Where are all the men? That’s the question the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal is asking in its new policy brief analyzing enrollment data, which found that women outnumber men at every UNC System institution but one — not including the North Carolina School of Science and Math, which was not part of the analysis.
The same trend holds true within the NC Community College system at large.
The “gender gap” rings true for higher education in general, and it has since the 1980s, but has grown more pronounced over time.
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The brief found male and female enrollment was nearly 50-50 at both the UNC and NCCC systems in 1980, with women having a slight edge. While enrollment overall has increased since then, 2023 data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows men make up 41% of the UNC System undergraduate student body and 39% of the NCCC System.
At the individual UNC System institutions, every university saw a lesser percentage of men enrolled in 2024 than it had in 2015 with the exceptions of Elizabeth City State and Fayetteville State. Though male enrollment fell by nearly 5% from 2015, NC State remains the only university to enroll more males than females as of 2024 — by less than half of a percent.
Nationally, 20% of U.S. men finished college and just 14% of women in 1970. By 2010, the percentage of men who finished college reached about 27%, but the percentage of women skyrocketed to 36% by the same year, according to research published in 2025.
More recently, 2024 analysis from the Pew Research Center showed 47% of U.S. women ages 25 to 34 have a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of men of the same age.
Jenna Robinson, president of the Martin Center and co-author of the brief, told Carolina Public Press she was aware of the national enrollment trends happening on college campuses, but she didn’t necessarily think it had existed in North Carolina for as long as it has.
“We found what we expected — over the years, more women have been going to college than men,” she said. “One thing I didn’t expect, though, was that the imbalance goes back as far as it did. We collected data as far back as IPEDS has data broken down in this way. For as far back as you can go with these data, women have outnumbered men. I found that a little bit surprising.”
Why the gender gap in enrollment?
The explanation for the disparity in enrollment at North Carolina colleges today is that men simply aren’t applying at the same rates as women in the state. But the reason for boys’ seemingly lesser interest in higher education is where much of the debate lies.
“A gap in applications has existed for at least two decades, but it has notably widened in recent years,” the brief reads.
“In the 2024 academic year, 128,554 men applied for admission to a UNC System institution, while 201,877 women applied. It’s not that large numbers of male applicants want to attend college and are turned away; they have a disproportionate lack of postsecondary interest from the start.”
Part of the problem is boys’ current performance in K-12, Robinson said. They aren’t graduating at the same rate as girls, and they don’t score as well on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. But it also appears that boys and men just have different preferences.
The brief suggests a “broken education system” in which classrooms are more conducive to female learning could be the root, pointing to research that says girls are more inclined to sit still for longer lengths of time and are less affected by shorter recess periods. Reading material also tends to cater to girls’ interests more than boys’, it says.
When boys have experiences during their K-12 education that causes them to decide, for example, that they don’t like sitting at a desk or prefer to work with their hands, that can result in the decision to opt out of college, Robinson said. But as long as they have other goals and a means of achieving them, that fact alone isn’t necessarily cause for concern.
“If they want to go into the military or become an entrepreneur and start working right away, and they have a good plan and a good path, then I would say that’s not a problem,” she said.
“Having an imbalance on its own isn’t a problem. But if this is a bigger ‘failure to launch’ problem for boys, then that is something we should be concerned about.”
Associate Professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education Daniel Klasik told CPP there are convincing arguments that say the enrollment gap could be attributed to the “gendering” of careers like teaching and health care, which are traditionally female-coded jobs and require college degrees.
“Men, on the other hand, if they wanted equivalent entry-level jobs — those are things like construction and industry work where maybe a college degree isn’t required — they can be making similar choices based on early career plans,” he said. “But because of the way those careers have been gendered, women tend to go more toward college-track professions whereas men may not need to.”
With that in mind, Klasik said it’s not surprising NC State remains the only university to enroll more men — even if by a mere 0.38% — thanks to its engineering school.
UNC-Charlotte, another System university boasting a school of engineering, also has the second-highest percentage of male enrollment. NC A&T, also with an engineering school, once boasted one of the higher percentages of male enrollment in 2015, but it’s fallen 7% in the years since.
Although there’s been significant progress of women going into STEM fields, physics, engineering and computer science continue to be male dominated. The male populations at NC State and UNCC exhibit that the programs a school offers matter a lot in attracting male students, Robinson said.
“Offering academic opportunities that are exciting and attractive to men will mean that more men show up,” she said.
