The article from The Daily Sceptic
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/04/10/are-white-boys-checking-out-of-university/
suggests a growing gender imbalance in higher education, with women making up 57% of UK undergraduates and dominating fields like psychology (80% female), English literature (70%), and sociology (77%). It also points to a cultural shift, boys self-excluding from what they perceive as a female-dominated environment, potentially exacerbated by marketing that sidelines them and a broader "woke" ethos that is alienating.
The gender gap is real. Data from the UK's Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for 2022-23 confirms women are the majority of undergraduates, and the gap has been widening for decades. In the US, it's similar—women earned about 58% of bachelor's degrees in 2021, per the National Center for Education Statistics. Fields like psychology and education skew heavily female, while engineering and computer science remain male-dominated. The article's anecdote about boys dismissing certain subjects as "basic white girl" courses reflects a cultural perception that might deter them from those fields. Boys aren't abandoning higher education entirely—they're just gravitating toward STEM, trades, or, as the article mentions, gap years and ventures like mining. This could be less about "wokeness" and more about practical choices: men are increasingly aware of the ROI on degrees, especially with average UK student debt at £48,000. Fields like psychology often lead to lower-paying careers than, say, engineering or tech, or no job at all.
The article implies universities' focus on diversity—evident in prospectuses prioritising underrepresented groups—alienates White boys, who feel like an afterthought. Marketing matters, and if boys feel universities aren't for them, they might opt out. A 2024 House of Commons briefing noted White pupils, especially boys, are less likely to attend higher education than other ethnic groups, with barriers like financial concerns and a vague sense of not belonging. If boys increasingly see academia as a female space, entire disciplines could become lopsided, reducing diversity of thought. That's stagnation, ultimately leading to collapse.
Studies do show women, on average, lean more Left politically than men, and this gap seems to be widening, especially among younger generations. Pair that with the increasing female dominance in certain academic disciplines, and it's reasonable to worry about a feedback loop where woke progressive ideologies could entrench themselves further, potentially stifling intellectual diversity.A 2020 Pew Research Center study found that in the US, women are more likely to identify as Democrats (56% vs. 42% for men), and this split is starker among younger adults. In the UK, a 2019 YouGov poll showed women under 30 were significantly more likely to support Labour or Liberal Democrats over Conservatives. Fast forward to 2024 and data from political analysts suggest this trend is accelerating, with Gen Z women polling as much as 20 points more progressive than their male peers on issues like identity politics, climate, and social justice.
Now, connect that to universities. Fields like sociology (77% female), psychology (80%), and English literature (70%)—already heavily female—are also where critical theories (e.g., postcolonialism, gender studies) thrive. These disciplines often amplify progressive frameworks, sometimes at the expense of competing views. If men are opting out, as the Daily Sceptic piece suggests, these fields could become echo chambers, not just of gender but of ideology. A 2023 study from the Manhattan Institute found that in US humanities departments, only 15% of faculty identified as conservative, compared to 60% identifying as liberal or far-Left.
When disciplines prioritise ideological conformity—say, valuing narrative over evidence or policing language over debating ideas—they risk losing rigour. Look at what's happening in some social sciences: replication crises in psychology (e.g., only 50% of studies replicating in a 2015 meta-analysis) or the backlash against certain literary theories for sidelining canonical works. If whole fields get bogged down in jargon or dogma, they produce less actionable knowledge. That's decay, not in the apocalyptic sense, but in the slow erosion of credibility and utility. You see it when graduates struggle to think critically outside their frameworks or when public trust in academia drops—polls like Gallup's 2024 survey show only 36% of Americans have high confidence in universities, down from 57% a decade ago.
Project this trend on, and assume an ever-increasing move to wokeness and at some point, much of the modern Western university will decay, and collapse under the fetid weight of its own rottenness. But at least, with such university creatures not embracing reproduction, the future will be Darwinian selection, self-elimination, and bright in the longer term, as universities reach their use-by date, and are thrown into the dust bin of history!
