Avoiding Girlington

Dr. Helen Smith is interviewed by Forbes concerning declining male college enrollment:

Jerry: “You mentioned a number of institutions in which men feel uncomfortable – no, it’s actually not a matter of feeling uncomfortable, it’s a matter of actually being disadvantaged. There’s one you haven’t mentioned yet which is something that overlaps with an interest of mine and of your husband’s, Glenn Reynolds: the idea of a college bubble, the idea of a higher education system in which the value of the product has been become completely dissociated from the price of it. Talk to me a little bit about – what do you call it, Girltown or Girlingtown? – the universities as sort of a world hostile to men.”

Helen: “Right. I call it Girlington [in the book] and that’s sort of like Burlington. There’s so many women at the University of Vermont they call the place Girlington as opposed to Burlington. What’s interesting is that it’s something like 60% women going to college and 40% men, and I think you’re right. I don’t think that it’s just the higher education bubble – I know that my husband Glenn Reynolds is interested in that and actually has a new book called The New School coming out about that very topic – but I think that actually what’s happening is that not only is the [college] commodity much less desirable to men but I think that the environment itself is actively hostile towards men. So I think you’ve got two things going on there: you’ve got a commodity college which isn’t to men as important as it used to be, and there are other things that men are finding to do; and at the same time I think that the discrimination against men in these diversity-field, women-dominated schools is also acting as a kind of barrier to men. A lot of men don’t want to put up with it and a lot of people think, “Of course that’s not really happening,” but people have no idea what men face in our colleges today.

People simply have to stop thinking about college in terms of when they went to school. It is an entirely different cost/benefit structure than it was 20 or 40 years ago, and must be considered from the value proposition it offers now as opposed to what it offered then. And if one considers the lower quality education, the reduced value of the degree, the vastly inflated costs, and the anti-male discrimination, it is a dubious prospect indeed for most men.

There are other ways to punch the college degree ticket. Look into them.