By Rachel Chiang | Assistant News Editor
Despite striving to “educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service,” the Baylor Trends statistic reports the population of female students has been outnumbering male students for years, in line with a greater national trend.
Baylor’s student population has been oscillating in the 60% to 40% female range since 2017. But after a high of 64% female population in 2021, the university has been experiencing an incremental shift towards a more evenly-spread student population.
This year, the student body makeup is 42% male to 58% female — a small change that could be a sign of a greater movement in the future.
Dr. Theresa Kennedy, French professor and director of the Women and Gender Studies department, said there has been a growing sentiment in homes, families, school and church dissuading young men from pursuing higher education.
“I guess maybe not a mentality but kind of a growing attitude amongst younger boys in middle school and high school ages where they just feel like studying — doing well in school — is not really manly,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said this idea of anti-intellectualism in men has been growing for about 40 years.
“It’s really interesting, because the opposite has been true for girls. Girls are now thriving in school,” she said. “You can probably trace it back to the feminist movement in the ’60s and ’70s when a lot of girls weren’t even getting on college campuses. But now there’s women’s centers across the universities. There’s so much support for girls’ education, and more and more girls are starting to participate in government on campus.”
Kennedy cited a 2021 The Wall Street Journal article titled, “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost,’” that addresses this issue on a national level and highlighted Baylor as one of the schools facing this issue.
At the time, Baylor had launched their “Baylor Males and Moms” campaign to keep high school boys’ applications on track. The campaign sent texts to mothers encouraging them to get their sons to send in transcripts and complete their applications.
“In the article, they had interviewed young men around the U.S., and they quit school or didn’t enroll because they just didn’t see the value in a college degree,” Kennedy said. “They just thought it was too expensive for what you actually got, and they decided, ‘I just want to make money after high school.’”
Kennedy said this type of mindset is a problem because it is short-sighted, but the rising cost of education has played a part. Some men fall into a trap of wanting to be a breadwinner and are afraid that they will be too busy paying back student loans, Kennedy said.
“In our culture — in our society — we have such strong ideas about which gender should pursue which occupations that it’s hard for it’s hard for people to change and to be aware of that,” Kennedy said. “I think we need to change expectations and make people more aware of those gender expectations.”
In her class, Kennedy said they call the idea that men must fit in a certain role to be strong, manly breadwinners the “man box.”
She said these expectations create a lot of pressure and anxiety for men, and being in the 21st century, there is no reason to believe that anymore.
According to Kevin Jackson, vice president for student life, this ratio is prevalent in universities across America, not just Baylor. Because gender is not a differentiator in admissions, classes tend to reflect the national ratio of 60% to 40% at Baylor, making the university a small-scale example of the large-scale problem.
“Certainly, we want to recruit a class that brings us the very best and brightest students,” Jackson said. “We still, with our admissions team, work really hard to get out and to work with the different high schools and the counselors and really encourage the broadest level of student application pool that we can.”
In order to create a more balanced population, Jackson said action must start long before recruitment and admissions deadlines.
“One of these that we want to encourage is just, in general, more males to aspire to go to college, and that work is work that’s early on. It’s working with families, [and] it’s working in schools,” Jackson said.
Baylor’s new strategic plan, Baylor in Deeds, details its commitment to improving specific aspects of the university. Vice president and provost Nancy Brickhouse said parts of the plan will help create more even numbers.
“With the expansion of engineering, that’s also likely to add some diversity to the undergraduate class,” Brickhouse said. “It tends to be a more male population and actually a very diverse population as well. So, it’s another good argument, I think, for adding engineering to our profile of options for all of our students.”
