Young people, and young men in particular, are losing faith in the country’s education system. They are opting out of college in record numbers. This trend has been ongoing for some time, and now it’s coming to a head. 

For me, this topic is personal. Both of my parents were university professors. Academia put food on our table. I’ve witnessed firsthand the positive effects that a successful and vibrant college can have on small towns and communities. 

But increasingly, this industry is weakening. The financial implications may have yet to be felt, but the writing is on the wall. For the first time in U.S. history, our sons will have less education than their fathers. That statement would have been unfathomable to grandfathers like mine who sacrificed on a daily basis, so that my parents could get college degrees. They did so because the return on investment was clear: Those degrees led to better jobs, which led to more money.

For most college grads though, that is no longer the case. More and more, universities have prioritized short-term profits over the quality of knowledge taught. They favor Left-wing political ideology over long standing pursuits of truth. Here’s one report from just a few days ago to set the stage:

 

According to census data, more women than men have college degrees in this country now. Women are more likely to graduate within four years than men. Women make up 64.4% of Pharmacy students;Women make up 56% of law school students: ; and as of the 2023-2024 school year, they make up more than 55% of students in medical schools. 

In a 2015 study, using international data, researchers have determined that girls outperform boys in educational achievement in 70% of the countries they studied — regardless of the level of gender, political, economic, or social equality.

Now, for some of these zero-sum percentages to be tilted in favor of women, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We have an entire country of highly capable females, we need many of them to get degrees and assist in the workforce. This is not a negativity-session on women going to college. As I said, both of my parents excelled in academia. My mother has a PhD. My wife has a high-pressure career. Many of the department heads here at The Daily Wire are capable women, some graduated from college, some didn’t. 

However, those who say, it’s a good sign that more women are doing well in higher education, must also admit, it’s a bad sign that more and more men are doing poorly. Or better yet, let’s understand that living fulfilling lives, and building better families and communities is the ultimate goal, not simply filling up more classrooms, and obtaining more degrees.

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker was chastised for making this point during his commencement speech at Benedictine College several weeks ago. WATCH:

 

It’s barely acceptable to embrace masculine virtue in the NFL anymore, and it’s completely taboo at colleges in this country.

The experts have it all figured out, though. According to them, girls are performing better because they gave higher GPAs. This is why I’ve said for years, we need new metrics for intelligence. We need new identifiers for capability. GPAs, SATs, IQs? Give me one solid mechanic who can fix my car over this year’s entire Harvard class. I mean it. Harvard — once seen as the beacon for collegiate learning across the world — now appears before the Supreme Court to defend enrollment discrimination against Asians. 

Those higher GPAs are merely a symptom of a larger issues. So, what are the issues?

First, personality. Much of the Western world right now will have you believe there is no difference whatsoever between men and women. So much so that one bearded, flannel-wearing man had to traverse the entire planet asking the simple question, “What is a Woman?”

Dr. Jordan Peterson frequently cites this difference in personality when he speaks about agreeableness. Research shows that “agreeable” students tend to get better grades than their IQ would predict. Intuitively, this makes sense. If a student is on the borderline between passing and failing, teachers are going to “pass” the agreeable student, and “fail” the disagreeable. I can’t help but think of the distinction between Howard Roark and Peter Keating in the novel “The Fountainhead.” If you haven’t read it, you should. Roark, the most uncompromising character, the man who valued integrity above compromise, was expelled from school, while his classmate, who copied all of Roark’s work, became valedictorian.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show with guest host David Cone on DailyWire+

Another factor, and it shouldn’t be shocking news, is boys do better with male teachers and girls do better with female teachers. The problem is, women make up over 89% of elementary school teachers. So many young boys get a slow start. Young boys without fathers, get an even slower start.

While we’re on grade school, how about limiting recess? Eliminating this period may sound like a good idea to some who see it as a waste of time, but its removal has significant ramifications on boys in particular. Researchers in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport found:

The more time kids in [first grade] spent sitting and the less time they spent being physically active, the fewer gains they made in reading and math. … Among girls, sitting for a long time without moving much didn’t seem to have any effect on their ability to learn.

Anyone who has sons and daughters understands this without needing statistics. 

What makes the topic of men performing poorly in higher learning so much more painful, is that the outcome seems intentional. Western society is prioritizing feminine interests over masculine interests in every facet of society. The goalposts are being shifted to ensure success for some members of our society, but not others. In that, the pursuit of truth, and knowledge, and learning is lost.

And let’s be honest, that learning is not just lost for men. Degrees all across this country are being watered down for every student holding a diploma.

So here are four solutions we must implement to revitalize our higher education system to the standard America needs.

