The great education divide that Brad Wilcox, Mark Regnerus and others have described as negatively affecting college women’s marital prospects is now affecting the canine population. Yes, you read right. In a recent column, George Will reported that the Raymond James financial services firm has discovered an increased market for dog adoptions among women seeking “security and/or companionship” from a dog partly because of the dearth of equally educated men in the marriage market.
None of this surprises anyone who has kept up with campus enrollment data. When I was teaching undergraduates in the late 1970s, there was already a slight increase in the female-to-male student ratios. In some colleges and universities, females were already more than half of the student bodies. Mr. Will quoted figures showing that women currently account for 74 percent of enrollment growth on the nation’s college campuses.
As a member of the Board of Trustees for a university, I always ask to see the enrollment trend lines for the male/female ratio. Over the last 30 plus years, the data show a steady increase in female enrollments and decline in male student numbers. Many universities began years ago to take active steps to increase male enrollment (closing female acceptances earlier while extending male deadlines, adding male sports teams, including more males in PR photos, strengthening courses of study that typically attract male enrollees, etc). While those steps help slow the decline, none is actually stopping the trend.
Obviously, nobody wants to return to the days when many women went to college primarily just to get the so-called “Mrs.” degree, as witnessed by the firestorm of criticism several years back when the Daily Princetonian published alum Susan Patton’s open letter urging young women to find a husband while at Princeton. Never again, she warned coeds, will you find so many men who are your intellectual equals.
The ramifications of the expanding gender gap in higher education extend far beyond whether educated young women are readily able to find suitable mates, There is the strength that accrues to society from having a population of equally well-educated men so that there is an appropriate gender balance in society; at the individual level marriage is a means to satisfy the longings of the human heart, but the family is equally significant at the societal level. Establishing a family helps build the solid foundation of communities so necessary for strong nations.
Having gained an ever-expanding critical mass of educated women, it would be a shame to go back to a society where one gender dominates the other in terms of education and opportunity. The tremendous gains in women’s equality should not mean putting men in the circumstances women faced 40 years ago. What have we gained if we just switch one brand of gender inequality to the opposite form?
Sadly, we are already seeing the effects from the devaluing of masculinity as noted by numerous sociologists. Gurmeet S. Kanwal described the “crisis” in Psychology Today, “You see it in how men are portrayed in the media; how they see themselves, and how they are seen by others. In fact, the perception and image of heterosexual men in this country has never been as negative, de-idealized, and potentially harmful as it is now.” Dr. Kanwal likens the way men are feeling now to how women felt when Betty Friedan described their unhappiness in 1963 as “the problem that has no name.” Without the rites of passage (college, marriage, parenting) that typically help a boy grow into a man, men remain in “perpetual adolescence” or “eternal boyhood.”
In Ray Williams’ Psychology Today article, “The Male Identity Crisis and the Decline of Fatherhood,” family historian Lawrence Tone noted, “The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent; … there has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer.” As husbands and fathers have become endangered species, America has become a more feminine society. Fathers, notes family researcher David Popenoe in Mr. Williams’ article, are often made to feel invisible or irrelevant. Yet their parenting style (done properly) is essential in a child’s development, especially in “managing emotions” and “promoting self-control.”
The male role, however, is generally dismissed as unnecessary by popular media, and women are more often than not portrayed as more intelligent, effective and stronger compared to their male counterparts even in the action-adventure genre. Guy Garcia, author of ’The Decline of Men: How the American Male is Tuning Out, Giving Up and Flipping Off His Future,” describes the “fragmentation of male identity” and declares that because “generally speaking” men aren’t needed at all, they are “losing their way.”
Similarly, Mr. Williams described men as “groping in the dark for their identity.” Certainty today’s young men are in uncharted territory as they are increasingly marginalized and their role is society is increasingly uncertain. Serious social critics recognize that America must solve its male crisis before the whole culture “goes to the dogs.”
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