Tag: Gender

Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission

by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
December 4, 2025

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show.

The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.

“This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”

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For years universities and colleges have been trying to keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers of men have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions.

Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.

Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.

But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.

“The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.

“What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.”

At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

School	% of males admitted	% of females admitted
Brown University	7.0	4.4
University of Chicago	5.6	3.7
Yale University	4.6	3.4
University of Miami	22.5	16.5
Middlebury College	12.2	9.6
Baylor University	56.8	47.9
Pomona College	7.6	6.7
Tulane University	14.9	13.4
Vassar College	20.4	17.6

_{SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets}

Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.

In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.”

The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.

Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.

Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”

Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female, said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”

“For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”

The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show. Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.

“If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.

At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’”

The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.

Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent.

Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.

Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.

At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.

Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.”

There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.

“It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

This story about men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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December 4, 2025

Gender governance and the global grammar of illiberal inclusion

by Ourania Filippakou

Across global higher education, the terms of justice, equality and inclusion are being rewritten. In recent years, the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States (Spitalniak, 2025) has unfolded alongside a global resurgence of anti-gender, ultra-nationalist, racialised and colonial politics (Brechenmacher, 2025). At the same time, the rise of authoritarian and far-right ideologies, together with deepening socioeconomic inequalities fuelled by an ascendant billionaire class (Klein and Taylor, 2025) and the growing portrayal of feminist and queer scholarship as ideological extremism (Pitts-Taylor and Wood, 2025), signal a profound shift in the rationalities shaping the politics of higher education. These developments do not reject inclusion; they refashion it. Equality becomes excess, dissent is recast as disorder, and inclusion is reconstituted as a technology of governance.

This conjuncture, what Stuart Hall (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2010, p57) would call the alignment of economic, political and cultural forces, requires a vocabulary capable of capturing continuity and rupture. It also reflects the deepening crisis of neoliberalism, whose governing logics become more coercive as their legitimacy wanes (Beckert, 2025; Menand, 2023). As Hall reminds us, ‘a conjuncture is a period when different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions… or as Althusser said ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’’ (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2012, p57). A conjuncture, in this sense, does not resolve crisis but produces new configurations of ideological coherence and institutional control. In my recent article, ‘Managed Inclusion and the Politics of Erasure: Gender Governance in Higher Education under Neoliberal Authoritarianism’ (Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 2025), I theorise these developments as a global grammar of illiberal inclusion: a political rationality that appropriates the language of equity while disabling its redistributive, democratic and epistemic force. The article develops a typology of symbolic, technocratic and transformative inclusion to examine how feminist, anti-caste and critical vocabularies are increasingly absorbed into systems of civility, visibility and procedural control. Transformative inclusion, the configuration most aligned with redistribution, dissent and epistemic plurality, is the one most forcefully neutralised.

Across geopolitical contexts, from postcolonial states to liberal democracies, gender inclusion is increasingly appropriated not as a demand for justice but as a mechanism of control. The techniques of co-option vary, yet they consolidate into a shared political rationality in which equity is stripped of redistributive force and redeployed to affirm institutional legitimacy, nationalist virtue and market competitiveness. This is not a rupture with neoliberal governance but its intensification through more disciplinary and exclusionary forms. For example, in India, the National Education Policy 2020 invokes empowerment while enacting epistemic erasure, systematically marginalising the knowledges of women from subordinated caste, class and religious communities (Peerzada et al, 2024; Patil, 2023; Singh, 2023). At the same time, state-led campaigns such as Beti Bachao elevate women’s visibility only within ideals of modesty and nationalist virtue (Chhachhi, 2020). In Hungary, the 2018 ban on gender studies aligned higher education with labour-market imperatives and nationalist agendas (Barát, 2022; Zsubori, 2018). In Turkey, reforms under Erdoğan consolidate patriarchal norms while constraining feminist organising (Zihnioğlu and Kourou, 2025). Here, gender inclusion is tolerated only when it reinforces state agendas and restricts dissent.

Elsewhere, inclusion is recast as ideological deviance. In the United States, the Trump-era rollback of DEI initiatives and reproductive rights has weaponised inclusion as a spectre of radicalism, disproportionately targeting racialised and LGBTQ+ communities (Amnesty International, 2024; Chao-Fong, 2025). In Argentina, Milei abolished the Ministry of Women, describing feminism as fiscally irresponsible (James, 2024). In Italy, Meloni’s government invokes ‘traditional values’ to erode anti-discrimination frameworks (De Giorgi et al, 2023, p.v11i1.6042). In these cases, inclusion is not merely neutralised but actively vilified, its political charge reframed as cultural threat.

Even when inclusion is celebrated, it is tethered to respectability and moral legibility. In France, femonationalist discourses instrumentalise gender equality to legitimise anti-Muslim policy (Farris, 2012; Möser, 2022). In Greece, conservative statecraft reframes inclusion through familialist narratives while dismantling equality infrastructures (Bempeza, 2025). These patterns reflect a longer political repertoire in which authoritarian and ultra-nationalist projects mobilise idealised domestic femininity to naturalise social hierarchies. As historian Diana Garvin (Garvin quoted in Matei, 2025) notes, ‘what fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses’, with contemporary ‘womanosphere’ influencers in the US reviving fantasies of domestic bliss that obscure intensified gendered precarity (Matei, 2025).

Such gendered constructions coexist with escalating violence. More than 50.000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024, which means one woman or girl was killed every ten minutes, or 137 every day, according to the latest UNODC and UN Women femicide report (UNODC/UN Women, 2025). This sits within a wider continuum of harm: 83.000 women and girls were intentionally killed last year, and the report finds no sign of real progress. It also highlights a steep rise in digital violence, including harassment, stalking, gendered disinformation and deepfakes, which increasingly spills into offline contexts and contributes to more lethal forms of harm. These global patterns intersect with regional crises. For example, more than 7.000 women were killed in India in gender-related violence in 2022 (NCRB, 2023); eleven women are murdered daily in femicides across Latin America (NU CEPAL, 2024). At the same time, masculinist influencers such as Andrew Tate cultivate transnational publics organised around misogyny (Adams, 2025; Wescott et al, 2024). As UN Secretary-General António Guterres (2025) warns: ‘Instead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny’.

