This is a post I wrote for another blog back in 2022. It was inspired by a March 15, 2022 column by Ilana M. Horowitz in the NYTimes.
Recent conversations in some higher ed circles have turned towards a particular area of the coming (perhaps arrived due to COVID-19) demographic cliff for enrollment at traditional, residential, undergraduate programs: the boys. Prognosticators are coming to agreement that sooner rather than later women will outnumber men in undergraduate programs 2:1. This trend has been something long noticed from a faculty perspective as the most promising and/or talented individuals are regularly identified as young women. For example, in the fall of 2021, I taught a freshmen honors section of the required BIBL101 course focused on the four Gospels at Abilene Christian University that had 21 young women and 5 young men. Perhaps explained by the simple statistics, the top academic products came from young women. In other words, not only is the number of men enrolling in higher education dwindling, but also the achievement of those who do enroll is dwindling as well.
The explanations here are often fairly typified. Young women by virtue of social and cultural gender norms are more conscientious and compliant, better at developing the social ties a human being needs in order to flourish, and are less prone to risky behaviors. (While I think these kinds of explanations miss something important about the dark side of our gendered socialization – how young women must overcome certain kinds of expectations and/or endure certain kinds of trials by virtue of gender in order to achieve and excel academically – that must be the subject of another post.) Young men, by contrast, are often discussed in strikingly biological terms rather than social terms. Boys are more energetic, riskier because of evolution, more actors than thinkers, etc. When social and cultural formation enters the conversation around boys, it is often either in the negative about how toxic masculine behavior towards women and/or other male-bodied peers manifests or in the vein of how much easier boys have it because they are favored by cultural and/or social systems (the patriarchy always protects and elevates its own). It is the latter of these that I hope to explore a bit here.
I wonder if the coming demographic cliff might sharpen our conversation about the patriarchy and the formation of an elite society. Does it really matter if the number of young men enrolling in and achieving in undergraduate programs shrink? Will it really be a massive reshaping of Western society and culture in the near future? It is difficult to imagine the answer to either of these will forever be “no” because as many have pointed out the steadily declining numbers of young men enrolled in and completing college is and has caused a marital match crisis for the young women in those programs. How much of a reproduction problem that will cause is debated, but it is difficult to imagine it will not have an impact. What I mean by my questions of whether it matters concerns whether or not “the right” kind of young men will still be enrolled and graduated from universities and elite schools. Afterall, despite the way patriarchy has always functioned on every level of a society, the number of young men graduating college does not entirely matter to the future of the patriarchy. What matters is that those already in the inner circle continue to replace themselves. In other words, what matters is whether the right kind of young man continues to enroll in and complete their undergraduate education.
This is why I wonder whether the conversation might shift if the numbers truly do become 2:1 on university campuses. It seems 1.5:1 didn’t shift the conversation meaningfully and so one could make a good argument that 2:1 won’t shift it either. That it will simply elicit the same old hand-wringing and worrying about the future of “the boys”. Yet, if this demographic cliff does not involve a massive societal reorganization, I wonder if we might begin to discuss how power remains vastly unchanged. I wonder if it might allow pieces like Dr. Ilana Horowitz’s column to receive a different kind of response in the comments than what it got. Perhaps what is bad for boys who come from working class backgrounds is also bad for all of us (except those in the hallowed echelons of the patriarchy). Perhaps religion in the sense she describes for her pseudonymized subject “John” can be a tool for the reshaping of culture and society rather than a regressive or status quo enforcing tool. After all, when I consider the possibility of young men wanting to imitate Jesus, a man who in Christian faith has access to the totality of power in the universe, more than the patriarchy has or could amass, and yet chooses not to avail himself of that power for his own benefit, but rather allows others to torture, mock, and harm him, it is hard for me to imagine that as a bad thing for our world.
