When politicians and tutors talk about underrepresented groups at universities, few expect men to feature on the list. Yet as a report from the Higher Education Policy Institute today shows, men are now an endangered species at university, with women being 35 per cent more likely to go to university than men. Men are also more likely to drop out, or get a lower degree mark.
The report worries that this is a trend that could get worse – and argues that instead of being a victory to celebrate in a battle of the sexes, that men falling behind in education is something that policymakers should take seriously. And besides, worrying about boys’ underachievement doesn’t necessarily mean that policymakers aren’t also thinking about disadvantages that girls still face in education and the workplace: it just means that they are trying to understand the full picture. This was something I wrote about in 2014 in the magazine: parity between the sexes should mean we are concerned about problems that affect either gender.
But the HEPI document points out that ‘even among those who accept there is a problem, there has been a shortage of ideas for tackling it. Moreover, given the centuries of male dominance in higher education, there are few precedents from which to learn.’
It suggests more men in the classroom – something that will arguably on occur when the decline in boys going off to university starts to be reversed too – will help raise aspirations, that some ‘young men could benefit from not being rushed into full undergraduate study immediately on leaving school or college’, and that some of the funding set aside for widening participation should be used for encouraging disadvantaged young men into higher education.
Whenever someone takes the time – and the authors of this report, Nick Hillman and Nicholas Robinson, have taken a great deal of time in researching the underachievement of young men – to point out that it might not necessarily be a good thing that men are outnumbered at undergraduate level, they attract predictable howls from those who think that this in some way diminishes the need for feminism. It doesn’t: society is still structured in ways that disadvantage women and expect them to bear with disadvantage quietly. But as we fight that disadvantage, we should be wary of dismissing the problems that young men face as just one of those things about blokes. That sort of attitude shows we haven’t bothered to understand much about society and its problems, whether or not they affect men or women most visibly.
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