These global pressures reverberate across institutions that have historically positioned themselves as democratic spaces, including universities, which increasingly recast gender equity as a reputational risk or cultural flashpoint rather than a democratic obligation (D’Angelo et al, 2024; McEwen and Narayanaswamy, 2023). Equity becomes an emblem of modernity to be audited, displayed and curated, rather than a demand for justice. Ahmed’s (2012) theorisation of non-performativity is essential here: institutions declare commitments to equality precisely to contain the transformations such commitments would require. In this context, symbolic and technocratic inclusion flourish, while the structural conditions for transformative inclusion continue to narrow.

These shifts reflect broader political and economic formations. Brown (2015) shows how neoliberal reason converts justice claims into performance demands, hollowing out democratic vocabularies. Fraser’s (2017) account of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ illuminates the terrain in which market liberalism coupled with selective diversity politics absorbs emancipatory discourse while preserving inequality. Patnaik (2021) argues that the rise of neofascism is a political necessity for neoliberalism in crisis, as rights are redefined as privileges and inclusion is repurposed to stabilise inequality. In this conjuncture, these tendencies intensify into what Giroux (2018, 2021, 2022a) names ‘neoliberal fascism’, a formation structured by three interlocking fundamentalisms: a market fundamentalism that commodifies all aspects of life, a religious fundamentalism that moralises inequality; and a regime of manufactured ignorance and militarised illiteracy that discredits critical thought and erases historical memory (Giroux 2022b, p48-54).

The United States now offers a further manifestation of this global pattern, illustrating how attacks on DEI can function as a broader assault on higher education. As recent analyses of US politics show, the first and particularly the second Trump administration is actively modelling itself on Viktor Orbán’s illiberal statecraft, centralising executive power, purging public institutions and mobilising ‘family values’ and anti-‘woke’ politics to reshape education and media governance (Giroux, 2017; Smith, 2025; Kauffmann, 2025). The dismantling of DEI under the Trump administration, framed as a defence of merit, free speech and fiscal responsibility (The White House, 2025), marks the beginning of a wider attempt to consolidate political influence over higher education. Executive orders targeting DEI have been followed by lawsuits, funding withdrawals and intensified federal scrutiny, prompting universities such as Michigan, Columbia and Chicago to scale back equality infrastructures, cut programmes and reduce humanities provision (cf Bleiler, 2025; Pickering, Cosgrove and Massel, 2025; Quinn, 2025). These developments do not simply eliminate DEI; they position anti-gender politics as a mechanism of disciplining universities, narrowing intellectual autonomy and extending political control over academic life. They exemplify wider global tendencies in which inclusion becomes a field through which illiberal projects consolidate authority. The assault on DEI is thus not a uniquely American phenomenon but part of a broader authoritarian turn in which inclusion is recoded to stabilise, rather than challenge, existing power.

Understanding gender governance in higher education through this conjunctural lens reveals not merely the erosion of equity but the emergence of a political formation that reconfigures inclusion into an apparatus of civility, visibility and administrative control. These tendencies are not aberrations but expressions of a larger global grammar that binds emancipatory rhetoric to authoritarian-neoliberal governance. The result is not the dilution of equality but its rearrangement as a practice of containment.

The implications for the sector are profound. If inclusion is increasingly reorganised through metrics, decorum and procedural compliance, then reclaiming its democratic potential requires an epistemic and institutional shift. Inclusion needs to be understood not as a reputational asset but as a commitment to justice, redistribution and collective struggle. This means recovering equality as political and pedagogical labour: the work of confronting injustice, protecting dissent and renewing the public imagination. Academic freedom and equality are inseparable: without equality, freedom becomes privilege; without freedom, equality becomes performance.

As Angela Davis (Davis quoted in Gerges, 2023) reminds us: ‘Diversity without structural transformation simply brings those who were previously excluded into a system as racist and misogynist as it was before… There can be no diversity and inclusion without transformation and justice.’ And as Henry Giroux (2025) argues, democracy depends on how societies fight over language, memory and possibility. That struggle now runs through the university itself, shaping its governance, its epistemic life and the courage to imagine more just and democratic possibilities.

Ourania Filippakou is a Professor of Education at Brunel University of London. Her research interrogates the politics of higher education, examining universities as contested spaces where power, inequality, and resistance intersect. Rooted in critical traditions, she explores how higher education can foster social justice, equity, and transformative change.

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Categories: Leadership Governance & Management | Tags: conjuncture, DEI, diversity, EDI, equality, feminist, gender, governance, inclusion, liberal, neoliberal, neoliberalism and higher education, social justice, technology | Permalink.

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December 1, 2025
Uni boosts gender diversity by 30% in maths – Campus Review

As the artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing industries explode, trained STEM professionals are in high demand. Mathematics is foundational to these fields.

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November 23, 2025
Gender disparity in university leadership: what lessons can East Africa learn from the UK and Europe?

This blog was kindly authored by Naomi Lumutenga, Executive Director and co-founder of Higher Education Resource Services (East Africa).

Despite commendable interventions in recent decades, a gendered leadership gap persists at varying levels within higher education institutions. In 2024, women led 27% of the top 200 universities in the US; 36% in the top UK universities; 55% in the Netherlands’ top 11; and 29% in Germany’s top 21. In contrast, female leadership was far less common in Sub-Saharan Africa: only two of Ethiopia’s 46 universities, two of Tanzania’s 60, and six of South Africa’s 26 public universities were headed by women. While some may argue that comparisons with Western institutions are unfair due to their longstanding systems, the disparity highlights persistent structural barriers to gender parity in university leadership. Shifting focus from individual to organisational transformation can deliver change. As an example, long-standing financial systems have been leapfrogged. Currently, it is quicker to wire money to and within many African countries, compared to Europe or the USA. Linear comparisons along time periods, to effect change, do not, therefore, tell the full story; the real focus should be on the political will from within universities to acknowledge the value in and shift leadership towards gender parity.

