Trash News

Earlier this month, Bloomberg published an article about declining male enrollment in American colleges and universities. They weren't alone - the story was also available on wire services and popped up on various newspapers - but Bloomberg's article was notable in how messy it is and what it attempts to raise in reader's mind - and what it attempts to have the reader never consider.

The pattern usually goes like this: state some facts, state some more tangentially-related or unrelated facts, stoke some fear and depend on nobody saying to himself, "wait a moment, what's missing? Are these things actually related? Why is this article trying to scare me?" We see this all the time in the American press.

Men opting out of college isn't a new phenomenon: Women have outnumbered men in undergraduate enrollment for about 40 years, and the gap continues to widen. Almost half of women age 25-34 have earned a bachelor's degree, according to Pew Research Center data; for men the rate is 37%. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of Americans attending college dropped by 1.2 million, with men accounting for almost the entirety of that drop.
As US men forgo higher education, the demographic group as a whole has lost ground in other areas too. Working-class men today are less likely to be employed than they were four decades ago, their inflation-adjusted wages have barely budged in more than 50 years ... Men with a college degree or higher still earn roughly 200% of what men without a diploma do, census data show.

Those are interesting comparisons. Can you spot a missing fact? One that stands out immediately is: "how was 'working class male' employment 40 years ago versus college education rates?" Bloomberg has made an assertion that "working-class men" have a bad deal, and it's because of falling college attendance creating too many "working-class men." Did it? Let's see.

In 1965, around 13%-15% of men aged 25 to 64 had a college degree. Looking at birth years of 1935-1950, we see soaring higher ed, with male degree attainment in those birth cohorts moving from between about 22% to about 32%. So degree attainment was quite a bit lower than it is today at the end of the period, but not by as much as you might think based on the scary headlines.

According to a 2017 study, "blue-collar" employment fell by more than half in terms of total employment as compared to the 1970s. So is the problem "men aren't going to college anymore" as Bloomberg asserts, or is the problem "employment prospects suck for non-white-collar people" as the data indicate? The two are not wholly unrelated. If there are fewer blue-collar jobs, it would be good to pursue a white-collar job if you can, and that means college. Bloomberg, however, after framing the argument, fails to discuss the broader historical picture. Instead, they go for scare tactics. This is under the ellipse in the first quote:

... they're less prone to get married or have children, and an increasing number report having no close friends. Men are also four times more likely than women to die by suicide. Data show that men age 18-30 spent an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours alone each day in 2023, 18% more than they did in 2019 and over an hour more than women did, according to a report by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Bloomberg also spends hardly any time on the cost problem. This article spends one paragraph plus a single quote from a high school student on the cost problem with college. It spends four paragraphs - plus an insert quote - on YouTube and social media "influencers" (and Trump, of course) conspiring to get men to reject college. It would all be fine if it weren't for those meddlers on YouTube and in the Oval Office! They also claim - in another three paragraphs - that men skip out on college because they're bored and it takes too long and there's too much bias in favor of instant gratification. A few words on needing a mortgage to go to college, literally nothing about education quality, and a pint of digital ink on "influencers" and "boredom" with a chaser of "you'll be miserable and suicidal if you don't go."

No. Men aren't increasingly lonely because they're not going to college. Blue collar jobs didn't vanish because not enough men went to college. Marriage rates aren't declining because not enough men go to college. Birth rates aren't approaching fertility trap territory because not enough men go to college. Bloomberg wants you to think those things, using the oldest trick in the book. The data they provide are unrelated, and the data they choose not provide are related. All of those key metrics were better when male educational attainment was lower.

But college - whether men go or not - is not the core problem. The problems described in the article - declining male enrollment, declining blue collar career prospects, declining marriage, declining reproduction, high loneliness, male suicide, etc. - are real but they are far less tightly correlated to the enrollment changes than Bloomberg wants to acknowledge. These are broad social problems that can't be boiled down to "foolish young men who spend too much time on YouTube aren't going to college because evil influencers tell them not to and they think it might be boring" or likewise boiled down to "men going to college collapses marriage and birth rates and the industrial economy."

The attempt to pin all our problems on declining enrollment is insane, and there is one line in the article that exposes what Bloomberg is really concerned about:

Returning Gen X students such as Wilson won't be enough to keep higher ed afloat.

This article is egregious, but it isn't really special. This is how the press works and, despite the press' declining influence, it remains fairly effective.

posted by Joe Mannix at 03:30 PM

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