Masculinity and Student Success in Higher Education

Jonathan M. Bowman, D. Craig Filar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138686014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134869701
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This practical resource identifies complex issues associated with masculinity in higher education, providing administrators and faculty with research-based strategies for supporting the success of this student group. Grounded in interdisciplinary social science theories and representative case studies, this book unpacks the experience of college men while simultaneously addressing the various identities they embrace or are assigned. Masculinity and Student Success in Higher Education shares strategies on increasing enrollment, engagement, and persistence of men in higher education across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic distinctions. By successfully interrogating their own campus practices, readers can better address issues of diversity while also supporting and engaging the social and academic factors that contribute to student success.

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Chapter 1

Declining Enrollment and Engagement

Young persons who identify as male experience a different culture than the one experienced by their counterparts decades – or even just years – ago. Amidst a changing job market, a media culture reliant upon unflattering masculine tropes, and a contentious cultural landscape wherein men treat women with open disdain in media, politics, and the business world, these young men often find themselves in uncharted waters without a clear route forward. (Uncharted waters for men, that is; women have experienced destructively choppy waters for generations while men enjoyed unearned privilege. For a discussion, see McIntosh, 2000.) That being said, there is great diversity in the gender role socialization that each American male experiences, so each young man has varying degrees of enculturation and similarly unique responses. From the culture-based rules about how men should interact with women or with other men, to even more foundational questions about what it means to be a man in the first place, there is great debate about a clear model for modern masculinity. While some young male-identified students are thriving despite changes in both culture and experience (Harris & Barone, 2011), healthy norms for Western masculinity seem far out of reach for the university culture writ large. Intentional and comprehensive interventions – like those provided by an engaged experience with higher education (Delbanco, 2012; Felten, Gardner, Schroeder, Lambert, & Barefoot, 2016) – may prove some of the only opportunities that lead to greater understanding.

One thing about which there is not much debate, however, is that Western men are applying and being admitted to colleges and universities at ever-decreasing rates when compared to previous generations. Overall, relative rates of college attendance for male-identified students are down (Diprete & Buchmann, 2013; Huyge, Van Maele, & Van Houtte, 2015; Weaver-Hightower, 2012; Tyre, 2008) with significant impact on later-life success (including longevity, lower substance abuse, marriage rates, etc.; Edsall, 2017). Even more discouragingly, scholars note that many men who do attend our institutions are less likely to be engaged, more likely to experience difficulties, and more likely to engage in problematic behaviors, including destructive uses of both alcohol and drugs (for an overview, see Kellom, 2004). These practical impediments, when combined with a set of gender roles that likely discourage a young man’s pursuit of education in the first place, increasingly lead to problems in the classroom and lessened rates of graduation (Hingson & White, 2012).

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GENDER ROLE SOCIALIZATION

A body of research over recent decades has looked at the impact of masculine norms on people who identify as men. For over 35 years, scholars have unpacked and disentangled the variety of issues that emerge when men experience a disconnect between their gender role socialization and their preferred (or the healthiest) life. Described as gender role conflict (O’Neil, 2015; O’Neil, 2008; O’Neil, 1981), this perspective first acknowledges our gender role socialization, which is the process where both young and old people become aware of – and engage – and even internalize an understanding of masculinity, femininity, or both. Gender role conflict therefore emerges when an individual’s internalized gender roles either negatively impact the individual rendering them unable to reach their own potential (e.g., a young man deciding not to attend college because education is “sissy” stuff), or when that individual’s internalized gender roles cause them to in some way cause someone else not to reach his or her potential (e.g., a man refusing to drive his talented son to an audition because “real” men don’t pursue the theatre). A large part of gender role conflict addresses whether the restrictive boundaries of masculine culture often impinge upon one’s free expression of the self (to the extent that the self can be experienced and understood).

Throughout the body of research, O’Neil (2015, 2008, 1981) highlights six patterns of gender role conflict that likely impact the male-identified experience, each of which can motivate behaviors that have the potential to negatively impact the university experience for male-identified students and those who engage them.

• Restrictive emotionality causes men to avoid regular emotional expression, leading to unhealthy outlets for expression or a need for a justification for such expression, including alcohol or drugs (e.g., Bowman, 2009).

• Health care problems are most likely to emerge later in life, but can lead to a variety of detrimental experiences both on and off campus.

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• Obsession with achievement and success likely impacts a variety of campus choices, including selection of academic major, willingness to participate in service, and differential attitudes towards coursework across the curriculum depending upon perceptions of transferability towards future goals.

• Restrictive sexual and affectionate behavior may cause men to avoid healthy expressions of affection, to limit the range of “acceptable” practices and partners, to further heteronormative culture, and to not plan ahead for safe and consensual sexual engagement.

• Socialized control, power, and competition issues are pervasive but decidedly manifest in our Greek letter organizations and athletic teams, where students often push themselves beyond natural limits to prove that the self or the group is the biggest, the fastest, the strongest, the hardest-drinking, or the most sexually active.

• Homophobia not only restricts the exploration of the self that is seen as important during the identity-developing college years, but also causes feelings of fear or a lack of safety amongst queer-identified students and their allies on our campuses.

