“Boys and men are in crisis. Rarely has a cohort fallen further and faster than young men living in Western democracies.” Scott Galloway in “Notes on Being a Man”
The work to promote success for women and girls in society is far from done, but this work does not have to be at the detriment of young men. Statistics show that young men in the West, and in America in particular, are falling behind. As Scott Galloway argues, “this is not just a male issue: women and children can’t flourish if men aren’t doing well.”
For young American men, a college degree no longer buys what it used to. Fortune’s reading of a Financial Times analysis of federal labor data, reports that Gen Z men who finished college now carry roughly the same unemployment rate as men who never enrolled, while they are almost double the unemployment rate of women graduates (7% versus 4%). The dividend of better employment for both the expense of college and the opportunity cost of four years of lost wages has eroded to the point where a young man weighing a bachelor’s against a paycheck may start to conclude that the institution hasn’t made its case. Which is how we now see notable declines in men’s post-secondary aspirations and achievement.
In 2011, men were 47 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds enrolled at four-year colleges. Today they are 42 percent according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center figures (as cited by Insight into Academia). According to Pew Research, among 25-to-34-year-olds, 47 percent of women hold bachelor’s degrees to men’s 37 percent. The Hechinger Report traces women past men in medical, law, pharmacy, dental, and veterinary school, which is a pipeline to the professional class. This divergence is even more stark in master’s and doctoral degree attainment, where women boast 60 percent of all degrees earned.
Galloway’s larger warning is that retreat compounds. Men who fall behind in attainment fall behind in prospects, which makes them read as less viable partners, which feeds loneliness, depression, and the deaths of despair he counts at three of every four in America. And that doesn’t serve women who want partners and families either. The decline is not a zero-sum win for anyone.
Men are moving instead to the trades. High5Test counts 678,014 registered apprentices in the United States by 2025, up more than 88 percent since 2015. This population is roughly 86 percent men. Earn-while-you-learn carries no debt and pays from day one, and it’s proving more acceptable to men than a classroom does.
The strongest version of the counterargument is that this is fine. Rational, even. The trades pay. Automation is hollowing out the entry-level desk jobs, not the job sites. A male degree premium that has collapsed is simply the market correctly pricing an oversupplied credential, and men reading that signal and choosing apprenticeships are behaving like sensible economic actors. The arithmetic in that argument is real, and dismissing it would be a kind of moral abdication masquerading as concern.
But the premium’s collapse may also be related to the fields that people are choosing. Healthcare is where the work is — the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 1.9 million job openings a year over the next decade, faster than any other sector. And healthcare is precisely where women went and men have not. Fortune credits this divergence for the gap in graduate unemployment. The OECD’s Education GPS finds boys overrepresented in vocational tracks and falling behind in reading. Emerald Publishing’s work on boys’ underachievement points to the masculinity norms that code academic effort, and caregiving fields, as feminine and therefore off limits. Unifresher’s UK data shows where men do concentrate when they stay in school, engineering at 78 percent male, computing at 74, mathematics at 64. The cultural script pulling men out of college is the same script steering the ones who remain away from the sector that is actually hiring. The trades, meanwhile, are not uniformly safe; construction alone is 36 percent of registered apprentices, and construction is among the most cyclical and automatable work in the economy.
About 20% of students are parents and of that, only 30% are fathers, roughly 800,000 men. Their need runs high and their use of support runs low: more than 70 percent report financial difficulty, nearly half are food insecure, yet they take up public assistance at far lower rates than student mothers, and they ask for help less often. A population that need-blind support models are built to catch is slipping through because it won’t raise its hand.
Before anyone reads all this as a case that women have simply succeeded, look at what the degree returns. Payscale’s controlled gender pay gap — women’s earnings against men’s after adjusting for role, experience, and education — has sat at 99 cents on the dollar for five straight years, and the uncontrolled gap is widening again. SpencerStuart’s S&P 500 snapshot puts women at 35 percent of functional C-suite roles, concentrated in HR, communications, and marketing, while the operational seats that feed the CEO chair stay overwhelmingly male. So neither sex should read the market’s signal naively. Women may be over-invested in the credential relative to what it returns in pay and power. Men may be under-investing relative to a return that still exists — in the right fields, for the ones who finish.
The institutional job is to tell each group which paths actually pay. Not to flatter the instinct either already has. And for men, that means an honest piece of counsel most institutions are too skittish to give: the degrees that still clear the old premium are disproportionately the ones men have decided aren’t for them. Nursing, the allied health professions, the caregiving fields with 1.9 million openings a year — that is where the unemployment gap closes. An institution serious about its missing men would build and market programs straight into that script, the way the hyperscalers built straight into the working adult: recruit men into health and caregiving credentials by name, design the support so a 30-year-old father will actually use it, and stop pretending the problem is that men don’t value college. The problem is that no one has shown them the version of it that pays.
Bringing men back to parity does not have to cost women a thing. It costs institutions something harder — the willingness to look at who they’re losing, name why, and redesign for it. Young men do not have to suffer for women to succeed. But somebody has to build the door.
