Education
Why Don’t Men Go To University Any More?
What will that mean for universities…and for 21st century work?
A while back, I mentioned the strange case of the disappearing university male. In that context I wondered how the educational establishment – in whose eyes a university degree is a primary success metric – are addressing the 58% (female) to 42% (male) disparity blocking male success. But I didn’t get around to asking why it’s happening.
However, here’s a fascinating recent post from American writer Celeste Davis that dives deep, deep down the rabbit hole. The article first references a handful of more mainstream theories seeking to explain the gap, including:
- High tuition costs (which, I guess, just don’t bother women?)
- Boys having weaker academic skills
- Boys being exposed to negative messaging in early grades
- Politically left-friendly campuses that attract more women
- More high-paying career alternatives for men
Davis agrees that those are probably all contributing factors. But she turns her attention to what she feels is the big driver: male flight. Perhaps, goes the argument, young men just don’t see themselves thriving in career fields that appear to be dominated by women. The more women enrolled in last year’s university cohort, the more of this year’s men decide to check out of university altogether.
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Or, as Davis puts it:
“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!”
According to Statistics Canada, overall male enrollment as a proportion of total university populations has dropped by 4.4 percent since 1992. Canada might not be experiencing the same painful overall drops in university enrollments they’re seeing south of the border, but we may not be too far behind.
All this seems to be true of universities in general, but the impact might be more visible in specific programs. In fact, the biggest changes have impacted a handful of university program categories:
- Personal, protective and transportation services – which include law enforcement and fire fighting. Male participation dropped from 85 percent of enrollment in 1992 to just 43 percent in 2021.
- Agriculture, natural resources, and conservation, which saw a decline from 55 percent to 38 percent.
- Physical and life sciences and technologies saw male enrollment drop from 49 percent to 24 percent.
- Social and behavioural sciences and law enrollment fell from 38 percent to 29 percent.
Celeste’s theory is that, rather than external forces driving declines in male participation, it’s the entry of more and more women into academic programs that lies behind the changes.
I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that the solution to the problem is to impose enrollment quotas to limit entry for women. Quotas are evil.
In fact, I’m not 100 percent convinced that this is a problem that even needs solving. That’s partly because I don’t buy the line that university is always the most reliable route to social and economic success. It’s also because I don’t see a down side to relaxing and allowing market forces to work things out for us.
One thing that is worth our attention is the damage these trends might cause the higher education industry over the long term. Upwards of three percent of Canada’s GDP can probably be attributed to the higher education sector. And Canadian universities employ more than 343,000 people – around one of every 80 employed Canadians. You and I may or may not have a direct connection to higher education, but its decline would definitely leave a mark.
It’s worth noting that, for all the chaos those trends might spark within the higher education industry, they appear to be having a surprisingly minor impact on the actual workforce. Employment data from Statistics Canada shows us that the proportion of male workers changed by less than three percentage points between 1987 and 2023 in all but a few of the 18 job categories tracked. The exceptions included:
- Public administration, where the percentage of workers who were male fell from 61 percent in 1987 to 48 percent in 2023.
- Educational services, which saw the number of male teachers and administrators fall ten points from a representation of 42 percent to 32 percent.
- Male participation in the finance, insurance, real estate, rental and leasing industries actually rose from 41 percent to 47 percent.
But the exceptions were far less interesting than the fields where there was no significant change. Compare the four percent drop in agricultural employment to the 30 percent by which enrollment in agriculture, natural resources and conservation programs fell.
Similarly, the 25 percent drop in male participation in science and technology programs doesn’t seem to play out in the real world: male employment in professional, scientific and technical services is effectively unchanged since 1987.
Those enrollment vs employment designations aren’t perfectly aligned, of course. And employment data does have a far longer built-in lag than university attendance. But the gaping disparity does suggest there are a lot of women signing up for courses but not following up by getting related jobs.
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Red Deer
Judge upholds sanctions against Red Deer Catholic school trustee who opposed LGBT agenda
From LifeSiteNews
Monique LaGrange was ousted last December from the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools’ board for comparing the LGBT agenda targeting children to brainwashing.
A Canadian judge ruled that a school board was justified to place harsh sanctions on a Catholic school trustee forced out of her position because she opposed extreme gender ideology and refused to undergo LGBT “sensitivity” training.
Justice Cheryl Arcand-Kootenay of the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta ruled Thursday that the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools (RDCRS) Board’s sanctions placed against former trustee Monique LaGrange will stand.
