By Brian Massie, A Watchman on the Wall
Thanks to our Geauga lobbyist for sending this very revealing article to us.
Why US Men Think College Isn’t Worth It Anymore
Rising tuition, the spread of more traditional ideas of masculinity on social media and a desire for an immediate income are working together to set boys on a different path.
By Francesca Maglione / April 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM UTC
Caden Yucha’s dad didn’t go to college. His uncle didn’t either, and they both have jobs. Of his male friends, Yucha doesn’t think a single one is enrolling in a four-year program next year when they graduate from high school in Madison, Ohio, 45 minutes east of Cleveland near Lake Erie. Yucha himself considered continuing his education only once, when he briefly mulled whether a degree could fast-track a firefighting career. But he quickly quashed that idea when he realized it would have contributed debt, not income, to his paltry teenage balance sheet. With college off his radar, Yucha, 18, has instead lined up a full-time job at an automotive collision and restyling shop where he says he’ll be making a “pretty penny”—$15 an hour. He’s already saving up to buy his dream car, a 2013 Scion FR-S.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I have done the math already, and I will be making upwards of a grand every other week, which is not bad fresh out of high school,” he says, before returning to pulling dents out of a white Chrysler at a career technical school, where he’s been taking afternoon classes on collision repair. College seems like a “lot of money,” he says, “when I can get the same education for free.”
Does Yucha know anyone with college under their belt? Sure: His mom enrolled, and so did his two aunts. Even his girlfriend is planning to continue her education, to study nursing. But no men. It’s a trend playing out across the US—students ending school after 12th grade are mostly boys—but perhaps nowhere is the sharp drop in male enrollment more apparent than here in Lake County.
In this corner of the Midwest—where the median household income is $78,000 and the largest city is 47,000-strong Mentor—the share of men age 18-24 enrolled in college dropped by more than 15 percentage points in the decade through 2023, the biggest decline in any large county in the US. The average slide, by comparison, was about 3 percentage points. In 2013 half of the young men in Lake County were enrolled in college; 10 years later, that number was only 1 in 3, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of US Census Bureau data.
Men opting out of college isn’t a new phenomenon: Women have outnumbered men in undergraduate enrollment for about 40 years, and the gap continues to widen. Almost half of women age 25-34 have earned a bachelor’s degree, according to Pew Research Center data; for men the rate is 37%. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of Americans attending college dropped by 1.2 million, with men accounting for almost the entirety of that drop.
As US men forgo higher education, the demographic group as a whole has lost ground in other areas too. Working-class men today are less likely to be employed than they were four decades ago, their inflation-adjusted wages have barely budged in more than 50 years, they’re less prone to get married or have children, and an increasing number report having no close friends. Men are also four times more likely than women to die by suicide. Data show that men age 18-30 spent an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours alone each day in 2023, 18% more than they did in 2019 and over an hour more than women did, according to a report by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.
Those widening gaps have spurred countless think pieces on the way the US has failed its struggling men and boys. Not all of that gulf can be attributed to higher education, but it’s surely a factor: Men with a college degree or higher still earn roughly 200% of what men without a diploma do, census data show. Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure helps with financial stability.
Why, then, are so many boys opting out? Many cite exorbitant costs. At the Ivy League schools, the sticker price is almost $100,000 a year, and even a public in-state education will set a student back about $25,000 annually, College Board data show. Those costs also disadvantage lower-income women and girls, but it’s boys and men who are more often taught (consciously or not) the value of starting to collect a paycheck as soon as possible.
That’s the case in teacher Rita Soeder’s “internship class” at Perry High School in Lake County, where only one or two of the four senior boys plan to attend college. Others are gunning to begin a career, aiming to get a jump-start on building wealth while dodging student loans.
“You see a lot of influencers saying you don’t need to go to college, and when people see that, they listen”
There’s nothing wrong with getting a blue-collar job, Soeder is quick to point out: She just wants students to be aware of their options, whether that includes a four-year degree or not. Her school, for instance, is working with colleges in the area to turn some of the classrooms left empty because of dwindling enrollment into labs where students can take classes toward careers in welding, nursing or other fields. At Mentor High School, the biggest in the county, more than 40% of the juniors and seniors are taking at least some career tech courses, such as automotive or public safety.
If more young men in Lake County aren’t enrolling in college, it’s “by collective design,” says Joseph Glavan, the director of workforce development at Mentor Schools and Lakeland Community College. “What we have seen is—based on the demand of students, families and employers—they are looking for more direct workforce options.”
There’s wisdom to that plan, especially in a county with a significant blue-collar population. Large swaths of the country have transitioned away from manufacturing—something President Donald Trump is angling to reverse with his second trade war—but Lake County is holding on, or at least trying to. It’s still home to hundreds of active fabricators and factories. Ohio is third in the nation in total manufacturing employees, just behind California and Texas.