Our organisation, (Higher Education Resource Services East Africa) addresses gender equality in universities, as these institutions shape future leaders. Prestigious institutions like the University of Oxford have produced multiple prime ministers and policymakers across the globe, as the recent HEPI / Kaplan Soft Power Index demonstrates. In East Africa, notable alumni of Uganda’s Makerere University include past and serving national leaders like veteran Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and Benjamin Mkapa (Tanzania); Mwai Kibaki (Kenya); Paul Kagame (Rwanda); Milton Obote (Uganda); and Joseph Kabila (Democratic Republic of Congo). However, Makerere University (unlike the University of Oxford) has never had a female Vice Chancellor.

The structure and landscape of such institutions matter because they model frameworks and practices for the communities they serve. The persistent unequal representation triggered the work of HERS-EA that culminated, in part, in our recent publication.

Findings from our unpublished study conducted in 2024 across 35 universities in East Africa illustrated the situation starkly. This study was conducted by Makerere University in collaboration with HERS-East Africa, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The aim was to analyse the underlying barriers that prevent women from progressing into leadership and, for those who advance, from thriving. While some of the findings might be culturally unique to East African contexts, the majority were acknowledged, at the annual Engagement Scholarship Consortium conference in Portland, USA (October 2024), as being relevant to any higher education institution. In Japan, for example, there is evidence of cultural pressure exerted differently when women seek promotion; as Kathy Matsui asserts, women decline promotional offers for fear of how they might be treated when/if they get pregnant.

Our study of premier universities in East Africa found that, despite gender equality policies, female leadership remains rare: only two of seven top universities had a female Chancellor (a ceremonial role), none had a female Vice Chancellor, and just one had a female Deputy Vice Chancellor (who was nearing retirement). With respect to enrolment, while most institutions claimed gender parity at admission, few tracked or reported gender disaggregated data at graduation or PhD completion, and evidence of tracking progress was limited.

PhDs, research leadership, and grant management are important for university leadership, so we highlighted these areas and addressed implicit institutional norms. Drawing on these lived experiences, we concluded that gender discrimination in university leadership persists through biased job criteria, age limits, and interview questions. Other barriers include a lack of accountability, inadequate strategies against sexual harassment, and poor support for women to complete PhDs.

Co-created recommendations included trialling an adapted equivalent of the non-punitive Athena Swan Charter, which develops a culture of self-assessment while mitigating potential backlash. The Athena Swan Charter was initiated in the UK in 2005, and it is gaining global traction. It provides a sliding scale of progression towards gender equality, from bronze to silver and gold. Other proposed interventions included providing writing bootcamps with childcare and research advisors present, away from family and other distractions. Aspects of the quota system and structural frameworks in Scandinavian countries were discussed, but while lessons can be learnt from these transformational shifts, the real stumbling block is the lack of political will for changing norms rather than individual women within East African institutions. However, change is possible. Rwanda’s post-1994 Genocide national policies include quotas, and they are revised every three years to assess progress towards gender equality in all sectors. Currently, women hold 61.3% of the total seats in parliament, and they occupy 66% of the total seats in cabinets. Overall, Rwanda is now considered one of the best achievers in the world for gender equality. Perhaps lessons can be learnt from Rwanda’s progress that can give us all reason to hope.

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November 18, 2025
Do male teachers make a difference? Not as much as some think

by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
November 17, 2025

The teaching profession is one of the most female-dominated in the United States. Among elementary school teachers, 89 percent are women, and in kindergarten, that number is almost 97 percent.

Many sociologists, writers and parents have questioned whether this imbalance hinders young boys at the start of their education. Are female teachers less understanding of boys’ need to horse around? Or would male role models inspire boys to learn their letters and times tables? Some advocates point to research that lays out why boys ought to do better with male teachers.

But a new national analysis finds no evidence that boys perform or behave better with male teachers in elementary school. This challenges a widespread belief that boys thrive more when taught by men, and it raises questions about efforts, such as one in New York City, to spend extra to recruit them.

“I was surprised,” said Paul Morgan, a professor at the University at Albany and a co-author of the study. “I’ve raised two boys, and my assumption would be that having male teachers is beneficial because boys tend to be more rambunctious, more active, a little less easy to direct in academic tasks.”

Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

“We’re not saying gender matching doesn’t work,” Morgan added. “We’re saying we’re not observing it in K through fifth grade.”

Middle and high school students might see more benefits. Earlier research is mixed and inconclusive. A 2007 analysis by Stanford professor Thomas Dee found academic benefits for eighth-grade boys and girls when taught by teachers of their same gender. And studies where researchers observe and interview a small number of students often show how students feel more supported by same-gender teachers. Yet many quantitative studies, like this newest one, have failed to detect measurable benefits for boys. At least 10 since 2014 have found zero or minimal effects. Benefits for girls are more consistent.

This latest study, “Fixed Effect Estimates of Teacher-Student Gender Matching During Elementary School,” is a working paper not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal.* Morgan and co-author Eric Hu, a research scientist at Albany, shared a draft with me.

Morgan and Hu analyzed a U.S. Education Department dataset that followed a nationally representative group of 8,000 students from kindergarten in 2010 through fifth grade in 2017. Half were boys and half were girls.

More than two-thirds — 68 percent — of the 4,000 boys never had a male teacher in those years while 32 percent had at least one. (The study focused only on main classroom teachers, not extras like gym or music.)

Among the 1,300 boys who had both male and female teachers, the researchers compared each boy’s performance and behavior across those years. For instance, if Jacob had female teachers in kindergarten, first, second and fifth grades, but male teachers in third and fourth, his average scores and behavior were compared between the teachers of different genders.

