So a bunch of young men are whining that the world isn’t ENTIRELY geared in every way to cater to their every idiot whim? WHO CARES????
Dudes, grow up. As I have heard sooooo many men tell me throughout my life, no one cares about your feelings. If men fail, it’s your fault. Have you considered smiling more?
I would be curious if men are merely opting for more traditionally blue-collar of work because that's where the earning potentially is now. Why get a bachelors degree and take on $100,000 of non-dischargeable debt to make $60,000 a year when you can be a union electrician/carpenter/plumber and make 20% more without all of the student loan overhead after a similar investment in time? I think some men are realizing that college just simply is not worth the investment. I would be curious for AIBM to explore the reality of this.
Plus, as great as endorsing HEAL careers may be, you seem to be missing a very important metric when it comes to career selection: mating opportunity. If I may speak plainly, nobody's trying to fuck a social worker or a kindergarten teacher; their pay is shit and they have no cultural cachet. You would need a sizable financial investment in compensation for these fields that I simply don't believe as possible.
Highly technical and consequential careers will always require a university education. However, many other careers simply don't - and we shouldn't be hoodwinking young people into taking on surreal amounts of debt for them.
I want to dwell on this point for a second to give it some much needed emphasis. From the outside looking in, many university degrees seem either bloated beyond belief, or completely redundant.
At the same time, it is incredible how much university graduates don’t know. How is it possible for someone to receive 16 years of education and still require on the job training?
I had teachers in high school nearly cured me from a reading affliction. It was in the 11th grade when I first experienced such overt hostility as a dude. Between the essay (I still remember the title these thirty years later): "Man as a False Generic" and the imposition of reading of The Stone Angel by the other pessimistic Canadian Margaret. It was horrible.
My teacher seemed to think that we boys were to be cured from being boys. She wanted to liberate us from the patriarchy. We hated her and wanted to liberate her from living. Luckily, the next year I had a great teacher who at the time noticed how boys learning seemed to be dropping off. That was in 1991.
Crap teachers with axes to grind against men have been with us for decades. We are now reaping what was sewn by an anti boy / anti man presence in schools...
The therapy profession is even worse. I was the only born as a man man in my school of seventy students over the four years. There were some manufactured men, built on belief. But I was the only bio-dude.
Given that the APA wants to cure men of masculinity, the problem of colleges turning pink has implications that reach much further than mere academic achievement.
V interesting data. I imagine there is a link here between the gender divide in college enrolments/achievements and the increasing divide in political/value orientations between young men and young women. I'm writing from the UK where this is becoming more evident, but I believe in the US there is already something like a 30-point difference in young people's value orientations.
I became interested in the gender divide in educational achievement because the material pay/careers returns do not accrue to women (at whatever age - the gender pay and careers gap is especially big in older age groups). That's why I wrote The Paula Principle book, in which I argued that male career patterns need to change in order for women to get the due returns to their competences. But I see now that male under-achievement is a growing issue.
As I retire from the Board of The Joshua Project (JP4Men.org), a non-profit dedicated to providing meaningful rites-of-passage experiences for young men moving into the meaning of mature masculinity, I feel a need to shine a light. We have mentioned in earlier posts that we appear to be lacking any societal rituals or norms that help boys develop in a healthy way. Our posts discussed young men and their lack of .. uh .. ‘college completion’? We ruminated on this as resulting from a gap in our societal focus. We are correct. I just did not feel our conclusions went deep enough.
From everything I have seen, we, as a society, are unable to find space to allow men, and more specifically young men, to explore their archetypical balance. These boys need to discover who they are, how they should act, and what their future holds. They need to find their place as adults in our communities. You know, they need to become mature men.
In calling for a focus on the maturation of young men I am not looking to diminish the justly deserved push towards gender equality, or the expanding role of women in our society. As a father of two successful young women, I have seen the societal pressures on young women and applaud our efforts to make sure that every girl can develop into the strong, mature woman she wants to be. Nor am I talking about what the internet, magazines or media think either one of our genders ‘ought to be’, or how they should interact.
