Scriptorium Philosophia
Solar sails are a form of space propulsion. They harness the faint solar wind, using the momentum of photons to swell the sail, like zephyrs on a tall-masted frigate. At first the pressure is mild, no more than hitching up an outboard motor to a johnboat. But solar sails need no motors, and solar winds, unlike the Earth-bound kind, never stop. Their ceaseless gentle pressure can accelerate the sail-driven ship to interstellar speeds. Some designs are estimated to travel at half the speed of light. If you were on a sail-driven spaceship, after awhile you might not notice how fast you were going. There’s not a lot of landmarks out in open space. When you’re moving at relativistic speeds and not paying much attention to other inertial reference frames, well, you’ll be in for a surprise when you pull into port. For one thing, there’s time dilation. The time of those at the dock has passed much more quickly than those in the spacecraft. From their perspective, the solar sailor is living in the past.
This is how I feel about higher education.
When I head over to the campus Starbucks, here’s what I am struck by, every single time: there are no men. OK, not literally zero, but routinely one or two guys in a line of two dozen women. Where are all the men? Not going to college, apparently. The stats back that up.
About 60% of college undergraduates are women
Over 60% of students pursuing postbaccalaureate degrees are women
80% of veterinary school students are women
The majority of dental school students are women
The majority of medical school students are women
The majority of law school students, including at 17 of the top 20 programs, are women
Don’t young men want to meet girls any more? Come to college! It’s not just men opting out of college. It’s white students. Since 2018, college attendance among white students has dropped by 19% across all sectors. Black, Native American, native Alaskan, and Hispanic numbers are all up. At this point, white men are 21% of college students, but about 30% of the population.
What’s changed?
There’s plenty of bad explanations.
The cost-conscious. College is too expensive so white men have decided not to go.
Fine, but it’s not more expensive for white men. A few scholarships aside, it’s expensive for everyone. If cost were the issue, college enrollment would be down evenly across all demographics, which it is not. Furthermore, modestly-priced regional publics are begging for students, but top-priced private research universities and small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) turn away the majority of applicants. So how come cost-conscious students keep crowding the aisles at Whole Foods U. instead of heading over here to Aldi College? Yo white guys, you’ll have to do your own bagging, and our organizational system is a bit random, but come on over for a good budget education.
The demographers. The problem is the demographic cliff. There are fewer high school students, therefore fewer HS graduates, therefore fewer students who might go to college.
Lower birth rates after the Great Recession are absolutely a real thing and that smaller cohort has now worked its way to college-age. Yes, that might help explain lower enrollments in general, but like cost, this explanation doesn’t single out white students or men. Why are they different?
The tradesmen. White men are forgoing college in favor of learning a trade—welding, construction, HVAC repair, electrical work, plumbing. There’s good blue collar money to be made without taking on student loans.
The trades are an excellent choice for a lot of people, and I completely get the appeal of working with one’s hands. There’s three problems with this explanation, though. One, the number of manufacturing jobs has been declining for years, so there is not massive demand for them luring away prospective college students. Two, people used to see college as a way to get white collar jobs that wouldn’t destroy your body the way blue collar jobs do. The physical toll of the latter has not changed. Three, the biggest problem is that it doesn’t explain why white men in particular are choosing the trades over college.
The feminists. College has become women’s spaces and misogynistic men are fleeing them. Celeste Davis writes, “When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important. Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice.”
The same people who used to ascribe low college attendance among women and minorities to a lack of role models and institutional support have somehow forgotten that explanation now that roles are reversed. It’s the patriarchy is the time-honored cliché response to any gender differences. When more men than women go to college, it’s the patriarchy. When more women than men go, it’s still the patriarchy. Apart from its apparent unfalsifiability, “patriarchy” is no longer a very good explanatory tool in a country where women fare better on nearly every measure. On top of which, the feminist explanation doesn’t address why white men in particular are opting out.
The right wing. College is nothing but liberal indoctrination, and conservative men aren’t interested in hearing it.
The problem with this explanation is that it is just plain false that college is nothing but liberal indoctrination. Where to begin on this one? First, most of what’s taught has little or nothing to do with politics. Chemistry, mathematics, nursing, management, exercise science, accounting, neuroscience, foreign languages—you’d have to try mighty hard to find the indoctrination there.
Second, colleges and universities are not a monolithic block. The general political attitudes at a women’s college in Massachusetts, a research university in Texas, a Great Books school in New Mexico, and a Catholic SLAC in the Midwest are not going to be the same.
Third, most professors in my (pretty extensive) experience are just trying to get their students to come to class, do their homework, and show some engagement with the material. What we hope for is to see the spark of intellectual excitement, to see the light go on. In my discipline, philosophy, I couldn’t care less if students believe what I believe. I just want them to learn to analyze arguments and understand the pros and cons of different positions on philosophical topics. I want to free their minds from the shackles of convention and see why my field is exciting and important.
