Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Where the Boys Aren't

In college:
The third possibility is that men aren't so much underrepresented in college as women are overrepresented. This is plausible. There probably are too many people going to college in general, and it may be that men -- more likely to choose, or at least consider, high-paying but unfeminine alternatives like plumbing, or other, more "masculine" alternatives like military service -- are less likely to wind up in college as an unthinking extension of high school. If this explanation is true, we can expect to hear little about it from university administrations, who have fully absorbed the marketer's ethos and have little interest in suggesting that college isn't for everyone.