Excellent article. Not that I am a follower, but I stumbled on a Dr. Jordan Peterson interview where he predicted, qualitatively, that after most men have left the university, in a few years women will notice and follow suit. Of course that is different from the gender ratio, but a decline in women students propping up these institutions would upset the balance. Not necessarily towards men though, as administrators start screeching "Bring back our girls!" and enact even more women-centric recruitment and retention programs. Thoughts?
Thanks, great find on that article, I’ll take a look.
It makes it tough for administrators to bring this up when the government and the media aren’t willing to talk about it. Politicians in both parties aren’t willing to discuss it. There have been a series of articles recently on how colleges are financially collapsing due to a drop in enrollments, but I couldn’t find a single article that mentioned that the main demographic dropping out is male. Some articles even describe how the Boston economy could go into a tailspin because the local area is so dependent on universities. Even the fear of an economic meltdown couldn’t bring them to mention that this is primarily driven by men not attending.
This is definitely ideologically inconvenient for administrators. But at some point, when their jobs are on the line because they’re losing male customers, I think they’re going to start to bringing this up. I think their pragmatism will kick in. Maybe they do it in a way that’s politically correct, like start groups to recruit men of color. Some universities are already cutting faculty [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/26/program-cuts-begin-west-virginia-university].
Yep we're seeing the "men of color" hand-wringing already, as if that population would be big enough to backfill the large enrollment drops. It's all performative rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic, either that or administrators can't do (or follow your) math. Here are a couple of examples of administrator responses that celebrate the sinking ship:
(The author, Carine M. Feyten, is chancellor and president of Texas Woman’s University, and is a proponent of...more women-only universities!)
(Thankfully Richard Reeves wrote a rebuttal in the same Chronicle of Higher Education "No, the Boys Are Not Doing Just Fine".)
2. "Universities as Women-Serving Institutions: Rather than focus narrowly on lagging male enrollments, consider what would it mean for a university to truly be a women-serving institution"
This article is pure gold, including nuggets like: "As feminist scholars, we foreground decolonial, intersectional and global analysis here to offer explanations for the current shifting gender demographics across higher education".
On a slightly different note, projects like the MIT Challenge [https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/] make me wonder about the future of a lot of courses. I think the lab sciences obviously need to be taught in person. But for a lot of courses, there are people able to learn the material more quickly at home than at school and for a lot less money. We need to ask what the purpose of college is from the perspective of the undergrad, rather than the R1 professor producing papers. For many degrees, it does seem more like a status symbol.
I'd love to see this analysis spread more widely, and have one suggestion to that end. You've shown how the declines are not driven by changes in male learning outcomes. That's a very important part of the story, because it eliminates a lot of possible causes. But I predict that would be the most contested part of your analysis: partly for culture war reasons, but also because most people aren't accustomed to thinking of the PSAT and SAT as demonstrating learning, as such (as opposed to ability, or for some, test prep). I think it's worth making that case more forcefully, with additional (and perhaps different types) of data, if it's out there.
Thanks for that. Yeah, I have high confidence that this isn’t caused by learning outcomes. But I don’t have high confidence in what is causing the GPA gap. The more I think about the discrepancy between GPA and SAT, and look at the various studies, the more confusing it gets. For example, they do lean slightly towards evidence of grading discrimination, but there just aren’t that many studies. And one of them with a good methodology found no discrimination. But oddly, the one that found no gender discrimination did find that teachers have favorites and give them higher grades, just that in that one school, in one town in Sweden, in that one year, those teachers had an equal number of male/female favorites.
But also some other things really don’t make sense. For instance, we definitely know that boys have higher rates of absenteeism and not handing in their homework, which would clearly be a contributing factor to the GPA gap. But then if that doesn’t lead to higher SAT scores, then is homework and attending class actually contributing to learning? Those might be on subjects that aren’t directly tested on the SATs, but the boys also have higher absentee rates from classes that are directly tested. So what is going on?