Furthermore, I think the Trump administration’s authoritarian attempt to destroy our universities is horrifying and disgusting. One thing he fails to understand is that great universities outlast nations. They will outlast him.
All that said, the right wing does have a point about messaging, and that messaging is why white men are not going to college. To be clear, I am not claiming that white men are treated unfairly. That’s what people are usually obsessed with: who’s being treated unfairly, and can we find ever more hidden and minor ways to claim injustice (cf. microaggressions, epistemic injustice). That’s not it at all. Why are white men not attending college? The answer is the small but constant, relentless pressure of being told, even by subtle implicature, that you don’t really matter. You are just the background that’s taken for granted. It’s the gentle steady pressure of the solar winds.
Celebrate women! Hey, great, they should be celebrated. More scholarships for minorities! Excellent, let’s make sure everyone can get a college education if they want one. Affirmative action! Sure, let’s compensate losers in the social lottery. DEI initiatives! Right on, make everyone feel welcome. Love is love! Definitely; the fraternities are filled with nothing but drunken rapists, so let’s put our energies and support into the LGBTQ community. Trans! Why not? Live and let live. Criticize the USA! Of course, it’s a white supremacist nation built on genocide that must be decolonized.
If that’s your college experience, after awhile, even the most liberal white college male is likely to notice that nothing is really centered around them or their interests. Ben Appel recently described his experiences as a Columbia University student: “I entered the university as a self-described radical progressive eager to resist the Trump administration, but within two years wanted to kill myself because I was impure. Because I was ‘cis’ and ‘white.’ Because I was gay and not ‘queer.’” The lesson he learned at Columbia was “You are tainted by the original sin of ‘whiteness.’ But if you ‘do the work,’ you can exorcise yourself of this evil. Join our global intifada.”
Maybe that’s an extreme example. It probably is. Nils Gilman makes a distinction between liberals and leftists. The liberals are basically how people who regard themselves as moderate Democrats will self-describe: pro-science, believers in the meritocracy, seeing the USA as flawed but as having moved towards greater justice and inclusion over time, having respect for rules-based order and the international community, etc. The leftists are the radicals, either Marxists who hate capitalism or epistemic warriors who think objectivity, empiricism, and truth are just examples of politically oppressive naïveté.
Gilman estimates the radicals are—at most—20% of the faculty. And this is coming from a guy who was educated at and was a senior administrator at Berkeley, as liberal a university as one could possibly find. His estimate means that at Berkeley 80% or more of the faculty are mainstream liberals or conservatives. Practically everywhere else it will be higher.
The extremists make the most noise, but if white male prospective students (or their parents) are hearing that noise, it’s not a surprise when they think that’s all that colleges have on offer. I’m not saying that is good reasoning, but it predictable reasoning.
When the people in the photo above show up on campus once a year, you write them off as nut jobs that represent neither mainstream Christianity nor the typical college experience. On the other hand, if you see them every day and they work for the university, you might start thinking some kind of weird self-hatred is what college is all about. Even if the extremists are only 1% of the overall experience. They are still a few more photons of pressure.
Here’s a personal example. I was a member of the American Philosophical Association for over 25 years. I was so eager to become a philosopher that I got a student membership when I was a sophomore in college. The nominal mission of the APA is to advance professional philosophy. We’re talking about a discipline that has been under relentless attack and defunding by barbarians for decades. We are facing an existential crisis. In my opinion the sole practical aim of the APA should be making sure that colleges retain a philosophy major and hire tenure-track philosophers. Several years ago I realized that all the APA was really interested in was diversity initiatives. As far as the APA is concerned, there could be 50 tenured philosophers left in America, so long as 25 are men, 25 are women, 6 are black, 3 are gay, etc.
The APA clearly did not care about me or my material interests. So why was I paying dues? Charity? I dropped my membership.
It’s funny to read DEI supporters who insist that their efforts aren’t driving away white students because “DEI officers, DEI officials, are not moving the needle on enrollment numbers the way some people might think that they are.” They can’t have it both ways. If the expensive DEI bureaucracy isn’t recruiting or retaining students, then what value is it adding? Just virtue signaling? Even if DEI is doing zero to add or retain minority students, it is still another small puff of solar wind into the sail.
There isn’t a smoking gun in this story. There’s no one big driver behind changing university enrollment. It’s all been just light photons of force, but they have been constant, relentless, and adding up for years. University leaders have been aboard the spaceship and not noticed that somehow we have gotten up to relativistic speeds, pulling faster and faster away from a group that’s been taken for granted. And that’s why white men aren’t going to college.