Related: Plenty of Black college students want to be teachers, but something keeps derailing them

The researchers found no differences in reading, math or science achievement — or in behavioral and social measures. Teachers rated students on traits like impulsiveness, cooperation, anxiety, empathy and self-control. The children also took annual executive function tests. The results did not vary by the teacher’s gender.

Most studies on male teachers focus on older students. The authors noted one other elementary-level study, in Florida, that also found no academic benefit for boys. This new research confirms that finding and adds that there seems to be no behavioral or social benefits either.

For students at these young ages, 11 and under, the researchers also didn’t find academic benefits for girls with female teachers. But there were two non-academic ones: Girls taught by women showed stronger interpersonal skills (getting along, helping others, caring about feelings) and a greater eagerness to learn (represented by skills such as keeping organized and following rules).

When the researchers combined race and gender, the results grew more complex. Black girls taught by women scored higher on an executive function test but lower in science. Asian boys taught by men scored higher on executive function but had lower ratings on interpersonal skills. Black boys showed no measurable differences when taught by male teachers. (Previous research has sometimes found benefits for Black students taught by Black teachers and sometimes hasn’t.)**

Related: Bright black students taught by black teachers are more likely to get into gifted-and-talented classrooms

Even if data show no academic or behavioral benefits for students, there may still be compelling reasons to diversify the teaching workforce, just as in other professions. But we shouldn’t expect these efforts to move the needle on student outcomes.

“If you had scarce resources and were trying to place your bets,” Morgan said, “then based on this study, maybe elementary school isn’t where you should focus your recruitment efforts” to hire more men.

To paraphrase Boyz II Men, it’s so hard to say goodbye — to the idea that young boys need male teachers.

*Clarification: The article has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal but has undergone some peer review.

**Correction: An earlier version incorrectly characterized how researchers analyzed what happened to students of different races. The researchers focused only on the gender of the teachers, but drilled down to see how students of different races responded to teachers of different genders.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

This story about male teachers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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November 17, 2025
TCU Moves Race, Gender Studies Departments to English

On June 1, Texas Christian University will close its stand-alone gender studies and race and ethnic studies departments and fold the majors and courses into the English Department, university leaders announced earlier this month.

The research university in Fort Worth is one of the first private institutions in the state to announce changes to its gender, sexuality and race-related academic programs after firings at Texas A&M University prompted the state’s public institutions to flag, censor and cut classes related to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity.

In a meeting with English Department faculty on Oct. 22, TCU provost Floyd Wormley cited financial reasons for the change, asserting that political pressure “had no influence” on the decision to merge the Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Departments into the English Department. But some faculty aren’t convinced. They say the move follows a decline in institutional support for the disciplines as the university faces immense pressure to eliminate any and all programming related to gender, race and ethnicity.

“The explanation from the administration is financial, and that doesn’t necessarily track with earlier correspondence with the department,” said Brandon Manning, an associate professor of gender and sexuality and race and ethnic Studies. The university is expanding its physical footprint and its student body, and “there are new programs and departments popping up daily,” he added. “TCU has been receiving considerable criticism online, and this seems to be a way to placate that criticism.”

A TCU spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that conversations about merging the departments started more than two years ago. The two departments already share a leadership structure. The English Department wasn’t mentioned as a partner until the Oct. 17 announcement, said Alexandra Edwards, an English instructor at TCU.

The merger will affect seven faculty members, five of whom will likely follow the programs into the English Department. Other faculty and support staff will be deployed to other departments, Wormley and Sonja Watson, dean for the AddRan College of Liberal Arts, told faculty at the Oct. 22 meeting. The merger is part of a universitywide restructuring project and is primarily due to low enrollment in the two departments, they said. The Spanish and Modern Languages Departments will also be combined, and so will the Geology and Environmental Sciences Departments.

“Decisions are not based on academic content but on data,” a TCU spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. “Students currently majoring in these programs have been notified that there will be no impact to their academic progress, meaning they will be able to complete their degrees as planned. TCU is growing and will need more faculty and staff—not less—to ensure that we meet the academic needs of students and demand for a TCU education.”

This fall, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies enrolled nine majors and minors, and Women and Gender Studies enrolled just two. The two programs have never been large; since becoming stand-alone departments in 2018, their highest combined enrollment was 31 majors and minors, in fall 2020. But using low enrollments to justify the merger is unfair, Edwards argued. The programs haven’t had a chance to flourish because of constant structural changes, she said.

“They have been through a ton of turmoil and leadership turnover and reassignment to various different colleges and units across the university, so for a long time they’ve been unable to become stable,” Edwards said. “I don’t see how gender studies or ethnic studies could become a priority in an English department that’s already … juggling a lot of competing interests and varied disciplines.”

Department chairs weren’t given any warning about the merger with the English department, and faculty were not consulted before the decision was made, according to notes from the Oct. 22 meeting shared with Inside Higher Ed. When faculty asked why, Wormley said it was within “the purview of the institution to make those decisions.”

A One-Man Campaign?

While TCU isn’t subject to the same state laws that eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at Texas’s public institutions, the university is still getting plenty of external pressure to ax its gender and race studies offerings. Faculty say the campaign to abolish related classes, programs and events at the university is led by Bo French, a TCU alum and the son of a sitting TCU board member. French is also chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party and a conservative politician who was denounced by members of his own party for using slurs for gay people and people with disabilities.

French has berated the university online for what he described as “LGBTQ” and “radical Marxist” indoctrination. He celebrated on Oct. 10 when the university removed the “LGBTQ+” link from the “community initiatives” dropdown on its website. Three days earlier, he posted a poll on X asking followers if the university should “dismantle its entire racist DEI infrastructure and also stop offering courses in degenerate LGBTQ ideology.”

French interpreted the merger news as a partial victory. “This is simply hiding what they do in another department. Nothing changes,” he wrote on X on Oct. 22. “However, it does show that the public pressure is working. They are bending, but we have to make them break completely and eliminate these courses altogether.”