What I am referring to is the breakdown in our society in the instruction of how boys become men. Boys do not need understanding or pity. They need role models and the tools to become the strong, mature men they want to be. As our society has changed, and our expectations of men has been altered, our failure to provide those tools has the potential to lead to disastrous results.
I suppose the foregoing paragraph can be considered my theory statement. But it leaves a question to be answered. Can I “prove we have this issue”?
As we have shifted our educational focus almost exclusively on preparation for college, we have diminished traditionally male careers. Shop class and vo-tech training appears as an afterthought. Young men who are interested in these pursuits are too often looked down upon as second-class citizens, almost as if we are asking whether a young man can pursue a trade and still be ‘useful to society’. With the push towards college as the ultimate goal for high school students, women have outpaced men in academia, and seem better poised to take advantage of this focus. It feels as if it points to a maturation difference between the sexes. Studies show this is true. (Of Boys to Men)
The seeming frustration among boys with these expectations has shown itself in some troubling statistics, like suicide rates. More young males commit suicide than young females. The reason for this may be complex, but clearly we are failing these young men.
In the book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine”, Jungian psychologists Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette argue that males are genetically born with four archetypes. The King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. Yes, inherited genetic archetypes. We tend to shy away from such designations because of the propensity of some to bend such concepts into ideologies of domination. However, as Moore and Gillette show, these archetypes transcend time, are intrinsic to all men, and have nothing to do with supremacy nor superiority.
How does a young man be a “King” without knowing what a King truly is? Does he understand that a King is someone who takes control of his PERSONAL realm? Can a young man even control that realm? Even if he can, does he understand how to use that control in a positive way for both himself and those around him?
The other archetypes provide similar opportunities for positive mature growth. The “Magician” promotes the power of knowledge, initiation and transformation. The “Warrior” recognizes a tendency toward aggressive action, but channels that in a positive way to meet goals. The “Lover” revels in our connection to others and the world around us.
A failure to recognize these archetypes allows their shadow to predominate, and immature males to emerge. The Magician becomes a hoarder of knowledge, doing nothing constructive with it. The Warrior vacillates between misspent aggression and inaction. The Lover becomes self-centered and manipulative.
These shadows of the male archetypes need to be exposed for what they are. Dead ends. But without the tools, knowledge, and technology to be successful how are young men going to properly channel these instincts? Are they going to get that guidance from Movies? Video games? School? Da Boys? Gangs? Jackin’ a car may make a kid appear strong to his buddies, but it does not make a man.
How does a dude learn this stuff? What can we do?
Well, I guess the first step is awareness of the fact that the pendulum has swung away from raising healthy boys to become men in their mature fullness. We have left the boys behind. More men need to step up and get involved.
At the Joshua Project we seek to provide meaningful rites of passage for young men moving into manhood. We look to encourage adult/youth mentoring relationships that can help steer boys to understand the drives within them and properly channel those drives. We use the archetypes as a means of creating compassionate, perceptive, discerning men.
So, as I step away from my official capacity, I am worried. I wish I could have done more. I am not going to quit helping and being involved, but younger men than I need to step up. We have work to do.
It seems clear to me that the reason boys are disproportionately likely to apply to more colleges than girls if affirmative action is outlawed is that white women benefit from affirmative action but white boys don’t.
I’ve encouraged men towards entrepreneurship. Per B. Franklin’s autobiography:
The two works I allude to, Sir, will in particular give a noble rule and example of self-education. School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and shew a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course in life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man’s private power, will be invaluable!
There’s always one guy and he’s always a guy. No wonder they’re not welcome:
“In their ongoing efforts to promote women, these institutions have to be careful not to inadvertently send a message that men are less welcome on campus than men.”
