How 9th-Grade Gridlock Keeps Boys Out of College

Colleges face a challenge to masculinity that bulging muscles, rumbling voices, and jacked-up pickup trucks won't remedy.

How 9th-Grade Gridlock Keeps Boys Out of College

By Richard Whitmire

Colleges face a challenge to masculinity that bulging muscles, rumbling voices, and jacked-up pickup trucks won't remedy.

Despite the fact that men and women get equal salary bumps for earning a bachelor's degree, far more women than men are getting the message. As a result, nearly 58 percent of bachelor's degrees and 62 percent of associate degrees are granted to women.

It's not that colleges aren't searching for men. Some start football programs or rugby leagues to attract guys. Others revise their campus brochures to portray men playing various sports. (Next up: A more realistic brochure showing guys slurping beer, eyes fixed on ESPN's SportsCenter?)

And it's not that colleges aren't bending over backward to admit the men they find. Favoring male applicants, in fact, is what caught the attention of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which in November announced that it would investigate whether colleges discriminate against women by granting admissions preferences to men.

Most likely, college admissions officers aren't losing any sleep over the investigation, which has no legal authority. For a private college, favoring men—or football players or clarinet players—appears to be legally survivable, at least for now.

What does cause them to lose sleep, however, is the lost revenue and social awkwardness that can ensue from gender imbalances. And so they continue to ask: Where are those men?

One possibility is that admissions officers are looking in all the wrong places. The boys are findable; it's just that they don't necessarily attend 11th- and 12th-grade college nights in the gym.

My suggestion: Skip back a few grades to ninth grade, where you'll find schools awash with boys. Ninth grade is the "bulge" year, in which nationally there were 113 boys for every 100 girls in 2007, according to the Southern Regional Education Board, which tracks such statistics. Depending on race, ethnicity, and location, the ninth-grade bulge for boys gets even bigger: Among black Americans, there are 123 boys for every 100 girls; among Hispanics, 122. Geographically the bulge is larger in the 16 states covered by the board, with Florida registering 117 boys for every 100 girls.

As an example, let's take Baltimore's Patterson High School, located in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. If you showed up to recruit the Class of 2009 on graduation day, you would have found 164 female and 107 male students. A quirk of birthrates? Not exactly. Had you checked on the ninth-grade class there in September 2008, you would have found 278 girls and 400 boys.

At this point you've probably guessed the cause: Incoming ninth-grade boys unprepared for the college-track rigors of high school get slammed and held back for a repeat "experience."

At my request, Thomas C. West, a senior research analyst with the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago, plotted the numbers. He drew upon his research from the "Still a Freshman" study released recently by the Johns Hopkins University, which looked at ninth-grade repeaters.

Nationally in 2006-7, approximately 250,000 male students (12 percent of all ninth-grade boys) and 178,000 female students (9 percent of the girls) repeated ninth grade, says West. So about 72,000 more boys than girls repeated ninth grade that year. continue...