Door to higher education needs to be kept open for young men, University of Waterloo engineering dean says
Posted by IHateTrains123
Door to higher education needs to be kept open for young men, University of Waterloo engineering dean says
Posted by IHateTrains123
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Archived version: [https://archive.fo/NhuKo](https://archive.fo/NhuKo).
>Prof. Wells said that, as an educator, what she’s seeing broadly in male enrolment data at university concerns her. Canada can’t afford to leave human potential on the table, she added.
>“I want to make sure that every child in this country feels not only that they can meet their full potential, but that there’s a place for them,” Prof. Wells said.
>“I worry that at a relatively young age, boys are self-selecting out, or saying ‘that’s not for me.’ I want to understand why.”
>Recently, The Globe and Mail reported on the gender gap at universities. The ratio among Canadian students is usually about 60 per cent female to 40 per cent male. Whether it’s at the bachelor’s, master’s or PhD level, law school or medical school, university or college, the pattern is fairly similar.
>[…]
>It’s not as though men are being displaced, and there’s no evidence that they’re being discriminated against. It’s that women, given the opportunity, have embraced higher education, spurred in part by the better jobs available to them with a degree. Men still earn more on average, even at younger age groups where the educational disparity is significant.
>Prof. Wells works at one of the handful of Canadian universities where the gender balance tips slightly more male than female. She’s also an engineer, a field with enrolments close to 75-per-cent male.
>Prof. Wells and two colleagues produced a detailed study of enrolment in university-entry STEM courses at Ontario’s public high schools over 11 years from 2007 to 2018.
>“The impetus for the study was really to look at the longer-term trends around women enrolling in STEM courses,” Prof. Wells said. “But then we were really surprised to see what was happening with men over time.”
>In their paper, Prof. Wells, Eamonn Corrigan and Martin Williams say that years of attention to the gender gap in STEM has contributed to progress toward gender parity. In 2020-21, 48 per cent of STEM majors at Ontario universities were women.
>But they tend to be clustered in certain subjects. Women have relatively low numbers in computer science and mathematics, for example. And in the sub-fields of engineering, there is near parity in biomedical and environmental engineering, but large gaps in mechanical, electrical and computer engineering, where fewer than 20 per cent of students are women.
>There’s a variety of reasons behind these gaps, including gender stereotypes. Prof. Wells and her colleagues focus on one significant factor, which is the number of students eliminated from these fields in high school because they don’t take the courses required for university enrolment.
>They found that female participation is up in nearly all high-school STEM courses and that their growth rates outpace those of men. This means young women are increasingly likely to continue with biology, chemistry and calculus through the end of Grade 12. The exception was physics, where women continue to be underrepresented.
>“The women are starting to outpace the men. We see bigger increases in continuation rates for women than men,” Prof. Wells said. “I guess you could argue that if the women were lower anyway, then maybe that makes sense, but it kind of confirmed other disturbing trends we were seeing around men dropping out, and losing hope and optimism.”
!ping Can-ON&Ed-policy
Perhaps illuminating: *straight* men are attending college at lower rates. Not gay men.
More to the point, [a higher proportion of women attending college reduces men’s application rate](https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college)
> A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.
> But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”
> Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.
> > There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.
> **For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.** One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
further
> Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
> > There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.
The answer is anti-intellectualism. It is seen as weak to be smart. Boys don’t want to be seen as weak.