From an immigrant's point of view (multiple immigrants, actually) American universities are some of the very best in the world and to have access to them is a privilege, although expensive. Sure, there are some "useless" degree programs but if you choose correctly, you can get a lot out of university and also get a good job from your well-chosen degree. People in some other countries are practically dying to get a chance to get into an American university. Americans need to cultivate gratitude.
"Curiously, men are nearly twice as likely as women to say the Court’s ruling will impact their decision to pursue a degree (56% vs. 30%), even though the ruling has no bearing on the consideration of gender in the admissions process. Moreover, some colleges report adopting affirmative action policies in favor of men as a means of combatting an increasing gender skew toward women on campus."
--- I'm wondering how much of this has to do with the (true or not) long-standing American cultural meme that white men are envious of black men.
Conservatives are all over the news, podcasts, and social media saying college is a scam and nobody should go. I guess they're encouraging "the trades"? At the same time they are railing against illegal immigration, people that fill the high-turnover rate jobs that Americans won't work no matter the pay like slaughterhouse employment. So if their anti-immigrant rhetoric succeeds who's going to fill the slaughterhouse jobs, tomato picking jobs, etc until robots can? You guessed it - all those Americans without a college degree. At least that's what they're hoping. And that's also why they are worried about the "birth rate". Do the math. These conservatives are clever.
Pretty incredible stat that the share of men enrolled in college the fall after high school is now the same as it was in 1964. I wonder how civil rights efforts in the south helped influence those numbers given this is just 10 years after brown v board of education
"Girls Who Code, The Future is Female, She can STEM, Black Girl Magic, and so on. These are wonderful messages of course."
Yep, nothing like explicit sexism for "wonderful messages".
"It is a remarkable and largely wonderful story. "
Sure, blatant sexism is "largely wonderful".
As your own post shows, women achieved parity in college admission 44 years ago. We've had 44 years of utterly gratuitous sexism that is explicit, open, and celebrated.
And then, we wonder why fewer men go to college. Gee, that's a tough one. :-/
I've thought a lot about this. First, it's not clear that more men should be going to college. The "solution", as unpalatable as it might be, could be that we should stop subsidizing higher education, resulting in fewer women going to college (which would also decrease the gender gap). This would fix so many things. It would help fix the dating scene for young people in their 20s where the gender gap in college degrees leads to both sexes being dissatisfied. And this in turn would hopefully reduce the number of single, college-educated women in their 30s who represent the worst pathologies of the left and have *way* too much power right now.
But if we insist on making college better for men, there are a couple things we can do:
1. Reintroduce male spaces. The biggest reason why men don't like college has nothing to do with material incentives like career prospects. It's that they simply don't feel like they belong socially. And they feel that way because they are correct. We need to raise the status of male-only spaces like fraternities, and in general, it needs to be socially acceptable for men to create men-only spaces without having to justify themselves. This is only fair as women can create women-only spaces without having to justify themselves.
2. Streamline degrees. Men are less conscientiousness but more obsessive than women. Right now, school highly rewards diligent behavior, but doesn't reward going above and beyond in any given area that you are passionate in. We need to let men who are outliers in one particular area to be able to leverage their special abilities without being bogged-down by general ed requirements. This means fewer general requirements in degrees, more options to test-out of courses given demonstrated mastery of the material, and so on.
3. More testing, less grade inflation. This is related to suggestion 2, but we should structure classes to be harder and more reliant on high-stakes tests for grades. Men are more naturally suited to a rhythm of high engagement interspersed with low engagement, rather than a consistent hum of medium engagement.
4. Remove all anti-male ideology/speech from university campuses. This is pretty self-explanatory.
To get men back into college, one of the first thing to do is restrain college's ability to put blot into degree programs. Currently a 4 year degree takes closer to 5 years, but if all the nonessential classes were cut out it would be 3 years for a bachelor degree.
So a bunch of young men are whining that the world isn’t ENTIRELY geared in every way to cater to their every idiot whim? WHO CARES????
