The First Step Is Admitting You Have A Problem

Glenn Reynolds has an item about the continued decline in the percentage of males who attend college, pointing to this USA Today story saying 57% of college students are women. At many schools the ratios are even more skewed. Reynolds pulls out this quote from the story: 

There has been no outcry, for example, on the scale of a highly publicized 1992 report by the American Association of University Women, How Schools Short-Change Girls, which compiled reams of research on gender inequities. 

That study "really ... got people to focus on girls ... (but) there is no big network that protects the needs of boys," says family therapist Michael Gurian, author of the just-published The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life, which argues that elementary and secondary schools aren't meeting the developmental needs of boys.

The "reams of research" from AAUW were only faintly acquainted with reality, however, as Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers showed in her groundbreaking book Who Stole Feminism? When Sommers published her book in 1994, women had long been surpassing men in most educational settings, from better grades and greater involvement in virtually every organized activity outside marquee sports to higher college attendance. Sommers wrote an equally depressing and necessary book in 2000, The War Against Boys. I'm not sure how the Amazon preview feature works, so I can't tell you if this link will still function when you try it, but here's an excerpt from page 22:

Six years after the relase of How Schools Shortchange Girls, the New York Times ran a story that, for the first time, questioned the validity of the report. By then, of course, most of the damage to the truth about boys and girls was irreparable. This time the reporter, Tamar Lewin, did reach Diane Ravitch, who told her, "The AAUW report was just completely wrong. What was so bizarre is that it came out right at the time that girls had just overtaken boys in almost every area. It might have been the right story 20 years earlier, but coming out when it did it was like calling a wedding a funeral.... There were all these special programs put in place for girls, and no one paid any attention to boys."

Doesn't sound like much has changed.

Update: Also noted at Dean's World.