First, pointless curricula that offer no market-place value, and provide no opportunity for students to monetize their learnings, must be eliminated from public universities. The University of South Carolina, for example, has a course called “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame.” The sociology professor behind that course told the New York Times that, “The central objective is to unravel some of the sociologically relevant dimensions of the fame of Lady Gaga.”

Cornell University, an Ivy League school, offers “Tree Climbing.” I’m not making this up. Cornell says the class will, “teach you how to get up into the canopy of any tree, to move around, even to climb from one tree to another without touching the ground.” That’s called being six-years-old. Go shadow Tarzan for a day, this shouldn’t be offered at Cornell, private school or not.

Pitzer College offers “Social Justice Activism;” Texas A&M offers “Paintball;” Denison College offers “Queer Studies;” Santa Clara provides lectures about “The Physics of Star Trek,” and George Mason has a course that’s simply called “Zombies.” (Personally, having established yesterday that zombies are indeed real, I’d go with Michigan State’s version of that course, which is called “Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse—Disasters, Catastrophes, and Human Behavior”).

But maybe the worst offender is Bates College in Maine, which offers a class on Whoopi Goldberg called “Makin’ Whoopi: Goldberg’s Canon.”

If you wanted to make college as unappealing as possible to intelligent and ambitious young men, these are the kinds of courses you’d offer them. And since the information being taught, can just as easily be learned over the internet, what’s really being paid for, what’s really being purchased is the degree. Only those are becoming more and more worthless to employers, because they’ve started to understand that a college degree no longer guarantees, that their new hire possesses a superior set of skills to the non-college grad.

Second solution, we must substantially limit access to federally-backed student loans. Colleges have been given every incentive to hike tuition costs while offering no additional value, knowing that student loan “forgiveness” — which is really student loan redistribution — has taken all risk away from borrowers. It’s the taxpayers — you and me — who are forced to foot the bill.

No money lender in the country would loan a hundred thousand dollars to a 17-year-old kid, even if he had the most exceptional business plan, and jaw-dropping pitch deck. Mark Zuckerberg was getting turned down for pitching Facebook two decades ago, but a similar 17-year-old today can now get a $100,000 loan to study underwater basket weaving without so much as a single sentence explaining how he will monetize this knowledge and pay back the loan. That’s a problem. That’s hurting America.

Third, stop teaching children that college degrees are essential to success. Of course colleges don’t want to hear that, but it’s imperative for the rest of us to explain this to our children. Some kids need trade school. My brother studied aviation maintenance. He can fix airplane engines. It’s a very important and in-demand skill, if he had only started earlier we might not have planes falling from the sky.

For some people, it’s important to start working right away, rather than taking what has become a four year vacation, racking up debt along the way. There are interesting and lucrative jobs in this world, that most people know nothing about. You don’t have to get an accounting degree and become a consultant. That’s why Mike Rowe and his show “Dirty Jobs” is so important. He highlights the beaver relocators and the caviar harvesters and the fossil hunters and the “doomsday seed bankers” — jobs most of us haven’t even heard of.

Even when young people decide to go to college, it’s important they understand that the most “prestigious” degrees don’t ultimately determine success. As Dave Ramsey pointed out, roughly two-thirds of millionaires graduated from public state schools. Only about 8% went to elite private colleges. And 12% of millionaires didn’t go to college at all.

Finally, it’s past time to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion, and affirmative action initiatives that drive no meaningful diversity. Some states have already made that decision, but it needs to go nationwide. The kind of diversity that’s important is diversity based on ability, and thought, and the geography of a person’s origin in some instances, but not diversity based on immutable characteristics that people can’t control.

A young kid who shows exceptional promise of becoming a great engineer needs to have that opportunity even though he may come from a low-income family who can’t afford college. Those types of scholarships are important, and they exist for good reason.

I’ll use myself as an example. I was able to attend the University of Michigan on an athletic scholarship. There’s no way I could have met their academic requirements, or afforded out-of-state tuition to attend that school, but I could play football. That’s how I contributed. It’s what I brought to the table. A different skill set than other students. True diversity. And when we end the practice of accepting students based on their metaphysical makeup, despite their lack of readiness for that opportunity, dropout rates will go down significantly for those very students. If you really want to understand this concept to its fullest extent, I encourage you to read Heather Mac Donald’s book, “The Diversity Delusion.” It’s poignant, prophetic, Ms. Mac Donald is a brilliant thinker and writer. 

Bottom line, universities should not be four year vacation centers where one explores how decadent and depraved he can behave. Diplomas should not be meaningless pieces of paper that we obtain simply to hang on the wall so we appear smart to all who enter our office.

The goal isn’t to hand out as many degrees as we can. The goal is to pass down, from generation to generation, the most essential knowledge that we possess for the betterment of our lives, our families, and our future generations.