Dudes, grow up. As I have heard sooooo many men tell me throughout my life, no one cares about your feelings. If men fail, it’s your fault. Have you considered smiling more?
I would be curious if men are merely opting for more traditionally blue-collar of work because that's where the earning potentially is now. Why get a bachelors degree and take on $100,000 of non-dischargeable debt to make $60,000 a year when you can be a union electrician/carpenter/plumber and make 20% more without all of the student loan overhead after a similar investment in time? I think some men are realizing that college just simply is not worth the investment. I would be curious for AIBM to explore the reality of this.
Plus, as great as endorsing HEAL careers may be, you seem to be missing a very important metric when it comes to career selection: mating opportunity. If I may speak plainly, nobody's trying to fuck a social worker or a kindergarten teacher; their pay is shit and they have no cultural cachet. You would need a sizable financial investment in compensation for these fields that I simply don't believe as possible.
Highly technical and consequential careers will always require a university education. However, many other careers simply don't - and we shouldn't be hoodwinking young people into taking on surreal amounts of debt for them.
I want to dwell on this point for a second to give it some much needed emphasis. From the outside looking in, many university degrees seem either bloated beyond belief, or completely redundant.
At the same time, it is incredible how much university graduates don’t know. How is it possible for someone to receive 16 years of education and still require on the job training?
https://theemergentcity.substack.com/p/suburban-campuses-are-facing-a-mid
I had teachers in high school nearly cured me from a reading affliction. It was in the 11th grade when I first experienced such overt hostility as a dude. Between the essay (I still remember the title these thirty years later): "Man as a False Generic" and the imposition of reading of The Stone Angel by the other pessimistic Canadian Margaret. It was horrible.
My teacher seemed to think that we boys were to be cured from being boys. She wanted to liberate us from the patriarchy. We hated her and wanted to liberate her from living. Luckily, the next year I had a great teacher who at the time noticed how boys learning seemed to be dropping off. That was in 1991.
Crap teachers with axes to grind against men have been with us for decades. We are now reaping what was sewn by an anti boy / anti man presence in schools...
The therapy profession is even worse. I was the only born as a man man in my school of seventy students over the four years. There were some manufactured men, built on belief. But I was the only bio-dude.
Given that the APA wants to cure men of masculinity, the problem of colleges turning pink has implications that reach much further than mere academic achievement.
V interesting data. I imagine there is a link here between the gender divide in college enrolments/achievements and the increasing divide in political/value orientations between young men and young women. I'm writing from the UK where this is becoming more evident, but I believe in the US there is already something like a 30-point difference in young people's value orientations.
I became interested in the gender divide in educational achievement because the material pay/careers returns do not accrue to women (at whatever age - the gender pay and careers gap is especially big in older age groups). That's why I wrote The Paula Principle book, in which I argued that male career patterns need to change in order for women to get the due returns to their competences. But I see now that male under-achievement is a growing issue.
Folks, We Have Work To Do
As I retire from the Board of The Joshua Project (JP4Men.org), a non-profit dedicated to providing meaningful rites-of-passage experiences for young men moving into the meaning of mature masculinity, I feel a need to shine a light. We have mentioned in earlier posts that we appear to be lacking any societal rituals or norms that help boys develop in a healthy way. Our posts discussed young men and their lack of .. uh .. ‘college completion’? We ruminated on this as resulting from a gap in our societal focus. We are correct. I just did not feel our conclusions went deep enough.
From everything I have seen, we, as a society, are unable to find space to allow men, and more specifically young men, to explore their archetypical balance. These boys need to discover who they are, how they should act, and what their future holds. They need to find their place as adults in our communities. You know, they need to become mature men.