Since then, he has continued to wage a social media campaign against anything related to gender, sexuality or diversity at TCU. On Oct. 22 he also posted on X a photo of a lawn sign advertising campus Pride Month events, alongside the comment “I know a few things are happening behind the scenes at ⁦@TCU⁩ and I am now more hopeful than ever, but they haven’t happened yet and so stuff like this is still polluting the campus.”

Publicly, university officials have said little in response to criticism by French and others, Edwards said. She noted that she was harassed and doxed by conservatives in August 2024 over posts she made before she worked at TCU, and she was advised by administrators to “lay low” until the firestorm subsided. A former TCU Women and Gender Studies professor who received a threat of violence in response to a 2023 course titled The Queer Art of Drag was asked by police to leave campus for his own safety, Edwards said. More recently, a political science professor was doxed for online comments she made in the wake of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk’s death.

Asked how the university has responded to political pressure and harassment of faculty, a spokesperson said, “The university has a thorough process to notify faculty and staff members and provide them with appropriate guidance and support to mitigate potential risks.”

In conversations with faculty, TCU leaders have acknowledged the pressures of the political landscape on the university, particularly on the gender and race studies departments, Edwards said. At the end of the Oct. 22 meeting, Watson told faculty she had been concerned about the future of the departments since Trump was inaugurated in January. During a March 28 meeting between faculty and Watson about combining the gender and race studies departments, Watson expressed concern about recent executive orders from President Trump.

“I think that we all know that the executive orders disproportionately affect [Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies], right? … As I said in the beginning, [I am] still very much committed to CRES and very much committed to growing the number of majors, and so I think the biggest challenge … is, how do we increase?” Watson said during the meeting, according to a recording obtained by Inside Higher Ed. “All liberal arts majors’ programs are having this issue for various reasons, but we see these issues manifest in a different way in both CRES and [Women and Gender Studies].”

In an all-hands meeting on April 4, TCU president Daniel Pullin and general counsel Larry Leroy Tyner explained the difficult bind the current national and state political landscapes have put the university in.

“If there’s a cliff that if you step off, there’s serious consequences, and [if] you don’t know where the edge of the cliff is, you stay way away from the edge,” Tyner said. “The combination of uncertainty and significant consequences creates the chilling effect.”

About a minute later, Pullin added that he and his cabinet are “trying to figure out how to stay as far away from that unknown cliff as possible so we can stay on mission and live our values and execute our plan.”

(This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the chronology of events precipitating the merger.)

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October 31, 2025
TCU Dissolves Women and Gender Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies Departments

Texas Christian University Texas Christian University will shutter its women and gender studies department and comparative race and ethnic studies department at the end of this academic year, folding both programs into the English department in a move faculty members say reflects the institution’s response to political pressure.

The decision, announced earlier this month, comes as higher education institutions nationwide face mounting scrutiny over programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion—particularly those focusing on gender and race. TCU officials cited low enrollment as the primary rationale, though faculty members say the timing suggests otherwise.

Discussions about restructuring or renaming the departments began in February. Those conversations centered on how to address external pressure against anything perceived as related to DEI initiatives—pressure that has intensified since the Trump administration began efforts to eliminate such programs.

Faculty members report that university messaging has been inconsistent. Last spring, they were told the two departments would merge but could not include “race” or “gender” in the combined department’s name. By August, officials indicated the merged department could retain those terms. The October announcement revealed all three units would be absorbed into the English department, which will retain its original name.

University data shows undergraduate enrollment in both departments remains minimal this fall: two seniors are majoring in women and gender studies, while nine students major in comparative race and ethnic studies—five seniors, three juniors and one sophomore.

Women and gender studies at TCU traces its roots to 1979, when professors Jean Giles-Sims and Priscilla Tate began advocating for such a program. The university formally launched it in 1994. The comparative race and ethnic studies program emerged in 2017 amid student concerns about campus climate, with its founding director telling media the program would help foster cultural change and attract a more diverse student body.

In his email to English faculty, Provost Floyd Wormley Jr.said that the restructuring aims to “ensure a more efficient and effective use of faculty and administrative resources” while maintaining fiscal sustainability.

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October 26, 2025
At Moms for Liberty summit, parents urged to turn their grievances into lawsuits

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It’s not a rebrand. But the Moms for Liberty group that introduced itself three years ago as a band of female “joyful warriors” shedding domestic modesty to make raucous public challenges to masks, books and curriculum, is trying to glow up.

The group’s national summit this past weekend at a convention center outside Orlando leaned into family (read: parental rights), faith — and youth. The latter appeared to be a bid to join the cool kids who are the new face of conservatism in America (hint: young, Christian, very male), as well as a recognition of the group’s “diversity,” which includes grandparents, men and kids.

But even as the youth — including 20- and 30-something podcasters and social media influencers, as well as student members of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — brought a high-energy vibe, stalwart members got a new assignment. Where past Moms for Liberty attendees were urged to run for school board, this year they were encouraged to turn their grievances into legal challenges.

Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Descovich acknowledged that while many of them had experienced backlashes as a result of running for school board or publicly challenging books, curricula and policies, they needed to continue the fight. (The more pugnacious co-founder, Tiffany Justice, is now at Heritage Action, an arm of right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.)

“You have lost family, you have lost friends, you have lost neighbors, you’ve lost jobs, you’ve lost whole careers,” she said. Yet she insisted that it was vital that they “shake off the shackles of fear and stand for truth or we are going to lose Western civilization as a whole.”

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The gathering held up “the free state of Florida” as an example of Republican policies to be emulated, including around school choice and parental rights. The state’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, boasted of having created a state Office of Parental Rights last spring, describing it as “a law firm for parents.”

He trumpeted the state’s lawsuit against Target over the “market risks” of LGBTQ+ pride-themed merchandise and encouraged parents to reach out with potential legal actions. “If you’re identifying one of these wrongs that’s violating your rights and then subjecting our kids to danger and evil, then we want to know about it,” he said. “And we’re going to bring the heat in court to shut it down.”

