A Nation of Boys at Risk

After decades of intensive effort and investment to create an equitable education system, not least for girls and women, the nation finds itself with a peculiar predicament: It is boys who are falling behind furthest and fastest. The high school graduation rate for boys, at 82%, is barely higher than for poor students eligible for free school meals (80%). Two-thirds of high schoolers with the highest GPAs (i.e., in the top tenth of the distribution) are girls, and the ratio is reversed at the bottom. For every three women on college campuses there are only two men, and the gender gap in bachelor’s degree attainment is wider today, at 15 percentage points in favor of women, than it was in the opposite direction, at 13 percentage points in favor of men, when Title IX was passed in 1972.

Simply put, boys and modern schools don’t seem to mix well. Around the world, boys are twice as likely as girls to say that school is “a waste of time,” according to a survey commissioned by the OECD in 2015. In the U.S., boys are three times as likely as girls to be expelled from school and twice as likely to be suspended. In every country in the OECD, there are now more young women than young men with a bachelor’s degree.

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