LaGrange had vowed to fight the school board in court, and it remains to be seen if she can take any further actions after the decision by Judge Arcand-Kootenay.
The judge ruled that the RDCRS’s policies in place for all trustees, which the board contended were breached, were “logical, thorough, and grounded in the facts that were before the Board at the time of their deliberations.”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, the RDCRS board voted 3-1 last December to disqualify LaGrange after she compared the LGBT agenda targeting kids with that of “brainwashing” Nazi propaganda. As a result of being voted out, LaGrange later resigned from her position.
The former school board trustee initially came under fire in September 2023 when she posted an image showing kids in Nazi Germany waving swastika flags during a parade to social media, with the bottom of the post showing an image of kids waving LGBT “Pride” flags along with the text: “Brainwashing is brainwashing.”
After her post went viral, calls for her to step down grew from leftist Alberta politicians and others. This culminated in her removal as director of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association (ACSTA).
In September 2023, the RDCRS passed a motion to mandate that LaGrange undergo “LGBTQ+” and holocaust “sensitivity” training for her social media post.
LaGrange, however, refused to apologize for the meme or undergo “sensitivity” training.
She had argued that the RDCRS had no right to issue sanctions against her because they were not based on the Education Act or code of conduct. Arcand-Kootenay did not agree with her, saying code of conduct violations allow for multiple sanctions to be placed against those who violate them.
Education
‘Grade inflation’ gives students false sense of their academic abilities
From the Fraser Institute
The average entrance grade at the University of British Columbia is now 87 per cent, up from 70 per cent only 20 years ago. While this is partly because the supply of available university spots has not kept pace with growing demand, it’s also likely that some B.C. high schools are inflating their students’ grades.
Suppose you’re scheduled for major heart surgery. Shortly before your surgery begins, you check into your surgeon’s background and are pleased to discover your surgeon had a 100 per cent average throughout medical school. But then you learn that every student at the same medical school received 100 per cent in their courses, too. Now you probably don’t feel quite as confident in your surgeon.
This is the ugly reality of “grade inflation” where the achievements of everyone, including the most outstanding students, are thrown into question. Fortunately, grade inflation is (currently) rare in medical schools. But in high schools, it’s a growing problem.
In fact, grade inflation is so prevalent in Ontario high schools that the University of Waterloo’s undergraduate engineering program uses an adjustment factor when evaluating student applications—for example, Waterloo might consider a 95 per cent average from one school the equivalent of an 85 per cent average from another school.
Grade inflation is a problem in other provinces as well. The average entrance grade at the University of British Columbia is now 87 per cent, up from 70 per cent only 20 years ago. While this is partly because the supply of available university spots has not kept pace with growing demand, it’s also likely that some B.C. high schools are inflating their students’ grades.
Sadly, grade inflation is so rampant these days that some school administrators don’t even try to hide it. For example, earlier this year all students at St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic High School in Aurora, Ontario, received perfect marks on their midterm exams in two biology courses and one business course—not because these students had mastered these subjects but because the York Catholic District School Board had been unable to find a permanent teacher at this school.
The fact that a school board would use grade inflation to compensate for inadequate instruction in high school tells us everything we need to know about the abysmal academic standards in many schools across Canada.
And make no mistake, student academic performance is declining. According to results from the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), math scores across Canada declined from 532 points in 2003 to 497 points in 2022 (PISA equates 20 points to one grade level). In other words, Canadian students are nearly two years behind on their math skills then they were 20 years ago. While their high school marks are going up, their actual performance is going down.
And that’s the rub—far from correcting a problem, grade inflation makes the problem much worse. Students with inflated grades get a false sense of their academic abilities—then experience a rude shock when they discover they aren’t prepared for post-secondary education. (According to research by economists Ross Finnie and Felice Martinello, students with the highest high school averages usually experience the largest drop in grades in university). Consequently, many end up dropping out.
Grade inflation even hurts students who go on to be academically successful because they suffer the indignity of having their legitimate achievements thrown into doubt by the inflated grades of other students. If we want marks to have meaning, we must end the practise of grade inflation. We do our students no favours when we give them marks they don’t really deserve.
Just as our confidence in a surgeon would go down if we found out that every student from the same medical school had a 100 per cent average, so we should also question the value of diplomas from high schools where grade inflation is rampant.
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