A public school culture that puts down boys and exalts girls from age 5 onwards, and boys choose to drop out in futility while girls continue. Wow, what a surprise!

I don't see how a lopsided male-female ratio is harmful to social life.

Brandon: It isn't if you are willing to accept as your dating pool bitter angry women who will start embracing the extreme feminist doctrine because the males are either scarce or wimpy sensitive types or, even worse, both. It's called the law of unintended consequences.

What a crock, Bart. If boys are having trouble at school, the general abdication by men of their responsibility to take an interest in them and and act as role models is more to blame than any putative prejudice by the educational establishment. Are we going to whine our way back to equality?

Well, it does require that Gramps have a spare building or two lying around gathering dust and bums.

Peter B -

The problem Bart alludes to is the arguable lack of attention boys are getting from teachers, not necause they are un-empathetic (mostly) females, but because politcal correctness made us all believe that only/primarily girs were being left behind. "The Bias Against Boys" gives builds on this story.

I do agree with you that no one should absolve male family members of their responsibility to mentor, etc. But the issue may be now in the realm of institutionalized bias.

There is one way to make a dent in these numbers that could be reasonably non-controversial--in admitting students, give substantially more weight to having participated in sports than other extracurricular activities such as band. Even after a few decades of Title IX such a strategy would still tilt the field towards boys.

Much if this recent male/female disparity in college enrollment has been explained by the overwhelming gender imbalance among African-American students. I think that it is also the manifestation of the growing marginalization of mid-level college education. If a boy is not going to a mid-level college for business or engineering, he may as well get a job and receive OJT. These days, I cannot imagine what a boy would find compelling about what is left of the Humanities curriculum at most colleges.

The main beneficiaries of affirmative action have been affluent white women. Finding husbands for thm s just the newest service colleges have to provie to stay competitive.

My grandfather could have contributed a cow or two.

This also ignores the even greater imbalance at Military and Engineering schools. Many top males would rather go to a less expensive smaller school and receive an equally good education in engineering without being told by feminist professors that everything in the world is their fault.

In recent years, there are more female mathematics graduates than male ones, and more females in medical school than men, and twice as many females in vet school than men.

This is the result of the constant anti-male drumbeat by womyn in the educational apparat. There have always been dykes in school who hate boys but it has gotten completely out of hand in the last two decades. Preteen girls can regularly wear shirts to school which say 'Boys are icky.' and the like, but if a boy were to wear something similar, he'd be in the principal's office with notations being added to his permanent record, which follows him for the rest of his life, faster than you can say 'Gloria Steinem. '