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[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Why Aren’t Men Going to College? Do disappearing college males know something we don’t?

Political future #1. Just over forty years ago, President Ronald Reagan ushered in a low-tax revolution which made it possible for better educated people, not only to get higher paying jobs, but to keep and enjoy the financial fruits of their labor. But between society’s current need to pay down the Covid-juiced federal debt and the rise of progressive thinking in the Democratic party, the probable tax burden on high earners has clearly diminished what ambitious workers can expect to receive for their labors. This development may not be as important to women, for whom the ability to earn a prestigious career title is still a historical novelty. But believing that some future progressive government will always provide them with at least a comfortable lifestyle, many young men might feel it’s not worth the educational effort required to achieve the shrinking financial reward.

Political future #2. Everything noted above, except that with fewer Americans working hard to produce needed goods and services the government goes broke, reducing once-promised entitlements to a trickle. In which case, what’s a better way for today’s young man to invest his time: earning an expensive university degree or going to work long enough for his brother-in-law, the electrician (plumber, bricklayer, or carpenter), to learn a useful trade? Name one novel or movie about some dark economic future where the most privileged male survivors are waving their college diplomas.

An abusive and uncaring educational system. In the 180 years since Horace Mann’s invention of our public school system, the nature of manufacturing has evolved from a reliance on physical labor to sophisticated industrial robots, the nature of military service from riding horses to mastering smart weapons, and the nature of accounting from paper journal keeping to the use of computerized spreadsheets. Yet in all that time the underlying structure of K-12 education, with its fixed grade levels, uniform class structure, one-size-fits-all curriculum, and nine-month school year has remained essentially unchanged—a testament to society’s interest, not in addressing the unique instructional needs of each child, but in challenging teachers and administrators as little as possible. After 13 years of enduring such a system—which consistently ranks near the bottom of international comparisons—is it so improbable that a good portion of young men, more impatient by nature than women of their age, might have had enough of any schooling?

Useless coursework. In 2005, Dr John Ioannidis, co-director of Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, published an influential study which showed that much of what for passes for ”settled science” in medicine, biology, economics, education research, the social sciences, and other university disciplines cannot, in fact, be replicated. In other words, by the ultimate test of scientific validity—getting the same result from repeating the same experiment—a lot of what professors teach their students isn’t true.

Indeed, concerns about what is called “experimental irreproducibility” have been growing for nearly a decade. In 2012, scientists at the biotech firm Amgen found they could confirm the results of only six of 53 supposedly landmark cancer studies published in prominent journals. Four years later, Nature conducted an online survey of scientists, 70 percent of whom said they’d tried and failed to reproduce their colleagues’ published findings.