Tina Descovich, CEO and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, was interviewed on Real America’s Voice, a conservative news and entertainment network that set up a remote studio outside of the Sun Ballroom at the Moms for Liberty national summit. Credit: Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report

The shifting legal landscape, not just in Florida but nationally, had speakers gushing about the opportunity to file new challenges, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor in June. It gives parents broad power to object to school materials, including with LGBTQ+ themes, and the right to remove their children from public school on days when such materials are discussed.

“This is where we need to take that big Supreme Court victory and start fleshing it out,” said Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm. He added that they were “needing warriors, joyful warriors, to file cases to start putting meat on the bones of what that does.”

The directive to file suit was not just around opt-out policies, which were the basis for the Mahmoud case. (Moms for Liberty has opt-out forms and instructions on its website.) Rather, attendees were also urged to file lawsuits in support of school prayer; against school policies that let students use different names and pronouns without parental consent (what Moms for Liberty terms “secret transitions”); and to give parents access to surveys students take at school, including around mental health.

“We need people willing to stand up legally and be, you know, named plaintiffs,” Kimberly S. Hermann, president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative policy group, said on a panel featuring two moms who sued their school districts. Winning a lawsuit or even just bringing one in one state, said Hermann, can get other school districts and states to adopt policies, presumably to avoid lawsuits themselves.

“One offensive litigation can have this amazing ripple effect,” she said. She and others made clear that there is staff to provide support. The legal groups will “stand with you,” said Sharp, “whether you’re passing the law or passing the local policy all the way to litigating these cases.”

Even as speakers criticized public schools particularly around LGBTQ+ issues, not as a form of inclusion but as foisting views into classrooms, they relished the chance to infuse their values into schools.

Filing these lawsuits is more than “just fighting for your role as parents,” Sharp told parents in a breakout session. “You’re ultimately fighting for your kids’ ability to be in their schools and make a difference, to be the salt and light in those classrooms with their friends and to take our message of freedom, of faith, of justice and to really spread it all across the schools.”

Related: America’s schools and colleges are operating under two totally different sets of rules for sex discrimination

Overall, this year’s Moms for Liberty event lacked the obvious drama of recent years. The flood of protesters in 2023 in Philadelphia required a large police presence and barricades around the hotel, along with warnings not to wear Moms for Liberty lanyards on the streets.

This year, there were no protests. That was partly because the event was held in a secluded resort convention center that could accommodate 800 (larger than the 500-ish of past hotels). But the group failed to fill the venue or attract much media attention. There was on-location broadcast by Real America’s Voice, a conservative news and entertainment network, from a set outside the Sun Ballroom. (Steve Bannon interviewed Descovich on his show, “The War Room.”)

It also didn’t draw opposition because protesters had a bigger target. Saturday saw “No Kings” rallies across the country, with thousands decrying what they see as President Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. “I forgot it was happening since they’re mostly ignored these days,” state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, (D-Orlando) and a senior advisor to LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida, said in a text message about the Moms for Liberty event. Liz Mikitarian, founder of the national group, Stop Moms for Liberty, which is based in Florida, said the moms “are still a threat” but not worth organizing a protest against.

It was also a quieter affair than last year’s in Washington, D.C. There, Trump’s appearance fed a party atmosphere with Southern rock, sequined MAGA outfits and a cash bar. (This year, Trump appeared, but only in a prerecorded video message.)

Sequined merchandise for sale at the Moms for Liberty gathering by the company Make America Sparkle Again included tops and jackets that paid tribute to Charlie Kirk, the slain founder of Turning Point USA. Credit: Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report

The three-day event, of course, aired familiar grievances in familiarly florid language — conservative school choice activist Corey DeAngelis railed against teacher unions over the “far-left radical agenda that they’re trying to push down children’s throats in the classroom.” Other sessions covered the expected — the alleged dangers of LGBTQ+ policies, in sports, restrooms, school curricula and books — but there was also discussion of concerns (shared on left and right) over youth screen use, online predators and artificial intelligence.

The event made room for MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services. Descovich interviewed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who is working to eliminate all vaccine mandates for the state’s schoolchildren.

But the move by Moms for Liberty to attract young conservatives elevated the energy in the room. It was apparent not only in a tribute to Kirk, the slain founder of Turning Point USA, which trains young conservatives on high school and college campuses. About 40 Florida TPUSA members took the ballroom stage to accept the “Liberty Sword,” the group’s highest honor, posthumously awarded to Kirk.

Related: Red school boards in a blue state asked Trump for help — and got it

It also showed up in a breakout session of mostly conservative social media influencers and podcasters who offered tips on using humor and handling online trolls: Lydia Shaffer (aka the Conservative Barbie 2.0), Alex Stein, Gates Garcia, Kaitlin Bennett, Angela Belcamino (known as “The Bold Lib,” who said she was surprised to have been invited), and Jayme Franklin, who in addition to her podcast is the Gen Z founder of The Conservateur, a conservative lifestyle brand that The New Yorker called “Vogue, But for Trumpers.”

They have built huge followings based on their compulsion to provoke. “We need to go back to biblical values of what it means to be a real man and what it means to be a real woman,” urged Franklin. “People want that guidance, and that needs to begin at church. We need to push people back into the pews.”

Their inclusion, like that of conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who moderated a panel, “Fathers: The Defenders of the Family,” appeared to recognize a need to expand the base — and be edgier. Johnson charged out on stage and trumpeted that “God’s first commandment to us was, ‘Go, be fruitful, multiply.’ Go make babies!!!!” He quipped that “right-wing moms, they’re happier, right?” and asked the crowd, “Any trad wife moms out there?”

The phrase is shorthand for a woman who embraces a traditional domestic role, often with an emphasis on fashion and style. Johnson — who credited Kirk for prodding him to find Jesus, get married and become a father (he has four children) — argued that Republicans, especially those in Gen Z, should embrace the traditional nuclear family identity as a winning political move.

