Males'
learning needs ignored?
Fewer now in college, expert says
Doug Carroll
The Arizona Republic
November 1, 2004
Are males on the verge of becoming an
endangered species on college campuses?
It's hard to say, but educator William Draves of the Wisconsin-based Learning
Resources Network thinks so. He estimates that only 35 percent of today's U.S.
undergraduate college students are men, down from 50 percent in 1980 and 43
percent in 2001. His projection is based on interviews with college officials
about continued declines in male enrollment since the 2001 National Center for
Educational Statistics report.
The problem, Draves says, begins in elementary school with the refusal to
acknowledge that boys and girls learn differently.
"Their neurology is different," says Draves, the author of a
new book, Nine Shift: Work, Life and
Education in the 21st Century.
"The hard-wiring differences (between boys and girls) are causing
this."
Draves and co-author Julie Coates make these key points:
• Boys learn spatially and need more movement to engage them.
• Boys often turn in homework late, but this behavior is not a predictor of
scholastic aptitude.
• Boys are, in many ways, better suited than girls for work in the information
age but are saddled with an educational model based on an agrarian society.
"We have 2 million boys who need to be in higher education," Draves
says. "This is an issue for everyone."
While most of the colleges and universities listed in the 2005 edition of The
Best 357 Colleges report a female majority in enrollment, the edge is not
especially wide.
Arizona State University is fairly typical of institutions profiled in the book,
with 48 percent men and 52 percent women. About three dozen schools among those
supplying a gender breakdown claimed a male enrollment of less than 40 percent.
"I'm not sure if there's really a problem," says Carol Best, a
guidance counselor at Dobson High School in Mesa and an expert on college
placement. "The growth of girls going (to college) is what's really going
on. They are going at a more accelerated rate."
Best says smaller liberal-arts schools do have greater difficulty attracting
male applicants. She mentions Carleton College in Minnesota as an example.
"Gender is one of the factors they look at," Best says of Carleton,
which has a male population of 48 percent among its enrollment of 1,927,
according to 357 Best Colleges.
Best says that 16 of Dobson's 25 highest-ranking seniors are girls. Among 24
students who have requested a letter of recommendation from her to an elite
college or university, only five are boys. But maybe the boys are just
procrastinating.
"Girls seem to take to the whole school thing more readily," Best
says.
Draves says the system encourages them to do so, much more than it does boys.
"Boys do want to go to college," he says. "Schools (need to) gear
education to meet the needs of both sexes."
Boys vs. Girls
• Boys receive 70 percent of D's and F's.
• Girls receive 60 percent of A's.
• Boys are 80 percent of high school dropouts.
• Among high school seniors in 1998, 50 percent of boys and 60 percent of
girls expected to complete college.
• Among high school graduates, boys' mean GPA was 2.83 in 2000, compared with
3.05 for girls.
Sources: Boys and Girls Learn Differently, by Michael Gurian; National
Center for Education Statistics; The
Gender Gap in College Expectations, Florida State University survey.
Pac-10 Conference male enrollment
• ASU: 48 percent
• Arizona: 47 percent
• UCLA: 44 percent
• California: 46 percent
• Oregon: 47 percent
• Washington State: 47 percent
• Washington: 48 percent
• USC: 49 percent
• Stanford: 52 percent
Note: Oregon State not profiled in The
Best 357 Colleges, 2005 edition.
Where the boys aren't
Colleges and
universities and their percentage of male students:
• 26 percent: Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, N.Y.)
• 30 percent: City University of New York-Hunter College
• 31 percent: Manhattanville College (Purchase, N.Y.)
• 32 percent: Eugene Lang College (New York), Goucher College (Baltimore,
Md.), University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• 33 percent: Bennington College (Bennington, Vt.), Howard University
(Washington, D.C.)
• 34 percent: Loyola University (Chicago), Mercer University (Macon, Ga.),
University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg, Va.), University of San
Francisco, Westminster College (New Wilmington, Pa.)
• 35 percent: Oglethorpe University (Atlanta)
• 36 percent: Samford University (Birmingham, Ala.), Wheaton College (Norton,
Mass.)
Source: The Best 357 Colleges: The Smart Student's Guide to Colleges,
2005 edition, Random House ($21.95).
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