In calling for a focus on the maturation of young men I am not looking to diminish the justly deserved push towards gender equality, or the expanding role of women in our society. As a father of two successful young women, I have seen the societal pressures on young women and applaud our efforts to make sure that every girl can develop into the strong, mature woman she wants to be. Nor am I talking about what the internet, magazines or media think either one of our genders ‘ought to be’, or how they should interact.
What I am referring to is the breakdown in our society in the instruction of how boys become men. Boys do not need understanding or pity. They need role models and the tools to become the strong, mature men they want to be. As our society has changed, and our expectations of men has been altered, our failure to provide those tools has the potential to lead to disastrous results.
I suppose the foregoing paragraph can be considered my theory statement. But it leaves a question to be answered. Can I “prove we have this issue”?
As we have shifted our educational focus almost exclusively on preparation for college, we have diminished traditionally male careers. Shop class and vo-tech training appears as an afterthought. Young men who are interested in these pursuits are too often looked down upon as second-class citizens, almost as if we are asking whether a young man can pursue a trade and still be ‘useful to society’. With the push towards college as the ultimate goal for high school students, women have outpaced men in academia, and seem better poised to take advantage of this focus. It feels as if it points to a maturation difference between the sexes. Studies show this is true. (Of Boys to Men)
The seeming frustration among boys with these expectations has shown itself in some troubling statistics, like suicide rates. More young males commit suicide than young females. The reason for this may be complex, but clearly we are failing these young men.
In the book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine”, Jungian psychologists Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette argue that males are genetically born with four archetypes. The King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. Yes, inherited genetic archetypes. We tend to shy away from such designations because of the propensity of some to bend such concepts into ideologies of domination. However, as Moore and Gillette show, these archetypes transcend time, are intrinsic to all men, and have nothing to do with supremacy nor superiority.
How does a young man be a “King” without knowing what a King truly is? Does he understand that a King is someone who takes control of his PERSONAL realm? Can a young man even control that realm? Even if he can, does he understand how to use that control in a positive way for both himself and those around him?
The other archetypes provide similar opportunities for positive mature growth. The “Magician” promotes the power of knowledge, initiation and transformation. The “Warrior” recognizes a tendency toward aggressive action, but channels that in a positive way to meet goals. The “Lover” revels in our connection to others and the world around us.
A failure to recognize these archetypes allows their shadow to predominate, and immature males to emerge. The Magician becomes a hoarder of knowledge, doing nothing constructive with it. The Warrior vacillates between misspent aggression and inaction. The Lover becomes self-centered and manipulative.
These shadows of the male archetypes need to be exposed for what they are. Dead ends. But without the tools, knowledge, and technology to be successful how are young men going to properly channel these instincts? Are they going to get that guidance from Movies? Video games? School? Da Boys? Gangs? Jackin’ a car may make a kid appear strong to his buddies, but it does not make a man.
How does a dude learn this stuff? What can we do?
Well, I guess the first step is awareness of the fact that the pendulum has swung away from raising healthy boys to become men in their mature fullness. We have left the boys behind. More men need to step up and get involved.
At the Joshua Project we seek to provide meaningful rites of passage for young men moving into manhood. We look to encourage adult/youth mentoring relationships that can help steer boys to understand the drives within them and properly channel those drives. We use the archetypes as a means of creating compassionate, perceptive, discerning men.
So, as I step away from my official capacity, I am worried. I wish I could have done more. I am not going to quit helping and being involved, but younger men than I need to step up. We have work to do.
It seems clear to me that the reason boys are disproportionately likely to apply to more colleges than girls if affirmative action is outlawed is that white women benefit from affirmative action but white boys don’t.
I’ve encouraged men towards entrepreneurship. Per B. Franklin’s autobiography:
The two works I allude to, Sir, will in particular give a noble rule and example of self-education. School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and shew a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course in life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man’s private power, will be invaluable!
B.V. Writing to B.Franklin
There’s always one guy and he’s always a guy. No wonder they’re not welcome:
“In their ongoing efforts to promote women, these institutions have to be careful not to inadvertently send a message that men are less welcome on campus than men.”