“We are the party of parents. We are the party of children,” he said, adding that traditional values were already dominating culture and politics. “We live in a center-right country. And I’m tired of pretending that we don’t,” he said, and showed a map of red and blue votes in the 2024 presidential election. “This is the shift. You live in a red kingdom.”

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

This story about Moms for Liberty was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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October 21, 2025
Career Pathways and Gender Roles

Last week I and several colleagues visited a local technical high school to see what kind of dual-enrollment courses we could offer there. The school was leaps and bounds beyond what technical high schools were known for when I was a student: It had an impressive range of programs, new facilities, dedicated staff and some very poised students. I’d be proud to have them here.

That said, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern that hasn’t changed over the decades: gender segregation by field remains robust.

The electronics lab and the computer gaming lab were full of young men. The allied health area was almost entirely young women. When I asked the admins there whether that was typical of what they’ve seen, they responded that it was.

This week I dropped by a continuing-education conference that the college hosts for dental hygienists. I noticed that the attendees were nearly all women. A woman who runs a complementary program and was in attendance told me that over 98 percent of the dental hygienists in our state are women. Strikingly, she noted that the few men in the field have a terrible time getting hired; dentists are afraid that patients will mistake male hygienists for dentists.

This, in 2025.

In each case, the organizers were fully aware of the gender split. They certainly didn’t encourage it and, in some cases, tried actively to counter it. That has been true for years. Yet the patterns persist; if anything, they seem to be strengthening in certain occupational areas.

It’s not news that women have been graduating college at higher rates than men for several decades now. But if you looked only at HVAC and cybersecurity programs, you wouldn’t know it. Conversely, if you looked only at allied health programs, you’d wonder how the percentage of men even hits double digits. The disjuncture between greater integration in certain professional fields and markedly persistent segregation in others is striking.

Honestly, if you had asked me 30 years ago, I would have expected to see much more integration by now. Maybe not parity, but something far closer to it than what we have now. And the fact that the patterns exist among current high school students suggests that it isn’t just a matter of one generation slowly replacing another.

My own bias is that, generally speaking, more integration is better. That means more women in welding and more men in nursing. That’s because defaulting to individual choice as an explanation doesn’t take account of the conditions in which those choices are made. Whether your preferred metaphor is critical mass or a tipping point, there’s often a threshold of representation beneath which folks who might otherwise have wanted to be there will feel unwelcome. That threshold is usually well below absolute parity, but above being the “only.”

Having enough people like you—however defined—in the field can make the option seem more welcoming.

So, no, I don’t believe in trying to engineer absolute parity in all things. People have free will, and an occupational draft isn’t likely to lead anywhere good. But surely we can make headway toward making more choices more welcoming for more types of people. We know that having too much sameness in a group leads to groupthink and that groups with multiple perspectives tend to make better decisions. The same can be said of professions. I didn’t think we’d still be making those points in 2025, but here we are.

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October 17, 2025
Colleges add sports to bring men, but it doesn’t always work

SALEM, Va. — On a hot and humid August morning in this southwestern Virginia town, football training camp is in full swing at Roanoke College. Players cheer as a receiver makes a leaping one-handed catch, and linemen sweat through blocking drills. Practice hums along like a well-oiled machine — yet this is the first day this team has practiced, ever.

In fact, it’s the first day of practice for a Roanoke College varsity football team since 1942, when the college dropped football in the midst of World War II.

Roanoke is one of about a dozen schools that have added football programs in the last two years, with several more set to do so in 2026. They hope that having a team will increase enrollment, especially of men, whose ranks in college have been falling. Yet research consistently finds that while enrollment may spike initially, adding football does not produce long-term enrollment gains, or if it does, it is only for a few years.

Roanoke’s president, Frank Shushok Jr., nonetheless believes that bringing back football – and the various spirit-raising activities that go with it — will attract more students, especially men. The small liberal arts college lost nearly 300 students between 2019 and 2022, and things were likely to get worse; the country’s population of 18-year-olds is about to decline and colleges everywhere are competing for students from a smaller pool.

“Do I think adding sports strategically is helping the college maintain its enrollment base? It absolutely has for us,” said Shushok. “And it has in a time when men in particular aren’t going to college.”

Women outnumber men by about 60 percent to 40 percent at four-year colleges nationwide. Roanoke is a part of this trend. In 2019, the college had 1,125 women students and 817 men.

This fall, Roanoke will have 1,738 students altogether, about half men and half women. But the incoming freshman class is more than 55 percent male.

Sophomore linebacker Ethan Mapstone (26) jogs to the sideline at the end of a drill. Mapstone said he hadn’t planned to play college football until Roanoke head coach Bryan Stinespring recruited him. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

“The goal was that football would, in a couple of years, bring in at least an additional hundred students to the college,” said Curtis Campbell, Roanoke’s athletic director, as he observed the first day of practice. “We’ve got 97 kids out there on the field. So we’re already at the goal.”

That number was 91 players as the season began, on Sept. 6 — and the Maroons won their first game, 23-7, over Virginia University of Lynchburg, on what Shushok called “a brilliant day full of community spirit and pride.”

“Our students were out in force, side by side with community members spanning the generations,” he said via email. “In a time when we all need more to celebrate and opportunities to gather, it is easy to say our first football game since 1942 was both historic and invigorating.”

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In the NCAA’s Division III, where Roanoke teams compete, athletic scholarships are not permitted. Athletes pay tuition or receive financial aid in the same way as other students, so adding football players will add revenue. For a small college, this can be significant.

Shushok said it’s not just about enrollment, though: He wants a livelier campus with more school spirit. Along with football, he started a marching band and a competitive cheerleading team.

“It plays to something that’s really important to 18- to 22-year-olds right now, which is a sense of belonging and spirit and excitement,” said Shushok, who came to Roanoke after being vice president of student affairs at Virginia Tech. Its Division I football team plays in a 65,000-seat stadium where fans jump up and down in unison to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as the players take the field.

