that it is at least a significant explanation. In general, we need to be more intentional about encouraging boys and young men to pursue knowledge and wisdom in education, but what if Davis is correct that this is about masculinity in particular? What if education has been culturally “gendered” feminine and so young men feel deep insecurity about pursuing it? What if young men are turned off from majors that are predominantly female? I think it would be a mistake to try to adjust colleges to meet some hyper-masculine ideal in order to attract these students (and I can think of at least one college that has tried that model). The reason I think this would be a mistake is that behind the anxiety about masculinity is a deeper male identity crisis, and behind that is a crisis of meaning. Young men, like the rest of us, have a poor sense of who they are because they don’t have a solid foundation of what they were created for (their telos); and as a result, they, like the rest of us, are insecure, looking for meaning in their identity which can only be provided in God. This is not a problem colleges can fix, or at least not fix easily through marketing or program changes. This is a problem only communities can address, particularly religious communities.