A Male Crisis in Higher Education?

I was having breakfast with a friend the other day. I mentioned that I felt there may be a male (boy's) crisis in higher education. I had recently read a statistic that said that girls were enrolled in four year colleges 53% to 47% more than boys. Which I felt was a large disparity across a whole nation. "Well," she said, "maybe the difference can be explained by boys not going to college but taking up auto-mechanics, or plumbing, or carpentry. I mean...those are good paying jobs." At first I thought: "Well, yea..." The I thought: WAIT!! What if only a few years ago I had responded to her worry about girls being underrepresented in college by stating: "Well...maybe they are in nurses training, or secretarial school...or cooking classes", she would have gone through her feminist roof.

I left our conversation with the distinct feeling there is an even more critical crisis for boys than I thought. Masked as my friend was in her argumentative cleverness, I felt at core she was expressing a smug pleasure that girls were WINNING--which of course meant that boys were losing! Men...if my friends is any indication...male involvement in male-ism to the degree of a force equivalent to female involvement in femine-ism is what will be required to get those statistics to 50%-50%...a proper parity, and not just establish a new and unfair female preference in the ongoing gender war. Which obviously continues.