There’s a danger to claiming discrimination when you aren’t sure there really is. For example, Freddie DeBoer points out that an issue with the anti-racist movement is that they’ve argued the SAT has a racial gap so they should use GPA…but the GPA also has a racial gap. Meaning that for race, GPA and SAT are correlated. The same group doing well on one is doing well on the other. So you might say, well there’s definitely grading discrimination against boys since those two things aren’t correlated. But there are studies that show there definitely is race-based discrimination on grading and still the GPA and SAT gap have more correlation. So what is going on? When you step back and look at all these studies as a whole, nothing makes sense.
"But also some other things really don’t make sense. For instance, we definitely know that boys have higher rates of absenteeism and not handing in their homework, which would clearly be a contributing factor to the GPA gap. But then if that doesn’t lead to higher SAT scores, then is homework and attending class actually contributing to learning? Those might be on subjects that aren’t directly tested on the SATs, but the boys also have higher absentee rates from classes that are directly tested. So what is going on?"
You have it exactly right here: homework and attending class (at least, within the range of variation of high school students) don't really affect *long-term* learning (which is what the SAT measures).
There is a big difference between *never* attending class and doing homework versus *ocassionally* attending class and doing homework. In terms of *long-term* retention, what really matters is that you've been exposed to a concept at least once or twice (while having the necessary prerequisites to grok the concept in the first place).
This feels counterintuitive because doing homework feels hard, so you have to be learning right? There is a couple things going on here. One is that it's important to remember that we are considering the median student here. And for the median student, the concepts that they can grok are not very complicated. So most homework is busy work. Homework becomes more important when concepts get more complicated like AP STEM courses or college-level courses.
Another important consideration is the difference between short-term and long-term retention. When you drill homework assignments, you are temporarily raising your competence in the material--just in time for the test! But if you were to be retested a couple years later, you regress to a baseline. And it turns out that the baseline that you regress towards is almost purely a function of native ability and has very little to do with how much you grinded out those homework problems years ago. This is why the SAT has a high g-loading (correlation with IQ) on the population of high school seniors.
(If you want a more fleshed-out version of this argument, I recommend "The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan.)
Put it all together and the SAT-GPA gender gap stops being mysterious. Boys have slightly higher IQ's (specifically on mathematical/spatial reasoning tasks), so they do better on standardized tests. But girls are more conscientious, so they do their homework and get better grades as a result.
Even though I am naturally sympathetic towards men, I actually think the "teachers discriminate against boys" angle is a red herring. Boys really are less diligent students than girls--you only need to teach students for a couple of weeks to see that.
This is slighly spicier, but a supporting piece of evidence is to look into the educational outcomes of male homosexuals. They suffer no discrimination. In fact, they have higher education attainment than both straight men and straight women last I checked.
The explanation here is that male homosexuals get the best of both worlds: they have the slightly higher IQ's associated with men while having the feminine/conscientious/diligent social behaviours that are rewarded in school environments.
Excellent write up and walk through. In my high school, we all knew that teachers on subjective test leaned toward the girls (late 70's) but guys faired slightly better on the standardized tests The PSAT and National Merit Scholar ranking (based solely on the PSAT) pretty much matched the schools
gender ratio.
I wonder how this would shake out looking at grad school admissions vs testing outcomes. I'd like to believe that it's less gendered but I just looked at my alma mater's MBA class and nope. Maybe one day we will have enough data to compare transmen vs transwomen.
It would be also interesting to break the numbers down on race and analyze it. The Asian gender gap is the smallest. Meanwhile, black women graduate college twice as much as black men! Many black women with college educations that prefer black men end up dating men below their educational caliber because of it. If we forecast the race-and-gender rates, we might even see 3x the number of black women graduates compared to black men.
Excellent article. Not that I am a follower, but I stumbled on a Dr. Jordan Peterson interview where he predicted, qualitatively, that after most men have left the university, in a few years women will notice and follow suit. Of course that is different from the gender ratio, but a decline in women students propping up these institutions would upset the balance. Not necessarily towards men though, as administrators start screeching "Bring back our girls!" and enact even more women-centric recruitment and retention programs. Thoughts?
