Men with no degrees: Lone, broke

So it seems that any young women still harboring the old-fashioned notion of going to college to get an “MRS” degree as well as that conventional sheepskin square or rectangle may well (a) be sorely disappointed and (b) have to put up with a lot of glowering looks from the single, noncollege-educated restaurant-table bussers they’ve chosen to reject.

So indicates a recent article posted at insider.com (among other places around the ’Net).

A New York University professor worries that, as stated in the headline, “fewer men going to college will lead to a ‘mating crisis’ with the US producing too many ‘lone and broke’ men.”

Sarah Al-Arshani’s Sept. 25 piece passes along the Wall Street Journal’s September report that “women made up 59.5% of college students at the end of the 20202021 school year, an all-time high … That’s in comparison to 40.5% of men enrolled in college.”

“Data from the National Center for Education Statistics found that in 1970, men made up close to 59% of those enrolled in college, compared to around 41% of women who were enrolled.” So this thing has totally flip-flopped, with the Journal report containing the prediction that the college gap between the sexes will get wider “in the next few years … so that for every one man that earns a college degree, two women would have earned one.”

And this is leading to the mating crisis, New York University professor Scott Galloway fretted to CNN.

He cites the increase in the cost to go to college “without much change to the quality of going to college” as one reason for the gap. That, and men having “more options beyond college at that age than women” … options such as construction and other trade jobs. What worries him is that young college-educated women don’t usually choose to get with young, noncollege-educated men. And that, Galloway warns, is creating “mating inequality,” which he contends is an “existential threat to society.”

“The most dangerous person in the world is a broke and lone male and we are producing too many of them,” he says, elaborating that “the most unstable violent societies in the world” all have one thing in common: “young depressed men who aren’t attaching to work, aren’t attaching to school, and aren’t attaching to relationships.”

Mmmkay. This makes me think of a feature, “Why Things Are” — I believe it may have been the

onetime syndicated Washington Post feature by Joel Achenbach — that appeared regularly in a dearly departed local publication. The column featured creative, humorous ways of answering life’s various questions.

One column dealt with the question of why polygamy, not so unusual in the ancient world, came to be generally frowned on. The answer: “So loser guys could get dates.” At one time, rich ballers married and hogged up all the eligible women and enjoyed harems. (Hey, we church folk know well about those Old Testament kings who had hundreds of wives plus a gazillion concubines.) Anyway, all this woman hoarding left the “loser guys,” or the Plain Joes, with nobody to get with.

From what Galloway has said, it’s been these womanless loser guys who have become dangerous and caused problems and instability in societies throughout history.

But wait … would these results still be the case in spite of the fact that in recent years, college has taken a hard reputation knock as leading to a dorm-room-load of student-loan debt for graduates who can’t find jobs to pay the debt off?

And wouldn’t that mean that there could be a lot of educated but broke, lonely women with standards hanging around and causing trouble too? I can picture the two groups on both sides of the street, glowering at each other … the lone, empty-pocketed, sheepskin-less guys on one side; the lone, debt-logged, degree-brandishing but depressed women who won’t date them on the other. That could lead to serious war.

It may even lead to polygamy being reintroduced to society as a fix. Which could tempt many a college-educated woman to become a wife of a guy who’s all that, but whom she must share with sister-wives, meaning she only gets to hang out/hook up with him maybe once a month or year.

Well, we can only hope for a utopia whose demographic is made up of guys who went to trade school, got decent-paying jobs and are happily married to gals who (a) also went to trade school/work blue-collar jobs; (b) are stay-at-home moms; or (c) are college educated, but didn’t listen to well-meaning parents who urged them to “marry a man who has more education and makes more money than you” and instead chose their spouses based on character. Spouses who are comfy making less money than their wives or even agree to be stay-at-home dads.

Imagine that.

(Going down on one knee) Will you email me? hwilliams@adgnewsroom.com