I attended two graduation ceremonies earlier this month, including the gala at Sanford Stadium, where I was struck by how many more men than women crossed the stage, with both events replete with fireworks.
My husband jokingly commented that if our daughter had wanted to attend an all-women’s college nearby, she could have saved us all the parking tickets and parking fees by walking just four blocks from our house. He mentioned this when we saw a line of UGA graduates in her major.
I looked at the latest data from the Georgia University System for the spring semester and concluded that females comprised 59% of the total enrollment at UGA, with a total of 39,373 graduate and undergraduate students.
At other public campuses in Georgia, the gender imbalance in favor of women at UGA is even more evident. The student population at South Georgia State, Valdosta State University, the College of Coastal Georgia, the University of West Georgia, and Georgia Southwestern State University consists of approximately 70% females. Women constitute three-quarters of the student body at Albany State University. The proportion of female students at Georgia Southern University is nearly 60% of the total.
Females make up the majority of undergraduate students at Clark Atlanta University, with almost 77% being women. Emory University also boasts a substantial population of female students, with approximately 60% of its students being women. The figures are comparable at several of Georgia’s largest private universities.
Fields like engineering, computer science, and construction-related areas, which typically attract a larger number of male students, probably mirror the gender ratios at those two campuses. Kennesaw State University has a slightly higher enrollment of women, accounting for just over half of the total enrollment, making it the only school with equal representation of both genders. On the other hand, Georgia Tech, with a male population of nearly 68%, is the only campus within the University System where males outnumber females.
If you want to understand the prevalence of women on our public campuses, there are many kids, especially boys, who leak the pipeline along the way to college enrollment.
Over 20% of them disappeared by their final year – a total of 17,000 freshman boys who were present in the spring of 2020. At the start of high school, there were 75,454 boys in the cohort. (The overall number of 12th graders statewide in March was 117,497.) Based on the enrollment updates from the state Department of Education, there were 58,640 male 12th graders in the public schools of the state in March of this year.
Based on data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the fatality rate for women in the corresponding age bracket was threefold higher than that of male drivers aged 16-19 years involved in car accidents in 2020. As stated in a Pew Research Center report from April, boys constituted 83% of the child and adolescent firearm-related deaths in 2021, encompassing both homicides and suicides. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state that there is a significant increase in suicides among teenage boys and young men. Some individuals have sadly passed away, potentially due to relocation or discontinuation of education. Moreover, we are witnessing a loss of male individuals due to firearms.
Since March of 2020, there has been a decrease of 15% or 10,614 female students. This decline is reflected in a decrease of 58,857 girls in this year’s 12th grade class, compared to 69,471 girls four years ago in the freshman class. However, it’s important to note that the rate of decline is not consistent. It’s evident that girls also face challenges in completing high school.
Based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics, it is observed that merely 41% of males complete their college education within four years, in contrast to 51% of females. Additionally, for every 100 women who obtain a bachelor’s or master’s degree, there are 74 men who achieve the same. Furthermore, federal data discloses that for every 100 women enrolled in U.S. Colleges across all levels, there are 77 men enrolled. This has sparked a growing nationwide worry regarding the increasing disparity in academic achievement between males and females.
A typical response to these disparate academic trends is that men can succeed without a college degree, especially if they go into narrow slices of high-paying blue-collar jobs, including construction and HVAC plumbing.
According to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, after 1983, the median economic value-added of a bachelor’s degree increased twofold compared to the value of a high school degree, regardless of the heightened public doubt regarding the worthiness of a college diploma.
Now or then, wasn’t it? “Philosophers make more money than welders.” Proclaiming, a college degree that was once famously overhyped, Florida Senator Marco Rubio contended.
$55,000 earn philosophy in grads college while $47,540 salary median a earn now welders that reports Statistics Labor of Bureau U.S. The
The bestselling book “Men and Boys” by author Richard Reeves, an Economist, cites a raft of alarming data points that suggest boys and men are more likely to live with their parents and less likely to buy a home than their female counterparts, implying they are adrift as young single adults.
My self-employed uncle, who used to tell me about his days spent crawling in tight spaces and having bad knees to show for it, was a plumber. He would also tell my brothers and me that, according to his research, self-employed plumbers not only make more money on average, but also have a longer lifespan than college graduates who don’t earn as much.
“Attend college,” he suggested to us. “The landscape is more stunning and it’s less taxing on your vertebral column.”