Why American men are abandoning college: report

Young men across America have been increasingly abandoning college as there are more costs associated with college, such as higher tuition prices, a desire for earning an income out of high school, and other opportunities presenting themselves.

According to Bloomberg, women have been outnumbering men at college for the last 40 years and the gap between men and women in college is getting increasingly wider. About half of women between 25 and 34 have earned a Bachelor's degree, while only 37 percent of men have done the same. From 2011 to 2022, college enrollment dropped by around 1.2 million nationwide, and it was mostly men opting to skip higher education. 

The reason behind the drop in men at college may be connected to several different factors, the outlet noted, such as the high price of tuition or the desire to immediately start earning a living. 

Despite this, those men with a college degree still tend to fare better than those without one, earning 200 percent more than their non-college-educated counterparts. This can vary widely depending on the field of study. But some young men want to earn more without attending a higher educational institution. 

In places such as Lake County, Ohio, enrollment into college from 2013 dropped from half of the young men to only one in three. “I hear a lot online about people saying in the trades you’ll earn money while you’re training and there’s more guarantee, so it makes it seem safer,” a student in Rita Soeder's "internship class" told reporters.

Around 20 percent of boys who are aged 13-17 said they use YouTube almost constantly, a Pew Research study found. On YouTube, like in other places of the online sphere, there has been a lot of support for skipping college and taking up a role in the workforce out of high school, Bloomberg noted. Turning Point USA Founder and CEO Charlie Kirk has spoken at length about the subject, and wrote a book titled, "The College Scam: How America's Universities are bankrupting and brainwashing away the future of America's Youth," which makes the case against going to college in certain circumstances. 

Liz Brainard, who is the advisory director for the Lake Geauga Educational Assistance Foundation, which helps high school graduates decide next steps, said that many smart young men graduating from high school are "bored" of schooling and want to go into the workforce instead and start earning a living. Although, she worries that those young men will skip out on college for the wrong reasons. 

"I just don’t want students to think, ‘This is a solution to my boredom’ or ‘This is going to solve all of my financial problems’ or ‘This is the easier path,’” she added, “I worry about those students."

David Price, the head football coach at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, told the outlet about how young men in his program were dropping out of college, “There’s so many things that are driving young men out of college. I think that a lot of society as a whole has been focused on immediate gratification, rather than looking at the whole picture.”

19-year-old Jayden Owens, who graduated from a trades school in Ohio, said, "College takes longer. I don’t necessarily want to be in school for that long. I had enough of that in high school. When I got out I was like, ‘Yes, we’re done!’”

Owens now works at a private ambulance company and is working to become a paramedic. “You want to learn, you want to protect, you want to provide,” Owens said. “For males, they are going into these types of fields because it forces you to be masculine."