Thanks, great find on that article, I’ll take a look.
It makes it tough for administrators to bring this up when the government and the media aren’t willing to talk about it. Politicians in both parties aren’t willing to discuss it. There have been a series of articles recently on how colleges are financially collapsing due to a drop in enrollments, but I couldn’t find a single article that mentioned that the main demographic dropping out is male. Some articles even describe how the Boston economy could go into a tailspin because the local area is so dependent on universities. Even the fear of an economic meltdown couldn’t bring them to mention that this is primarily driven by men not attending.
This is definitely ideologically inconvenient for administrators. But at some point, when their jobs are on the line because they’re losing male customers, I think they’re going to start to bringing this up. I think their pragmatism will kick in. Maybe they do it in a way that’s politically correct, like start groups to recruit men of color. Some universities are already cutting faculty [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/26/program-cuts-begin-west-virginia-university].
Yep we're seeing the "men of color" hand-wringing already, as if that population would be big enough to backfill the large enrollment drops. It's all performative rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic, either that or administrators can't do (or follow your) math. Here are a couple of examples of administrator responses that celebrate the sinking ship:
1. "The Boys Are Doing Just Fine. A smaller share of college-goers are male. So what?" https://archive.ph/oHhhr#selection-1497.9-1501.51
(The author, Carine M. Feyten, is chancellor and president of Texas Woman’s University, and is a proponent of...more women-only universities!)
(Thankfully Richard Reeves wrote a rebuttal in the same Chronicle of Higher Education "No, the Boys Are Not Doing Just Fine".)
2. "Universities as Women-Serving Institutions: Rather than focus narrowly on lagging male enrollments, consider what would it mean for a university to truly be a women-serving institution"
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/07/13/toward-conception-women-serving-institutions-opinion
Archived at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220816040032/https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/07/13/toward-conception-women-serving-institutions-opinion
This article is pure gold, including nuggets like: "As feminist scholars, we foreground decolonial, intersectional and global analysis here to offer explanations for the current shifting gender demographics across higher education".
On a slightly different note, projects like the MIT Challenge [https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/] make me wonder about the future of a lot of courses. I think the lab sciences obviously need to be taught in person. But for a lot of courses, there are people able to learn the material more quickly at home than at school and for a lot less money. We need to ask what the purpose of college is from the perspective of the undergrad, rather than the R1 professor producing papers. For many degrees, it does seem more like a status symbol.
I'd love to see this analysis spread more widely, and have one suggestion to that end. You've shown how the declines are not driven by changes in male learning outcomes. That's a very important part of the story, because it eliminates a lot of possible causes. But I predict that would be the most contested part of your analysis: partly for culture war reasons, but also because most people aren't accustomed to thinking of the PSAT and SAT as demonstrating learning, as such (as opposed to ability, or for some, test prep). I think it's worth making that case more forcefully, with additional (and perhaps different types) of data, if it's out there.
Thanks for that. Yeah, I have high confidence that this isn’t caused by learning outcomes. But I don’t have high confidence in what is causing the GPA gap. The more I think about the discrepancy between GPA and SAT, and look at the various studies, the more confusing it gets. For example, they do lean slightly towards evidence of grading discrimination, but there just aren’t that many studies. And one of them with a good methodology found no discrimination. But oddly, the one that found no gender discrimination did find that teachers have favorites and give them higher grades, just that in that one school, in one town in Sweden, in that one year, those teachers had an equal number of male/female favorites.
But also some other things really don’t make sense. For instance, we definitely know that boys have higher rates of absenteeism and not handing in their homework, which would clearly be a contributing factor to the GPA gap. But then if that doesn’t lead to higher SAT scores, then is homework and attending class actually contributing to learning? Those might be on subjects that aren’t directly tested on the SATs, but the boys also have higher absentee rates from classes that are directly tested. So what is going on?
