Young American Males Don’t Want a College Education and Here’s Why

The reasons are many and they are affecting not just men, but women also. Find out why there are more likely young female students on campus than male.

About a million young men and 0.2 million young women don’t go to college as of the 2022 count. In total, only 44% of young men make up the number of college students today. Back in 2011, there were 47% male students in colleges.

In community colleges (what’s known as 2-year colleges), the drop in enrollment is similar between genders. Young men going to community colleges make up 49% of students aged 18 to 24 — this is, in fact, slightly up from the number in 2011, which was 48%.

But their female counterparts also don’t enroll as much as before. The female high school grad drop in percentage is lower, though. They went from 52% to 48% in the span of 11 years.

In 2022, only 33% of students are young Hispanic men, 37% are Black, and 40% are White. This is an all-around drop from the 2011 numbers. Overall, it’s the female graduates who have the drive to continue their education in college. Their total number is 50% of college attendees in 2022.

Athena Kan, CEO of Dreambound, a platform specializing in career and technical training, said, “There’s been a big backlash against expensive 4-year colleges whereas trade schools or apprenticeships are on the rise. Men, especially white men, are much more likely to enter the trades or enter the technology industry, where a degree also isn’t required.”

Young people seemed to have wised up about how bad student loan debt could get, with TikTok content creators now striving to educate their peers. And frankly, the student loan statistics are terrifying if anyone cares to delve deeper.

The Freedom Economy Index, a collaborative project of RedBalloon and PublicSquare, surveyed 70,000 small businesses and the results were surprising. 91% of those small businesses were of the opinion that recent college grads didn’t gain any relevant skills matching the business community’s needs today.

Big companies like Bank of America, Walmart, and even Google and IBM will no longer ask for a college degree when students apply for entry-level jobs. Furthermore, a predicted “1.4 million jobs could open to workers without college degrees over the next five years,” the Burning Glass Institute reported.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan was the first one to start offering jobs for non-college grads. Utah Governor Spencer Cox even stated, “Degrees have become a blanketed barrier-to-entry in too many jobs. Instead of focusing on demonstrated competence, the focus too often has been on a piece of paper. We are changing that.”

It does appear that young women, more than men, see more benefits to completing a college education. Athena Kan corroborated it by saying women are more likely to “get accepted into college” and “have better grades.” Plus, women are just “better at planning ahead.”

If it’s true that more and more companies will hire entry-level employees without a degree, that reversal may just happen. But these young men must still know that college grads still make $1 million more than the others. It’s all up to them whether they want to be super rich or not.