FINDING THOSE MISSING MEN. The editorial board at USA Today have been running a number of point-counterpoint editorials addressing controversies that interest me. I'm taking these out of the order in which they're appearing. First up, from the July 11 edition, an exchange on the changing sex ratios at universities. The context is a growing imbalance between men and women completing college in the California State University system. The editorial board sees reason to be troubled. Their position:

Two girls for every boy sounded good to Jan and Dean, but it's not a healthy ratio for America's colleges and workplaces.

More specifically,

Among high school seniors who have at least one parent who graduated from college, 23% of the boys read at "below basic" levels on national tests, compared with only 7% of the girls. At many nearly all-white high schools, girls dominate the academic honors and run the prominent student activities.

On Tuesday, the American Council on Education reported that the biggest slide on campus has occurred among lower-income white males and Hispanic men. Among white students from all income backgrounds, the report found, gender gaps first emerged in the late 1990s and have widened each year since then.

Boys from higher-income families continue to go to college at high rates, mostly because there's a college for anyone whose checks don't bounce, even C-average boys. But too many of these boys end up in unchallenging courses or drop out because they were poorly prepared for college work

College matters because workers with bachelor's degrees earn salaries that average 62% higher than full-time employees with only high school diplomas. More important, in a global economy a bachelor's degree just gets you to the starting gate.

The blue-collar jobs that once supported families are drying up, affecting males more than females. So if a focused effort isn't made to address boys' needs, as was done successfully a generation ago for girls, many boys' futures will be grim, and the nation's ability to compete will slide.

Anybody remember something called "internalization?" It was wrong, we were instructed, to engage in stereotyping of people in order to prevent those characterizations from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies? And to point out shortcomings consistent with stereotypes was to engage in blaming the victim?

Apparently those rules don't apply to contemporary boys, who can be dosed with Ritalin on the slightest provocation, or regarded presumptively to be louts or rapists. (I exaggerate, but I have encountered enough of such thinking to be more than a bit displeased when it arises.)

The counterpoint sees a different problem.

More women than men have been enrolled in California's public four-year colleges since 1983, and two decades of female majorities on college campuses haven't yet undermined society or changed the fact that men earn more than women on average and hold the majority of business and political leadership roles.

Further, women's growing share of college enrollment is due almost entirely to more women going to college. The number of men going to college hasn't fallen; it's higher now than in the 1990s.

Why have women's college-going rates risen faster than men's? No one knows for sure. Cultural, educational and physiological factors all likely play a role. Researchers have also found evidence that the economic benefits of a college degree — and the risks of not getting one — have grown more rapidly for women than men in recent decades, meaning there may be good economic reasons for more women than men to go to college now.

Rather than gender gaps, Californians should be worrying about racial and class gaps in college enrollment. More than 42% of Californians are black or Hispanic, but only 25% of UC and Cal State students are. We should also be worried about how poorly California's high schools are preparing students for college. Only 35% of high school graduates complete the curriculum needed for admission to UC or Cal State.

While more girls than boys complete the curriculum, we're still preparing far too few students of either gender. Instead of focusing on differences between male and female college enrollment, California's educational energies would be better spent making sure students of all genders and races have the education and opportunities they need to realize their potential and contribute to California's economy.

There's really little disagreement between the two editorials. Perhaps the failure rests with the common schools. Perhaps the failure is in the common schools to develop the right mix of non-cognitive skills (which I maintain has much in common with bourgeois virtues) particularly outside the traditional middle- and upper-middle-income households. One thing that struck me about much of Southern California on my most recent visit is how downscale much of the region has become.

The New York Times reports on the phenomenon, using some of the same evidence and some of the same sources as USA Today. But it appears as if social dynamics are already at work..

[Jen] Smyers, ... at American, said she recently ended a relationship with another student, in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day.

"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month.' That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."

Further into the article is evidence that perhaps Ms. Smyers's date figured he could get away with such conduct.

American has no engineering school and no football team; it is a campus where the Democrats' organization is Democratic Women and Friends; "The Vagina Monologues" sells out at annual performances; and almost 1,000 people turned out for the Breastival, a women's health fair.

The faculty is attracting more and more women: a majority of the professors now on the tenure track are female.

Women on campus say there is great female solidarity. What there is not much of, said Gail Short Hanson, the director of campus life, is a dating scene.

Said Ms. Hanson: "If there's a dance, like the Founder's Day dance in February, do the women get their hair done? Yes. Do they get their nails done? Yes. But do they have a date? Probably not. So who do they dance with? Whoever wants to dance."

Future Desperate Housewives in training?

But in North Carolina, the same basic social dynamic is at work.

They and many other women at Greensboro say it is not bad to be on a campus with twice as many women as men because it encourages them to stick to their studies without the distraction of dating.

Maybe, said Ashleigh Pelick, a freshman who is dating a marine she met before college — but she teased a friend, Madison Barringer: "You know you'll go crazy if you never have another boyfriend before you graduate."

Ms. Barringer, a 19-year-old whose parents did not go to college, laughed. But she did acknowledge the gender imbalance as a possible problem.

"I know it sounds picky, but I don't think I'd marry someone without a college degree," she said. "I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation."

Admittedly, colleges exist for purposes other than assortative mating, but we have the makings of yet another "prepare to retire with your cats" scare to hit the national news magazines in a few years.

Creating a balance of men and women is now an issue for all but the most elite colleges, whose huge applicant pools let them fill their classes with any desired mix of highly-qualified men and women But for others, it is a delicate issue. Colleges want balance, both for social reasons and to ensure that they can attract a broad mix of applicants. But they do not want an atmosphere in which talented, hard-working women share classes with less qualified, less engaged men.

Laura at 11-D is troubled by the article.

I expected that the next generation would have the family and work thing figured out better than we do. I expected that more guys would spend time thinking about how to balance their responsibilities as a parent with their work obligations.

It seems that college girls are more aware than I was of the difficulties of combining ambition with family, but their answer is to work harder and more strategically, which I guess is somewhat an improvement, but an unsatisfying one. It's sad that girls are forced to be serious so early. And it seems that boys are still not planning for parenthood, despite the strides by guys in our generation.

The article, however, suggests the outlines of a solution.

Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising them.

But if the ladies are being more selective in managing their personal lives, they are developing the skills to compel the guys to behave more like gentlemen, and perhaps we will see couples establishing more careful delineation of responsibilities as the twentysomethings marry.