export_ofoct.com

[00:00.66] Donje Gates is 18 years old and lives in Chicago, Illinois.

[00:08.10] His family wants him to go to college in the fall.

[00:12.88] But Gates is thinking about going to a trade school instead.

[00:18.72] He says he worries about the cost of college and is not sure if it will be valuable to him.

[00:28.55] Gates was in a group of high school students visiting Chicago’s Malcom X Community College.

[00:38.11] About 75 percent of the school’s students are women.

[00:45.02] Like many colleges and universities in the United States, Malcom X is struggling to get more male students to enroll.

[00:58.30] Women now make up about 58 percent of U.S. college undergraduates. That information comes from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

[01:14.23] The percentage of men in higher education is getting smaller each year.

[01:21.40] Now, some universities are making extra efforts to attract and keep male students.

[01:29.91] For example, leaders at Malcolm X Community College saw that Black men were dropping out at a higher rate than other student groups.

[01:44.78] To help more Black men stay in school, leaders started a mentoring program.

[01:52.22] The program connects a teacher or other school employee with two Black male students.

[02:02.04] The effort has helped. Forty-three percent of Black male students dropped out between the fall of 2021 and the spring of 2022.

[02:17.18] But 93 percent of the men in the mentoring program stayed in school, said the school’s president, David Sanders.

[02:29.14] However, Sanders said some men do not want to admit they need academic help.

[02:38.44] “There’s an expectation for a male,” he said.

[02:43.22] “He’s supposed to be strong and not show weakness.”

[02:49.32] College officials say some ideas about men and boys add to the enrollment difficulties.

[02:58.89] Berea College is a small private school in the southern U.S. state of Kentucky.

[03:06.86] It has 18 percent fewer male students now than in 2019.

[03:15.09] The college is trying to attract more men from nearby areas in the Appalachian Mountains.

[03:23.60] Rick Childers is a former student at Berea.

[03:28.37] He now works for the college and leads the school’s Appalachian project.

[03:34.22] He said many of the male students he meets face the same outdated ideas about masculinity that he did.

[03:44.31] In that old way of thinking, going to college was not something a strong man would do.

[03:51.75] Childers said his father would call him “college boy” in a negative way.

[03:59.19] Educators say it is difficult to make college appealing to men who have been told that college is not for them.

[04:10.34] Educators say another problem is that some officials at colleges and universities do not believe male students need any special help.

[04:22.83] Ioakim Boutakidis is a professor of child and adolescent studies at California State University Fullerton.

[04:33.18] He noted that some officials think men already have more advantages than women.

[04:41.95] As a result, those schools may be less likely to offer special support for male students.

[04:51.78] Boutakidis said he has tried to get his university to pay attention to male enrollment and academics.

[05:02.40] But his coworkers, he said, have expressed doubt about the need for more focus on male students.

[05:13.03] Overall, men of color are less likely to attend college than white men.

[05:20.73] Because of this, Boutakidis said he thinks schools should focus on men of color first.