Boys to Men: The underachievement of young men in higher education – and how to start tackling it

Nick Hillman and Nicholas Robinson With a Foreword by Mary Curnock Cook:

HEPI’s scan across the evidence and possible solutions to the growing imbalance in educational achievement of boys is enormously useful and highlights just how complex this topic is.

Understanding the challenges presented requires expertise in a vast array of subjects: neurology, psychology, pedagogy, culture, social science, anthropology, education, assessment, geography, economics, humanity, feminism, politics, history and behavioural science – come to think of it, it has the makings of a superb liberal arts / science degree.

But the evidence is compelling. Boys are performing worse than girls across primary, secondary and higher education, not to mention apprenticeships, and the situation is getting worse. On current trends, the gap between rich and poor will be eclipsed by the gap between males and females within a decade. UCAS’s latest End of Cycle report shows the entry rate for men increased by much less than for women in 2015, widening the gap between the sexes to a record 9.2 percentage points at age 18, meaning young women are now 35 per cent more likely to go to university than men. If this di erential growth carries on unchecked, then girls born this year will be 75 per cent more likely to go to university than their male peers.