What's the Score in the College Bowl: Girls 57, Boys 43

USA Today lead with this article on gender gap, above the fold on the front page. Males are falling behind.

Several years ago, there was a boomlet of concern for young black males failing in the education system. Detroit started all male academies, which, given the DPS composition, were basically black. The ACLU (?) challenged the all male schools, the city polity complained about suburbanites invading their turf, and the Dodger can’t remember how it came out. Maybe open enrollment but no girls felt welcomed.

Maybe it was the song of the canary – an unknown adverse societal effect hit the most vulnerable first…

The table at the bottom of this post, which probably won’t survive formatting, shows the interaction of class and race.

Among blacks, the male fraction in the lowest income stratum went from 32% to 36% from ’96 to ’04. In the upper income stratum the male fraction went from 41% to 48%.

Among whites, the male fraction in the lowest stratum declined from 46% to 42% over the same period, while in the upper stratum it drifted from 52% to 49%.

Among all races, low income appears toxic to males. The racial gap is small in the high income stratum. Even there, men are the minority, except for asians. The black-white gap is most pronounced in the lowest income stratum.

Having never known this gender-class-race interaction, the Dodger has no theory for why. Since the ‘90’s there has been something of a societal effort on behalf of girls. There’s been a lesser effort concerned with black male youth. Both have improved their population fraction in college over that period.

The Dodger could imagine than lower income is confounded with single parent [woman headed] households. Maybe that has something to do with the gender impact at low income.

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College gender gap widens: 57% are women
By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY…
There are more men than women ages 18-24 in the USA — 15 million vs. 14.2 million, according to a Census Bureau estimate last year. But nationally, the male/female ratio on campus today is 43/57, a reversal from the late 1960s and well beyond the nearly even splits of the mid-1970s….
There has been no outcry, for example, on the scale of a highly publicized 1992 report by the American Association of University Women, How Schools Short-Change Girls, which compiled reams of research on gender inequities.
That study "really ... got people to focus on girls ... (but) there is no big network that protects the needs of boys," says family therapist Michael Gurian, author of the just-published The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life, which argues that elementary and secondary schools aren't meeting the developmental needs of boys.
…. There's still a pay gap. According to the Census Bureau, women on average earned 77 cents to each dollar paid to male counterparts in 2004.
…UCLA higher education professor Linda Sax says such a discussion should address what effect, if any, the gender composition of a college has on men and women. To find out, she examined data from more than 17,000 students at 204 four-year colleges.
Preliminary results show that on campuses that were predominantly female, both men and women got higher grades. Predominantly female campuses also led to a "significant increase" in men's commitment to promoting racial understanding and led males to more liberal views on abortion, homosexuality and other social issues, her research found.
(
About 9.9 million women (57.4%) and 7.4 million men (42.6%) were enrolled in colleges eligible for federal student aid in 2003-04. The percentage of undergrads (18-24) who are male, by race and income:
Low-income (Less than $30,000) Middle-income ($30,000 to $69,999) Upper Income ($70,000 or more)
1995-96 1999-00 2003-04 1995-96 1999-00 2003-04 1995-96 1999-00 2003-04
White 46 42 42 50 46 43 52 48 49
Black 32 36 36 48 42 42 41 48 48
Hispanic 43 43 39 46 51 42 50 52 49
Asian 53 51 47 57 48 50 52 54 51
All 44 42 40 50 47 44 51 48 49
Data: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies, 1995-96, 1999-2000, 2003-04
Income ranges adjusted for inflation to 1995-96 dollars; Source: ACE Center for Policy Analysis