From an immigrant's point of view (multiple immigrants, actually) American universities are some of the very best in the world and to have access to them is a privilege, although expensive. Sure, there are some "useless" degree programs but if you choose correctly, you can get a lot out of university and also get a good job from your well-chosen degree. People in some other countries are practically dying to get a chance to get into an American university. Americans need to cultivate gratitude.
"Curiously, men are nearly twice as likely as women to say the Court’s ruling will impact their decision to pursue a degree (56% vs. 30%), even though the ruling has no bearing on the consideration of gender in the admissions process. Moreover, some colleges report adopting affirmative action policies in favor of men as a means of combatting an increasing gender skew toward women on campus."
--- I'm wondering how much of this has to do with the (true or not) long-standing American cultural meme that white men are envious of black men.
Conservatives are all over the news, podcasts, and social media saying college is a scam and nobody should go. I guess they're encouraging "the trades"? At the same time they are railing against illegal immigration, people that fill the high-turnover rate jobs that Americans won't work no matter the pay like slaughterhouse employment. So if their anti-immigrant rhetoric succeeds who's going to fill the slaughterhouse jobs, tomato picking jobs, etc until robots can? You guessed it - all those Americans without a college degree. At least that's what they're hoping. And that's also why they are worried about the "birth rate". Do the math. These conservatives are clever.
Pretty incredible stat that the share of men enrolled in college the fall after high school is now the same as it was in 1964. I wonder how civil rights efforts in the south helped influence those numbers given this is just 10 years after brown v board of education
"Girls Who Code, The Future is Female, She can STEM, Black Girl Magic, and so on. These are wonderful messages of course."
Yep, nothing like explicit sexism for "wonderful messages".
"It is a remarkable and largely wonderful story. "
Sure, blatant sexism is "largely wonderful".
As your own post shows, women achieved parity in college admission 44 years ago. We've had 44 years of utterly gratuitous sexism that is explicit, open, and celebrated.
And then, we wonder why fewer men go to college. Gee, that's a tough one. :-/
I've thought a lot about this. First, it's not clear that more men should be going to college. The "solution", as unpalatable as it might be, could be that we should stop subsidizing higher education, resulting in fewer women going to college (which would also decrease the gender gap). This would fix so many things. It would help fix the dating scene for young people in their 20s where the gender gap in college degrees leads to both sexes being dissatisfied. And this in turn would hopefully reduce the number of single, college-educated women in their 30s who represent the worst pathologies of the left and have *way* too much power right now.
But if we insist on making college better for men, there are a couple things we can do:
1. Reintroduce male spaces. The biggest reason why men don't like college has nothing to do with material incentives like career prospects. It's that they simply don't feel like they belong socially. And they feel that way because they are correct. We need to raise the status of male-only spaces like fraternities, and in general, it needs to be socially acceptable for men to create men-only spaces without having to justify themselves. This is only fair as women can create women-only spaces without having to justify themselves.
2. Streamline degrees. Men are less conscientiousness but more obsessive than women. Right now, school highly rewards diligent behavior, but doesn't reward going above and beyond in any given area that you are passionate in. We need to let men who are outliers in one particular area to be able to leverage their special abilities without being bogged-down by general ed requirements. This means fewer general requirements in degrees, more options to test-out of courses given demonstrated mastery of the material, and so on.
3. More testing, less grade inflation. This is related to suggestion 2, but we should structure classes to be harder and more reliant on high-stakes tests for grades. Men are more naturally suited to a rhythm of high engagement interspersed with low engagement, rather than a consistent hum of medium engagement.
4. Remove all anti-male ideology/speech from university campuses. This is pretty self-explanatory.
To get men back into college, one of the first thing to do is restrain college's ability to put blot into degree programs. Currently a 4 year degree takes closer to 5 years, but if all the nonessential classes were cut out it would be 3 years for a bachelor degree.