Men now make up only 43 percent of students attending college. Where men once far outnumbered women, women now seem to be pulling ahead relative to men. Michael Gurian writes about this today (via Instapundit):

In the 1990s, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys. Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn’t take notes as well as the young women. They didn’t seem to care as much about what I taught — literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, “Sitting here, listening, staring at these words — this is not really who I am.”

That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in the District. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the “biggest agenda items” at Howard. “We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students,” he said. “We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men.”

Ahh, well, perhaps these guys were bored out of their minds. I know that I was completely bored all through high school. I could barely keep my mind on schoolwork. I wanted to play sports, party, and hang out with my friends and girlfriend. So I mostly blew off my homework.

I switched gears in college, and began studying hard because my major was difficult (electrical engineering). If I didn’t study hard, I definitely would have flunked out. I also developed an interest in engineering, and that interest has served me well to this day in my career. Many people don’t know that job satisfaction levels are high in the engineering field compared to many other lines of work. The pay is high and the work is interesting, a good combination!

So if the ratio of men to women in college is changing, a question is then: in what fields? Engineering is one of the best paying fields, and there have been lots of jobs. So whoever pursues these jobs is going to do well in the economy. Engineering involves lots of technology stuff that guys have historically been attracted to. So the chart below shows that the concern in the article above is actually reversed in the engineering field. Men are doing just fine in college here, making up 80% of graduates in engineering each year. Indeed, this guy wants Title IX applied to engineering colleges to force them to graduate more women (a really dumb idea, but hey, socialism knows no limits).

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