The Maroons play in the local high school stadium — it seats 7,157 — and pay the city of Salem $2,850 per game in rent. The college raised $1.3 million from alumni and corporate sponsors to get the team up and running.

Roanoke College players gather on the sidelines during practice. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

Despite the research showing limited enrollment gains from adding football, colleges keep doing it. About a dozen have added or relaunched football programs in the last two years, including New England College in New Hampshire and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Several more plan to add football in 2026, including Chicago State University and Azusa Pacific University in California.

Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

Calvin University in Michigan recently added football even though the student body was already half men, half women. The school wanted to broaden its overall appeal, Calvin Provost Noah Toly said, citing “school spirit, tradition, leadership development,” as well as the increased enrollment and “strengthened pipelines with feeder schools.”

A 2024 University of Georgia study examined the effects of adding football on a school’s enrollment.

“What you see is basically a one-year spike in male enrollment around guys who come to that school to help be part of starting up a team, but then that effect fades out over the next couple of years,” said Welch Suggs, an associate professor there and the lead author of that study. It found early modest enrollment spikes at colleges that added football compared to peers that didn’t and “statistically indistinguishable” differences after the first two years.

”What happens is that you have a substitution effect going on,” Suggs said. “There’s a population of students that really want to go to a football school; the football culture and everything with it really attracts some students. And there are others who really do not care one way or the other. And so I think what happens is that you are simply recruiting from different pools.”

Today, college leaders value any pool that includes men. Most prefer the campus population to be balanced between the sexes, and, considering the low number of male high school graduates going to college at all (39 percent in the last Pew survey), many worry about too few men being prepared for the future workforce.

“ I don’t know that we have done a good job of articulating the value, and of programming to the particular needs that some of our young men are bringing in this moment,” Shushok said. “I think it’s pretty obvious, if you read the literature out there, that a lot of men are feeling undervalued and perhaps unseen in our culture.”

Roanoke College President Frank Shushok Jr. in his office. Shushok said he brought football back to Roanoke to boost enrollment and create a livelier campus. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

Shushok said that Roanoke’s enrollment-building strategy was not centered on athletics. The college has also forged partnerships with local community colleges, guaranteeing students admission after they complete their associate degree, and has added nine new majors in 2024, including cannabis studies. Shushok pointed out that while freshman enrollment is down slightly this year, the community college program has produced a big increase in transfer students, from 65 in fall of 2024 to 91 this fall.

About 55 percent of Roanoke’s students come from Virginia, but 75 of the football team’s 91 players are Virginians. The head coach, Bryan Stinespring, a 61-year-old Virginia native, knows that recruiting territory, having worked on the coaching staffs at several Virginia universities in his career.

Related: College Uncovered podcast: The Missing Men

When Stinespring took over as head coach in 2023, hoping to inspire existing students and potential applicants to join his new team, there was no locker room, no shoulder pads or tackling dummies, no uniforms.

“The first set of recruits that came on campus, we ran down to Dick’s, got a football, went to the bookstore, got a sweatshirt,” said Stinespring, referring to a local Dick’s Sporting Goods store. “These kids came on campus and they had to believe in the vision that we had.”

Students bought into that vision; 61 of them joined a club team last fall, which played four exhibition games in preparation for this year. The community bought in, too; 9,200 fans showed up to the first club game, about 2,000 of them perched on a grassy hill overlooking the end zone.

Linebackers Connor Cox (40) and Austin Fisher (20) look on from the sidelines. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

Before Ethan Mapstone, a sophomore, committed to Roanoke, he was on the verge of giving up football, having sustained several injuries in high school. Then Stinespring called.

“I could hear by the tone of his voice how serious he meant everything he was saying,” said Mapstone, a 6-foot-1-inch linebacker from Virginia Beach. “I was on a visit a week later, committed two weeks later.”

To him, the football leaders at Roanoke seemed to be “a bunch of people on a mission ready to make something happen, and I think that’s what drove me in.”

Related: Even as women outpace men in graduating from college their earnings remain stuck

KJ Bratton, a junior wide receiver and transfer student from the University of Virginia, said he was drawn to Roanoke not because of football but because of the focus on individual attention in small classes. “You definitely get that one-on-one attention with your teacher, that definitely helps you in the long run,” said Bratton.

Jaden Davis, a sophomore wide receiver who was an honor roll student in high school, said, “ The staff, they care about all the students. They’ll pull you aside, they know you personally, they’ll send you emails, invite you to office hours, and they just work with you to do the best you can.”

Not everyone was on board with football returning to the college when the plan was first announced. Some faculty and administrators were concerned football would change the campus culture, said Campbell, the athletic director.

Sophomore wide receiver Jaden Davis poses for a photograph before the first practice of the season. Davis said the individual attention he could get from professors is what attracted him to Roanoke. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report

“There were just stereotypes about football players,” he said. “You know, they’re not smart, they’re troublemakers. They’re gonna do this and they’re gonna do that, be disruptive.”

But the stereotypes turned out to be unwarranted, he said. When the club team started, he said, “I got so many compliments last year from faculty and staff and campus security about how respectful and polite and nice our students were, how they behaved in the classroom, sitting in the front row and just being role models.”

Payton Rigney, a junior who helps out with the football team, concurred. “All the professors like them because they say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’” she said.

Like most Division III athletes, the Roanoke players know that they have little chance of making football a professional career. Mapstone said there are other reasons to embrace the sport.

“It’s a great blessing to be able to do what we do,” he said. “There’s many people that I speak to who are older and, and they reminisce about the times that they had to play football, and it’s very limited time.

“And even though there’s not a future for it, I love it. It’s a Thursday, my only problem in the world is that there’s dew on my shoes.”

Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at (212) 678-4078 or [email protected].

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September 13, 2025

Tag: Gender

At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

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Author: SRHE News Blog

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