Dropout Boys

Michael Smerconish recently reported on his CNN Saturday morning program that more and more men are shunning college, with women accounting for 60 percent of students of college students.  The main reason is that men can go straight from high school to high-paying jobs in the trades at a time when college is becoming more expensive.

Some feminists are celebrating this as a triumph for women in higher education, but Smerconish noted that this trend indicates a greater desire on the part of men to drop out of  and become more alienated from society.  Men who go into trades may more a lot of bread, but without any exposure to a liberal arts education, they will likely become dumber and less informed.  In other words, they'll perpetuate Fox News' audience.  Smerconish fears that these men will be disconnected from society in large part because women with college degrees will be less likely to date men without college degrees . . . and with more women going to college, men without college degrees will be outcasts and more embittered due to their lack of social standing.  The few men who do go to college will join the elite, the divide between the professional and the proletarian class will widen further, and . . . 

You see why Trump - who attended the University of Pennsylvania, where his father bought him a degree - can make a comeback in 2024?

I mean, this is just what we need, right? A generation of anti-intellectual and undercultured Americans ("I love the undereducated" - Donald Trump) defining politics and driving These States further into degenerative state . . .  Oh, maybe we can avoid that by electing a majority female Congress, just as Iceland elected a majority female Parliament, though Republicans will find a way to restrict "Democrat women" from not only voting, but also holding office.  With the support of uneducated Republican male voters.  Who watch Fox News.

Look, even blue-collar guys need a liberal arts education.  In Italy, taxi drivers go to the opera.  My Italian maternal grandfather, who never went to college and worked as a maintenance man in a factory in a proletarian city in New Jersey,  loved opera himself.  But then, maybe cultured blue-collar workers are the exception rather than the rule.  Consider the hapless tradesmen trying to stage a play in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.  (Shameless plug: I wrote a play recasting A Midsummer Night's Dream as a Marx Brothers movie, with Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo as the tradesmen.)

The upside to more women than men in college?  You know how undergraduates love to check out the opposite sex? Well, the guys now have an easier time of it than the gals.