BALTIMORE (AP) -- A decline in the number of male college students is expected to continue through the next decade as experts say non-degreed sports stars and high-tech pioneers help some men to feel school is uncool.
Women, who in 1970 accounted for less than 45 percent of college students, have slowly reversed the numbers. Now, it's men who constitute the minority."This is an absolute revolution," said Thomas Mortenson, an Iowa-based educational researcher, during a conference on the topic here.
Men returning from World War II used the GI Bill to fill college campuses, but female enrollment pulled even by 1983. Women earned about 642,300 bachelor's degrees in 1996, while men earned just under 522,500, Mortenson said.
Census figures put the nation's population at 51 percent male. U.S. Department of Education researchers predict that by 2008, men will comprise about 42 percent of college students.
The statistics apply across all geographic, economic, ethnic and racial lines, Mortenson said.
Among possible reasons, experts say: the declining presence of educated adult males in young men's lives, the rise of single parenthood and high numbers of female teachers in elementary and secondary schools.
"Little boys don't see much of adult males, either at school or in their family life," Mortenson said.
Media images of millionaire sports superstars also make for an "anti-intellectual undercurrent," said Catherine Steiner Adair, a fellow Harvard psychologist.
In a statement, former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller said educators must lure male students back to college and the fuller intellectual life it represents -- even if sitting in class reading "Beowulf" doesn't seem as exciting as earning $75,000 designing Web pages.
Educators said that message is often obscured by fashionable images of cutting-edge Internet tycoons such as Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, who did not graduate from college.
Linda Burnell Shade, chancellor of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, said the lure of high salaries -- both with high-tech firms and a booming development economy -- are bleeding her university of male students and faculty.
Instead of college, "a lot of guys get a pickup, a dog, and build houses," she said.