“Health care is dominated by women. Teaching is dominated by women. And some of that probably goes back, historically, to those were the only professions that were open to women, if you go back far enough. But I think also part of it is that people have different preferences for how they approach work, what they want to do with their time, what they value in terms of a career. And I think that even in a society that has ended every vestige of inequality, you’re still not going to have every profession be 50-50 male-female.”
Unique enrollment struggles for HBCUs
Elizabeth City State deviates from the norm in the brief, being the only university to see a notable gain in male enrollment since 2015 and also being the historically Black university with the highest male percentage enrollment in 2024 by a large margin.
With 47.92% of its 2024 enrollment being male, ECSU stands far above schools like Winston-Salem State and NC Central in this regard, which see staggeringly low percentages of male enrollment at 25.68% and 29.1%, respectively.
WSSU and NCCU aren’t alone, though. Historically Black Colleges and Universities across the country are struggling with male enrollment in their own right. Howard University, one of the most prestigious HBCUs in the country, enrolls just 30% men, 19% of whom are Black.
The Martin Center didn’t analyze the UNC or NCCC systems’ racial makeup, but it does note in the brief that high school graduation rates are especially low among Black males — though boys in general graduate high school at lower rates than girls — which translates to lower enrollment of Black men in colleges and universities.
The gender gap within the Black population is actually the largest of any gap education researchers see and has existed even longer than it has in other groups, Klasik said. Some have attributed that to disproportionate disciplinary actions taken against Black males in grade school, also known as the school-to-prison pipeline, although Klasik isn’t convinced that paints the full picture.
College readiness
Rodney Allred, a self-proclaimed college admissions nerd, worked as a college counselor in North Carolina high schools and early colleges for 26 years after he left his job as the Associate Director of Admissions at Pfeiffer University. He’s the founder of NC College Counseling, where he now provides college counseling services full-time.
Allred usually takes on 20 prospective college students each year ranging from seniors to some as young as eighth graders. This year, 19 of his clients are girls. He has a waitlist nearly as long as his client list, a disproportionate amount of which are girls, too.
When he does have male clients, the difference in their college enrollment readiness and attitudes toward college is palpable, he said. Female students will often be the ones to reach out on their own when it’s time for college prep, whereas it tends to be the parents of male students who seek out his services.
“The males, you get them on a Zoom meeting, and it’s like you’ve asked them to go to prison,” he said. “Just to come in and talk about it, it’s the parents dragging them. It’s not that they don’t see value in the service. A lot of them just don’t want to go to a four-year university, and just don’t want more of the same.”
“More of the same” being a school setting that expects students to sit still and listen rather than physically do. In his experience, classrooms are more conducive to female learning as the Martin Center brief suggests, which naturally leads to decreased college interest for males.
But there’s another factor Allred and the parents of his clients have observed. The marketing methods of college enrollment today seem to cater more to the female experience, he said.
Universities selling sorority recruitment culture and “rah rah” college environments, coupled with the feeling that girls are simply better in a traditional classroom environment, creates female students that want to attend college not only because they feel more equipped to but for the social benefits it offers.
Finding solutions
If the trend is seen as something to be remedied, the answer is not affirmative action for men, Robinson said. But the brief does suggest to “end all discrimination against men” in the form of women-only scholarships and programs that attract only female applicants, it reads.
On that note, colleges should also offer alternative admissions pathways, it reads, such as career-and-technical education pathways, apprenticeships and military-to-college bridge programs.
There’s also research that shows boys do better on standardized tests even though girls outperform in the classroom. As many colleges have gone test optional since the pandemic, Robinson suggests that they return to placing equal value on GPA and test results, although Klasik said the move away from testing is likely too recent to attribute that to the decades-long gender gap.
Because it has been the dominant trend for as long as it has, Klasik doesn’t necessarily think it’s one that needs a solution, but there is more that could be done to encourage male enrollment. As there are serious teacher and nurse shortages in the U.S., it could be worth addressing the issue of gendered careers in order to encourage more men to pursue those fields, he said.
But the Martin Center’s bottom line is that society must also change.
“In an age where white-collar jobs such as coding and copywriting can be outsourced to AI, Americans should have greater respect for jobs that don’t require a college degree,” it reads. “We must destigmatize workers who have taken alternate paths to their careers. Apprenticeships, the military, or short-term credentials are valid paths to career success.”
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.