Women’s History Month: Pregnant freshman to VP of Tech. She refused to quit. Her full story drops Friday. 🔥 #WomenInTech #KeepGoing #womenincollege

Buss: Men are getting harder to find on college campuses Colleges and universities might not be intentionally trying to attract women over men. But whatever they are doing is keeping men at bay.  In 2021, there were about 3.1 million more women than men in college. With the cultural and academic changes on campuses over the past several decades, and the skyrocketing numbers of female enrollees on them, is there a correlation?  In Michigan’s community colleges, universities and the Michigan Reconnect program, which offers free tuition, women outnumber men by 14 percentage points. That matches a trend, more pronounced in some places than others, seen throughout the country. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer highlighted the growing gender divide between men and women enrolling on college campuses in her February State of the State address and has pledged to sign an executive directive to boost the enrollment of young men in higher ed and skills training programs.  But it’s going to take more than free money to get men back in college, however well-intentioned those efforts may be. “The enrollment cliff is here,” Michigan State University President Kevin Guskiewicz told The Detroit News editorial board on Wednesday. “We’re seeing nationwide that the percentage is slightly higher for men.” Guskiewicz says MSU hasn't seen an impact yet but is putting it into the enrollment model they're building to right size the university. Male students now make up a smaller share of all enrolled college students in the United States than ever before as the gap between genders — which was accelerated during COVID — continues to widen. Only one-in-four U.S. adults say it’s extremely important to have a four-year degree to get a well-paying job, according to a 2024 Pew Research survey, and roughly half say it’s less important to have a degree to get a good job than it was 20 years ago. Today, a slight majority of workers between 25 and 34 do not have four-year college degrees. In the past decade economic outcomes specifically for men in this group have turned around from trending downward since the mid-1970s. Skilled trade jobs are in high demand. Mounting student debt has become a lifelong burden for young men and women and keeps them from traditional four-year degrees. But more than a third of men without a bachelor’s degree say a major reason they didn’t complete college is that they just didn’t want to. It’s not necessarily the cost, which has gone up as the value of a degree has gone down. College campuses have become bastions of collective victimhood, focused on microaggressions and safe spaces that don’t necessarily comport with the environment young men want — or need. There's more activism than academics. Many major public and Ivy League universities have feminized their priorities, catering more to women than men by diminishing the importance of free speech on campus, shielding students from offensive ideas or speakers and focusing on social justice and emotional well-being above academic freedom and the advancement of knowledge. The pro-Palestinian, antisemitic protests on college campuses since October 2023 provide a window into what has been brewing on them. In a 2017 YouGov survey of U.S. adults, 56% of men said colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas — compared with 64% of women who said colleges should. A 2019 Knight Foundation survey of full-time college students found 71% of men said protecting free speech mattered more than promoting inclusivity — compared with 41% of women who espoused that view. A 2021 ranking of free speech on campus by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that at Wellesley College and Barnard College, all-female schools, more than 40% of students were comfortable using violence to curb unwanted speech. Between 1990 and 2017, degrees in women’s and gender studies increased in colleges by roughly 300%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. It’s not a bad thing that women have achieved what they have on college campuses, but the disparity warrants concern.  It will be a challenge for these institutions to recoup their share of men and the foundational goals of higher education that may have been lost in the pursuit of gender equity. kbuss@detroitnews.com This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Buss: Men are getting harder to find on college campuses

Buss: Men are getting harder to find on college campuses #GenderDivide #CollegeEnrollment #WomenInCollege