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/04/10/are-white-boys-checking-out-of-university/
"Have you heard of the phrase 'basic white girl'? No, nor me, until I ran a series of workshops to help teenagers prepare for, amongst other things, university interviews. A number of courses would be mentioned and immediately dismissed by some as 'basic white girl' courses. These included: psychology (80% female), English literature (70%) and sociology (77%). ('Basic white girls,' I learned, also love side-stripe baggy trousers, Taylor Swift and being pretty.) These subjects represent the extreme trend in universities becoming female dominated: 57% of UK undergraduates are now female. The balance of academic teaching staff at universities in 2022-23 is 51% male and 49% female, but the wider university staff is 55% female. Is it possible that what happened in primary schools, where only 15% of teachers are male and secondary schools (35%), will happen in higher education? Are boys already self-excluding from this female-dominated world?
I bumped into a group of aforementioned students yesterday, a mixture of boys and girls all with high (conditional) offers from great universities, and had a chat about their A-Level revision. What alarmed me is the difference in enthusiasm between the boys and girls about their intended university adventures. The girls are locked in: open days and offer days enthusiastically visited, first choices chosen. The boys are altogether more diffident. One of them explained: "Me and my friends are just motoring along with no sense of purpose. We all have fantasies about going off on a great adventure, fighting animals, living in the wild." One of the girls shoved him and said, "OMG, you're so lame."
I conducted a straw poll amongst my friends – all their children who are off to university have noticed the same sex divide: girls already enthusiastically planning university stationery and the boys reluctantly being sent on offer days by their parents. Our own 18 year-old son has decided on a gap year, unable, in spite of lovely offers, to muster up sufficient enthusiasm to justify the average student debt of £48,000. He and a mate are investigating mining opportunities in Australia.
And this is where we get back to the troubling idea of 'basic white girl' stuff. My husband shouts from the hammock, my pink straw hat balancing on his head to shade out the spring sunshine: "Don't make these teenage boys sound like misogynistic bastards, because they're not." He's right of course, teenage boys love teenage girls, they worship them, they adore them, they expand a considerable amount of energy trying to talk to them, have a coffee with them, and if they are extremely brave and successful, kiss them. But they do not want to predominantly hang out with big groups of them. They do not want to be the only boy in the psychology lecture theatre. Hence whole spheres of knowledge, education and training being written off by boys on account of the preponderance of female students. I'm not sure this is misogyny – just a natural preference to spend significant amounts of time with other males – and females – just not majority female.
When my son ordered university prospectuses I noticed a decided lacklustre attempt to recruit white boys (still the majority ethnicity of the UK at 74%). One top university did not picture a boring white male until page 26 – lots of happy photographs of girls in burkas, gentlemen from the Afro-Caribbean club, young men waving pride flags, but nothing for the majority male until page 26.
Of course all of these marketing efforts are well-intentioned efforts to correct a once male-dominated enterprise. The Oxford college I attended in the 1990s only admitted women in 1980. My history don said it was a marvellous thing to do so, as well as encouraging state school applicants. He explained: "Academic standards soared. When it was just aristos they used work on entirely the wrong subjects – throwing sofas out of windows – that sort of caper. Dreadful."
Has the correction been too thorough? How alarmed should we be that a July 2024 House of Commons research briefing on 'Equality of access and outcomes in higher education in England', reports that: "White pupils are less likely than any other broad ethnic group to go to higher education. … Access to Higher Education was higher among women than men." Various "barriers to access, participation and outcomes" are listed that include: financial concerns, insufficient advice, sexual and racial harassment on campus or general lack of support. It seems to me however that the real peeling off of boys from the university system is a vague feeling of it being simply, somehow, not quite for them.
Would strict sex quotas help? 50% of all the student body and staff must be male and female? Not sure. Let's see how this mining venture pans out."