There’s a danger to claiming discrimination when you aren’t sure there really is. For example, Freddie DeBoer points out that an issue with the anti-racist movement is that they’ve argued the SAT has a racial gap so they should use GPA…but the GPA also has a racial gap. Meaning that for race, GPA and SAT are correlated. The same group doing well on one is doing well on the other. So you might say, well there’s definitely grading discrimination against boys since those two things aren’t correlated. But there are studies that show there definitely is race-based discrimination on grading and still the GPA and SAT gap have more correlation. So what is going on? When you step back and look at all these studies as a whole, nothing makes sense.
"But also some other things really don’t make sense. For instance, we definitely know that boys have higher rates of absenteeism and not handing in their homework, which would clearly be a contributing factor to the GPA gap. But then if that doesn’t lead to higher SAT scores, then is homework and attending class actually contributing to learning? Those might be on subjects that aren’t directly tested on the SATs, but the boys also have higher absentee rates from classes that are directly tested. So what is going on?"
You have it exactly right here: homework and attending class (at least, within the range of variation of high school students) don't really affect *long-term* learning (which is what the SAT measures).
There is a big difference between *never* attending class and doing homework versus *ocassionally* attending class and doing homework. In terms of *long-term* retention, what really matters is that you've been exposed to a concept at least once or twice (while having the necessary prerequisites to grok the concept in the first place).
This feels counterintuitive because doing homework feels hard, so you have to be learning right? There is a couple things going on here. One is that it's important to remember that we are considering the median student here. And for the median student, the concepts that they can grok are not very complicated. So most homework is busy work. Homework becomes more important when concepts get more complicated like AP STEM courses or college-level courses.
Another important consideration is the difference between short-term and long-term retention. When you drill homework assignments, you are temporarily raising your competence in the material--just in time for the test! But if you were to be retested a couple years later, you regress to a baseline. And it turns out that the baseline that you regress towards is almost purely a function of native ability and has very little to do with how much you grinded out those homework problems years ago. This is why the SAT has a high g-loading (correlation with IQ) on the population of high school seniors.
(If you want a more fleshed-out version of this argument, I recommend "The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan.)
Put it all together and the SAT-GPA gender gap stops being mysterious. Boys have slightly higher IQ's (specifically on mathematical/spatial reasoning tasks), so they do better on standardized tests. But girls are more conscientious, so they do their homework and get better grades as a result.
Even though I am naturally sympathetic towards men, I actually think the "teachers discriminate against boys" angle is a red herring. Boys really are less diligent students than girls--you only need to teach students for a couple of weeks to see that.
This is slighly spicier, but a supporting piece of evidence is to look into the educational outcomes of male homosexuals. They suffer no discrimination. In fact, they have higher education attainment than both straight men and straight women last I checked.
The explanation here is that male homosexuals get the best of both worlds: they have the slightly higher IQ's associated with men while having the feminine/conscientious/diligent social behaviours that are rewarded in school environments.
Excellent write up and walk through. In my high school, we all knew that teachers on subjective test leaned toward the girls (late 70's) but guys faired slightly better on the standardized tests The PSAT and National Merit Scholar ranking (based solely on the PSAT) pretty much matched the schools
gender ratio.
I wonder how this would shake out looking at grad school admissions vs testing outcomes. I'd like to believe that it's less gendered but I just looked at my alma mater's MBA class and nope. Maybe one day we will have enough data to compare transmen vs transwomen.
Again thanks.
As a clue to one dimension of the grading gap that favors girls, I remember this article from last year "Attractive female students no longer earned higher grades when classes moved online during COVID-19", https://www.psypost.org/2022/11/attractive-female-students-no-longer-earned-higher-grades-when-classes-moved-online-during-covid-19-64251
(They link to the peer-reviewed study in Economic Letters, which is open access.)
It would be also interesting to break the numbers down on race and analyze it. The Asian gender gap is the smallest. Meanwhile, black women graduate college twice as much as black men! Many black women with college educations that prefer black men end up dating men below their educational caliber because of it. If we forecast the race-and-gender rates, we might even see 3x the number of black women graduates compared to black men.