Many of these factors have proven inversely related to academic motivation in higher education (Kahn, Brett, & Holmes, 2011) and have serious negative impacts on a variety of other lifestyle and identity variables (O’Neil, 2015). Research has shown that “sense of identity” is among the top reasons that students choose to withdraw from college (see Lounsbury, Saudargas, & Gibson, 2004 for a discussion). Although not necessarily an exhaustive list of the problems of rigid gender role socialization and the resulting gender role conflict, this framework helps us begin to see myriad opportunities for negative and persistent views on our campus to be reified and majoritized should they not be addressed in a systematic and comprehensive manner.

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THE CHALLENGE OF COLLEGE MEN

Some major foci of higher education professionals seem necessarily entangled with specific issues associated with masculinity and student success. From coming to college, what they do when they get there, how long they stay, and whether they graduate, a focus on the challenges of college men allows us to highlight some key issues that we need to address at our institutions.

• Enrollment – Attendance at colleges and universities is more than just a noble pursuit. As an opportunity for education and social advancement, the transformative power of higher education is without peer in terms of life-changing experiences – and in terms of opportunities to create and engage social justice and feelings of well-being. Indeed, the recent public health crises around suicide and “deaths of despair” note that the dramatically increasing rates of mortality are virtually nonexistent for people who have a college degree as compared to those same middle-aged people who have no further education (Boddy, 2017), and that huge numbers of men are unemployed as a result of not having college degrees (Chira, 2016). Unfortunately, men are increasingly unlikely to enroll in colleges or universities (Knickerbocker, 1999; Tyre, 2008) for both cultural reasons and lack of adequate preparation.

• Retention and persistence – Student departure has been studied for almost a century (Braxton, 2000). Even though year-to-year retention numbers for colleges on the whole have been relatively stable at two-year and four-year colleges over recent years (for a discussion, see Braxton, Doyle, Hartley, Hirschy, Jones, & McLendon, 2014), male-identified individuals are less likely to remain at our institutions of higher education than are other students. With retention not only impacting institutional stability and the general operating budget (Braxton, Hirschy, & McClendon, 2004), but also moving the needle on national rankings and being a key determinant of much campus/state/federal funding, the commitment to seeing a student return year after year and ultimately earning a degree is both an issue of social justice and a practical concern.

• Behavior concerns – Not only are our male-identified students less successful on our college campuses, but also they typically cause greater concern amongst our professional staff and faculty, often of a legal nature. In terms of alcohol consumption and sexual conquests alone, students have been enculturated to believe that substance abuse and sexual activity are the markers of “real men” (Kimmel, 2008; Peralta, 2007) – a clear explanation for why college men are hospitalized for alcohol use at approximately twice the rate of people who identify as women (see discussion in Hingson & White, 2012) – and that excessive use of alcohol is an opportunity for gaining status and having sex (Dowdall, 2009). Young men also have been taught to feel superior to women in certain situations (Kimmel, 2008), a dangerous perception when alcohol and the possibility for sex emerge, considering the ubiquity of sexual assualts (Reingold & Gostin, 2015; Young, Desmarais, Baldwin, & Chandler, 2016). As is obvious on most every college campus, a variety of events, holidays, and contexts contribute to excessive alcohol use, with almost limitless opportunities to justify overconsumption (Neighbors, Foster, Fossos, & Lewis, 2011). Unfortunately, most of our college men learn these behaviors from their peer group, commensurate with plenty of theories of college student drinking (see Maisto, Bishop, & Hart, 2011, for a discussion of Alcohol Myopia, Social Learning Theory, and Tension Reduction Theory). Add to these obvious concerns additional issues such as drug use (Ford & Arrastia, 2008) and conduct/integrity issues (Cooper & Schwartz, 2007; King, 2012; Tibbetts, 1997) and the behavior problems begin to wear away at students’ ability to succeed – as well as at the patience of campus professionals.

• Engagement – There is a pronounced gender gap in terms of engagement on our college and university campuses (Sander, 2012). While we know that men want close relationships with one another (Kalmijn, 2002, Blieszner & Adams, 1992) and that socially diverse experiences matter (Dancy & Brown, 2008), male-identified students are less likely to participate in the many activities that help develop those close relationships (e.g., study abroad and community service; Sander, 2012) on our campuses. Engagement with both faculty and student peers is a strong predictor of retention and graduation, as well as predicting a variety of other positive social factors (Tinto, 2012). While men must ultimately focus on getting a degree, increased engagement on our campuses likely causes the college experience to have more nuance and to influence students’ worldviews in significant ways.

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STUDENT PERSPECTIVES

Throughout the book, we are including the perspectives of some undergraduate men. These perspectives are not intended to be generalizable; rather, these quotations offer insight into the lived experience of one individual man. In order to protect the identity of these men, minor details have been slightly altered but the individuals’ contexts or backgrounds remain largely unchanged. Conducted in private one-on-one meetings with either an author or a trained undergraduate interviewer, each quote represents an almost word-for-word open-ended perspective on their experiences of being male-identified on a college campus....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Masculinity and Student Success in Higher Education
• Key Issues on Diverse College Students
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Spotlight on Student Success Sections
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Declining Enrollment and Engagement
• 2 Preparation for Higher Education
• 3 Framing Colleges and Universities as a Masculine Endeavor
• 4 Supporting Historically Underrepresented Men
• 5 Academic Engagement
• 6 Co-Curricular Engagement
• 7 Extra-Curricular Engagement
• 8 Mentoring and Changemaking
• 9 Campus Structures Promoting Persistence
• 10 Rethinking Engagement
• Index