As someone who almost flunked out of college and struggled for two years before hitting a consistent stride, I am drawn to articles detailing what the Brookings Institution, as reported by insightintodiversity.com, called the “male college crisis.”
Brookings’ research found that many young men aren’t getting the help they need to earn a college degree.
“While women have outpaced men in college enrollment and completion rates for decades, the pandemic appears to have worsened this disparity, especially for men of color and those from underserved backgrounds in both urban and rural areas.
In fall 2021, the gender gap hit its peak, with men representing only four in 10 college students,” Brookings reported.
My interest in male college enrollment accelerated the other night when my wife and I discussed our eighth-grade godson’s education and bounced around how we would describe our college experiences to him and explain why college is important.
By way of full disclosure, let me note that I grew up in an upper-middle class family with college-educated, well-read parents who made it clear college was a foregone conclusion in my life.
They paid my way through Boston University and said dropping out wasn’t an option for me even after I brought home a freshman year second-semester report card that included an “F” as well as an “I” for incomplete and “W” for withdrawn.
I think I stayed in college because I managed to confront my immaturity and homesickness with just enough honesty to decide that I was going to stick it out and succeed.
That decision made on a winter afternoon after a teacher booted me out of his class infused the next two years of my education with curiosity and confidence and helped me explore and thrive and lay the groundwork for a profession I continue to labor in 42 years later.
Someone dispassionately assessing my college experience could conclude that I was a child of privilege who just needed to “straighten up and fly right,” as they used to say, in order to graduate.
That conclusion ignores the fact that I had more reasons to leave school than I had to stay. I had a home to return to in Colorado; buddies I could ride around and drink beer with and, most likely, a no-heavy-lifting job my well-connected mother could have set me up in.
Knowing all that, I took the harder road — not because I was made from tough moral fiber — far from it. I stuck and stayed because getting kicked out of a class in front of my peers was the first time in my life someone looked me in the eye and said, “You can’t have this unless you work harder than you have ever worked.”
I hope I get the chance to sit down with our godson and tell him that somewhere hidden beneath all the lectures, papers, midterms, beer parties, dates, football games and nights in the clubs is an experience in college that will test you and then define you for the rest of your life.
If you’re like me, you don’t know when it will come and what it will be, but there won’t be any mistaking it when it arrives.
I wish I could give that advice to every young man contemplating college and weighing the pros and cons of enrolling. For now, I’ll settle with offering it to an inquisitive kid rapidly approaching a crossroad.
