THE MEN INTERNALIZE THE SCORN.

They do so by shunning higher education.

“In a sense, we have lost a generation of men to Covid-19,” said Adrian Huerta, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California who studies college-going among boys and men.

“It’s a national crisis,” said Luis Ponjuan, an associate professor of higher education administration at Texas A&M University.

[Worcester high school senior Debrin] Adon, who attends the University Park Campus School, plans to buck the odds and go to college. He said he decided this after he realized that his parents, who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, want a better life for him. His mother is unemployed now, and his father runs a barbershop.

It's only a crisis if the young men who develop their human capital in other ways don't thrive.

[The pandemic shutdowns] opened jobs for young men from Worcester high schools at grocery stores and at Amazon, FedEx and other delivery companies, said Lynnel Reed, head guidance counselor at University Park, nearly two-thirds of whose students are considered economically disadvantaged. The school is in a neighborhood of fast-food restaurants, liquor stores, used-car lots, dollar stores and triple-deckers — homes usually shared by three families, one on each level, that are a staple of urban New England.

“How do you go away to college and leave your family struggling when you know that if you just worked right now, you could help them right now with those everyday needs?” Reed said.

That’s a bigger pull for young men than for young women, said Derrick Brooms, a sociologist at the University of Cincinnati.

Often, you don't. That's the tragic vision, and that's why it's important for higher education to treat the first-generation, non-traditional, returning adults as strivers when those young men who assess their chances of screening for store manager or senior chef and seek to add to their bag of tricks.

Despite the allure of a paycheck versus going into debt and spending years pursuing a degree, the reality is that “a lot of these young men at 17 or 18 years old end up working 12-hour shifts, getting married, buy a truck, get a mortgage, and by the time they’re 30, their bodies are broken,” Ponjuan said. “And now they have a mortgage, three kids to feed and that truck, and no idea what to do next.”

Stopping education after high school not only limits men’s options; it threatens to further widen socioeconomic and political divides, Brooms said.

I wonder, though, if the Hechinger contributors are asking what sorts of trucks those young men are buying.

Not everyone has to go to college. Faster and less costly career and technical education can lead to in-demand, well-paying jobs in skilled trades, automation and other fields.

Graduates with bachelor’s degrees still generally make more than people with lesser credentials, however. And the pandemic has shown that people without degrees are more vulnerable to economic downturns. Unemployment for them, nationwide, rose more than twice as fast in the spring as unemployment for people with bachelor’s degrees, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found.

Symbolic analysts with degrees could work from home. People who owned businesses in home improvement could probably find ways to stay employed.  Other parts of the service sector, well, those might have been "nonessential" jobs to their governors, particularly in the likes of Massachusetts and the other lockdown states.  Unfortunately, Mr Ponjuan is too wedded to his intersectional priors to see the deeper implication of his observation of life in the rough parts of Worcester. “We have a lot of young men who are completely disengaged from our society because quite frankly they don’t feel they’re being valued as men. So they think, why even try when everybody sees me as a thug, as a delinquent, when everyone assumes the worst of me instead of assuming the best of me?”  There's a sociology of education dissertation to be written, just on that question.  Are we seeing conventional internalized stereotyping of the ethnic minorities, or has that become entangled with the toxic masculinity stuff coming out of Student Affairs?  The online house organ for business as usual in higher education isn't helping today.  "Male students speak in college classrooms 1.6 times as often as women, according to a new academic article published in Gender & Society based on 95 hours of observation in nine classrooms across multiple disciplines at an elite institution."  That's a small sample, and it's likely not based on nine classrooms at the University of Worcester, and yet, it doesn't do any good to tell a young man that although he's not a thug, he still has unearned privilege.