Richard V. Reeves points out a puzzling finding: In studies of interventions that seek to improve the life prospects of disadvantaged people, when positive effects are found, the benefits tend to flow to women, not men. He discusses findings in “Why men are hard to help”, published in the last issue of National affairs. The essay is adapted from his recent book: Of boys and men: why the modern man struggles, why it matters and what heoh do it. Some examples:
Thanks to a group of anonymous benefactors, students educated in the city’s K-12 school system receive paid tuition at nearly every college in the state. Other cities have similar initiatives, but the Kalamazoo Promise is exceptionally generous. It is also one of the few such programs to have been rigorously evaluated – in this case by Timothy Bartik, Brad Hershbein and Marta Lachowska of the Upjohn Institute. They found that the Kalamazoo Promise made a major difference in the lives of its beneficiaries – more so than other similar programs in theirs. But the average impact masks a strong gender divide. According to the evaluation team, women participating in the program “achieve very significant gains”, including a 45% increase in college completion rates, while “men appear to experience no benefit” . The cost-benefit analysis showed an overall gain of $69,000 per female participant—a return on investment of at least 12%—compared to an overall loss of $21,000 for each male participant. In short, for men, the program was both costly and ineffective.
One of the other studies that jumped out of my desk examining this evidence was an evaluation of a mentoring and support program called “Stay the Course” at Tarrant County College, a two-year community college in Fort Worth, Arizona. Texas. Community colleges are the cornerstone of the American education system, serving approximately 7.7 million students, largely from middle and lower class families. But there is a completion crisis in the sector: only around half of students who enroll earn a qualification (or transfer to a four-year college) within three years of enrolment. Many of these schools produce more dropouts than graduates. The good news is that there are programs, like Stay the Course, that can increase a student’s chances of success. The bad news is that, as the pilot from Fort Worth shows, they might not work for men, who are most at risk of dropping out in the first place. Among women, the Fort Worth initiative tripled associate degree completion. This is a huge discovery: this kind of effect is rare in any social policy intervention. But as with free college in Kalamazoo, the program had no impact on college completion rates for men.
But Stay the Course and the Kalamazoo Promise are just two of dozens of education initiatives that don’t seem to benefit boys or men. An evaluation of three preschool programs – Abecedarian, Perry and the Early Training Project – for example, showed “substantial” long-term benefits for girls but “no significant long-term benefits for boys”. Project READS, a summer reading program in North Carolina, dramatically improved literacy scores for third-grade girls – giving them the equivalent of a six-week boost in learning – but there are had a “negative and insignificant reading score effect” for boys. …
Students who attended their first-choice high school in Charlotte, NC, after participating in a school-choice lottery, achieved higher GPAs, took more advanced placement courses, and were more likely to enroll in college than their peers – but the overall gains were “entirely driven by girls”. A new mentorship program for New Hampshire high schoolers has nearly doubled the number of girls enrolled in four-year college, but it has had “no mean effect” for boys. Urban boarding schools in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. boosted the academic performance of low-income black students, but only females. College scholarship programs in Arkansas and Georgia increased the number of women graduating, but had “moderate” effects for white men and “mixed and loud” results for black and Hispanic men.
And so on, and so on, for studies of the effects of wage subsidies, worker training, and other areas. Reeves notes that a number of studies of these programs point out the gap between outcomes for boys and girls, or men and women, and then note (as academic research papers like to do) that it deserves further study. But those additional studies — let alone policy proposals that would have improved outcomes for men — don’t seem to be happening.
So Reeves, like the rest of us, ends up falling back on explanations that have a plausible ring, but aren’t exactly the result of gold standard social science research into cause and effect. He writes: “The problem is not that men have fewer opportunities; it is that they do not grasp them. The challenge seems to be a general decline in agency, ambition and motivation. I
Reeves also notes:[W]here there is a difference according to gender, it is essentially always in favor of girls and women. The only real exception to this rule are some vocational training programs or institutions, which seem to benefit men more than women – one of the many reasons why we need more of them. Perhaps such programs speak more clearly to those with less agency, ambition and drive?
If women had significantly lower college attendance rates, this would be considered a national problem. Indeed, it was seen that way. As Reeves notes:
In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, a landmark law to promote gender equality in higher education. And rightly so: at the time, there was a 13 percentage point gap in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded to men compared to women. Barely a decade later, the gap had closed. In 2019, the gender gap in bachelor’s degrees was 15 points – wider than it was in 1972, but in the opposite direction. Today, women far outnumber men in the American educational system. … In the United States, for example, the decline in college enrollment in 2020 was seven times greater for male students than for female students. At the same time, male students struggled more than female students with online learning.
Societies with a substantial proportion of disgruntled and restless young men will suffer from a range of other related problems.