But some male students appear to be heading down that path on little more than vibes. “I hear a lot online about people saying in the trades you’ll earn money while you’re training and there’s more guarantee, so it makes it seem safer,” says one of the students in Soeder’s class, who asked not to be named.
He isn’t the only person collecting insights and advice from strangers on the internet. Almost 20% of boys age 13-17 say they use YouTube almost constantly, according to a Pew Research study. Online, the argument against college has never been stronger, especially among supporters of Trump—a University of Pennsylvania graduate—who’s claimed that colleges are “indoctrinating” students.
Similar messaging has come from activists such as Charlie Kirk, who traveled to more than two dozen colleges before the 2024 election on what he called the “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” to try to get more members of Generation Z to cast a vote for Trump. Almost one-third of US adults said they have little or no confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in June 2024—before Trump’s latest tirades against academia. In 2020, 41% of young men age 18-29 voted for Trump; that number jumped to 56% in the 2024 election.
“I think social media is a big factor,” another student from Perry High School says when asked how boys like him are making post-high-school choices. “You see a lot of influencers saying you don’t need to go to college, and when people see that, they listen.”
Plenty of men nearby have made similar choices, including George Wilson, 50, who opted for a job over a degree when he graduated from an Ohio high school more than three decades ago. He briefly enrolled as an undergrad, then transferred to a different school, then ultimately dropped out. “Mentally, I wasn’t ready for it,” he says. “I didn’t see the benefit of it at the time, and I just continued to work. I wanted a regular, steady job where I could make money.” He spent his career manufacturing blades for airplane turbine engines at Precision Castparts Corp. in Mentor; today he operates a robot there on the overnight shift. Trade work has been good to him, he says. His wife was able to get two degrees, and his job allowed him to be a hands-on father. Both of his daughters went to college; his son went into the military.
Still, successes aside, he recently decided he wanted to go to college after all, decades after his first attempt. So he enrolled at Lakeland Community College for an associate degree, then switched to Cleveland State University, where he’s pursuing a degree in organizational leadership. He says he wants to become a teacher, something that would come as a surprise to his younger self. “I didn’t realize that I would like learning,” he says, “and I would like education.”
Returning Gen X students such as Wilson won’t be enough to keep higher ed afloat. When Jennifer Schuller became president in 2023 of Lake Erie College, the only four-year college in Lake County, the drop in enrollment was palpable: She inherited a $5.6 million deficit. In the previous decade, the student body—which is majority men—had decreased by almost 20%. “It was hurting our bottom line,” she says. She’s made staff and program cuts to bring down the shortfall, while doubling her efforts to retain current students.
The football team was a particular problem; its yearly retention rate was only 46% in the 2023-24 academic year. Recognizing that positive relationships and mentoring can work wonders for struggling students, she quickly hired a new coach. She tapped Tiffin University’s David Price, a charismatic figure who starts asking students important questions—What’s their home life like? Are they prepared to be a student athlete? Do they value getting a degree?—as early as the application process, then makes a point to keep listening.
“Our program requires every single person that comes into the fold to be bigger than football,” he says. “Football is an avenue, but our program is based around building a culture and mentoring these young men into men.” Despite building those bonds early, every semester he has to have a conversation with at least one student who’s considering dropping out. But the overall result has been positive: The team’s retention rate has jumped to 85% in only one year.
“There’s so many things that are driving young men out of college,” says Price as he sits in the dining hall, breaking every few minutes to greet a passing student. “I think that a lot of society as a whole has been focused on immediate gratification, rather than looking at the whole picture.”
Liz Brainard, the advisory director for the Lake Geauga Educational Assistance Foundation, a nonprofit that helps students determine their next steps after high school, says she’s noticed in the past couple of years that more of the male students opting out of college are the ones with high GPAs and excellent track records. Their main reason? They’re “bored,” she says. Brainard is supportive of students who want to go into the trades, but she worries some are doing it for the wrong reasons. “I just don’t want students to think, ‘This is a solution to my boredom’ or ‘This is going to solve all of my financial problems’ or ‘This is the easier path,’ ” she says. “I worry about those students.”
Jayden Owens, for one, celebrated the end of his schooling. The 19-year-old, who graduated from Mentor High School last year, says he and his male friends just “wanted to get after it” once they graduated, meaning start earning the money that would make them feel like adults. “College takes longer. I don’t necessarily want to be in school for that long. I had enough of that in high school,” Owens says before heading into class at the career tech center. “When I got out I was like, ‘Yes, we’re done!’ ”
He’s now working at a private ambulance company and training to be a paramedic. It brings in money and helps him feel like a man—something that’s important to him after growing up without anyone to show him the “masculine stuff to do.” (His father was out of the picture.) “You want to learn, you want to protect, you want to provide,” Owens says. “For males, they are going into these types of fields because it forces you to be masculine.” —With Ann Choi
Advertisement
Categories: Contributors, Uncategorized