Point: Women are succeeding, but at what cost to men?

Until the last 30 years, men have always outperformed women in higher education.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2009 women enrolled in larger numbers, graduated at a higher rate, and maintained greater GPAs through college than men.

Recent studies argue that men are less motivated to succeed than women, who feel they must gain the much-needed edge to outperform men in rank and pay in the workforce (where men still dominate).

While a nice theory, it does not account for the lesser success rate of boys in elementary, middle, and high school—or the over-representation of boys in special education classes. Males are failing in school.

The National Center for Education Statistics found that women outperform men in language subjects and skill sets, while men outperform women in math. Most classes in college are language-dependent—lectures, group discussion, writing, reading, and verbal participation—and that may be why men are slipping in college.

It's like porn. According to Maxim, women can be aroused through reading stories, like romance novels or the articles in Playboy. Men need pictures or video.

While these findings support mass generalizations and groupings, the fact is men are not succeeding at the rate women are in college and something ought to be done before male enrollment and graduation rates continue slipping.

Why differential learning is an enigma to college administrators is beyond me—but if anything, it seems as though more professors are relying on talk-based methods only. Haven't these women ever lectured a boyfriend or husband while he answered in rhetorical responses and darted his eyes around the room? Shouldn't these men remember wishing pictures or breasts were part of that lecture?

I invite them to hang out in the Advocate office. Any production night at the paper, you will find three female editors typing away and staring at their computers, and five male editors engaged in a rolling-chair war. Men don't have the attention span or the patience to deal with boring modes of communication.

Too many college classes rely only on language to teach. Multimedia teaching is being employed in secondary schools to help kinesthetic and visual learners succeed, and the same should be implemented in post-secondary education.

Men should not be left to waste into mediocrity because most college professors choose talking as their main mode of teaching. Allowing men to fail because women are succeeding is a cop-out for lazy administrations. If men need more stimulation to succeed in class, then more creative teaching methods should be employed.