Seasoned academic leaders of a certain vintage will remember wistfully that innocent paean to spring break, “Where the Boys Are,” crooned by Connie Francis, in those halcyon pre-protest early ’60s, when the ladies’ eyes would wander to the Florida coasts before they returned to the rigors of campus life. But that was then, and this is now. The beaches aren’t boyless, but the campuses increasingly are, and there are distressing defections to other venues of a nonacademic sort.

In decades past, enrollment demographics told a different tale and asked a different question: Where are the girls and the minorities? With aggressive recruitment and financial-aid packages crafted to encourage female and minority matriculation at colleges nationwide, a discernible and pleasing shift has gradually taken place. Despite periodic assaults on affirmative action initiatives and occasional dips in enrollments at the nearly 60 women’s colleges now extant in the United States, there has been a relatively robust growth in minority and female college enrollment. But where are the boys?

A recent New York Times article lamented the deaths of the Yale Man, the Dartmouth Man, and the Virginia Gentleman, while noting that men’s colleges have dwindled from approximately 250 in operation in the early ’60s to today’s “Final Four”: Hampden-Sydney, Wabash, Morehouse, and a two-year institution, Deep Springs. Nationally, women now constitute 57 percent of college students, and the percentage is on the rise. This has caused a corresponding rise in an unexpected conundrum for college recruiters and admissions officers: How to right-size the male-female balance by going after (imagine!) the reluctant and disappearing male. Not reviving Ophelia, but re-energizing the hesitant Hamlet. To attend or not to attend—there’s the rub.

This surprising development raises the following questions for academic leaders to ponder, perhaps for the first time in the history of American higher education:

1. Since there is no significant decrease in the male population in America, why have men turned to places beyond or other than the college campus?

2. Are there inducements available to campus recruitment officers to lure hesitant Hamlets to be (rather than not to be) college students?

3. Where are male prospects to be found in these days of occupational “hidey holes” of unknown location? Where shall the manhunt begin in this new terra incognita?

4. Will recent experiments in all-male public secondary schools have an impact on male enrollment in general and men’s colleges in particular? Are there more Hampden-Sydneys and Wabashes on the horizon?

Meanwhile, where are the boys? For today’s academic leaders, that is indeed the question.

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John N. McDaniel is dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Middle Tennessee State University. He can be contacted at mailto:%20mcdaniel@mtsu.edu.

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