Iceland's Missing Male Students

Article here. Excerpt:

'The gulf in Iceland is now so wide that Benediktsson would like to see special initiatives to get boys interested in higher education, with universities working alongside other parts of the education system such as high schools.

“We would like to have it closer to 50-50 all over,” he said, “in order to be more representative of the society as a whole.”

But the root causes of the imbalance are hard to tackle. And a focus on male disadvantage is not uncontroversial in a country where men still earn far more than women and the professoriate remains overwhelmingly male.

Iceland, surrounded by fisheries, has long offered plentiful stereotypically male work opportunities that do not require high levels of education. “Young men have better job prospects without university education than the young women,” explained Thamar Heijstra, an associate professor of sociology at the university. Men can earn more out on a fishing boat than women can in female-dominated areas such as caring and teaching, she explained, so women gravitate toward universities to boost their earning prospects.

Female-heavy campuses are also the result of pent-up demand, explained Katrín Ólafsdóttir, an assistant professor at Reykjavík University, who has written about gender inequality. Women in their 40s and 50s are studying for degrees for the first time, she said, having grown up when it was far less common for women to go to university.

“Some boys may not see the value in going to college,” said Benediktsson, and they drop out of high school in far greater numbers, moving on to places such as trade schools. Some researchers are investigating whether the dearth of men on campus has roots beyond the economic, and if boys have become disillusioned with the idea of higher education, he warned. Certainly, they need more role models in areas such as teaching and nursing, he added.'