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What if boys were never the problem

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Ken LaCorte’s July 2026 episode of Elephants in Rooms reviews evidence on boys’ underperformance in school, arguing that the gap reflects a mismatch between how schools work and how boys develop rather than a deliberate failure.

The timestamped transcript was saved 2026-07-24.

Evidence presented

Scope of the gap. Men earn 42% of US college degrees, the lowest share ever recorded. The largest study on this topic, covering over a million students in 30 countries, found girls getting better grades than boys in essentially every subject going back to 1914. Girls outperform boys in reading at every grade level and in every US state; internationally in 2022, girls outread boys in 79 of 81 school systems tested. Girls come out ahead in overall school achievement in about 70% of countries studied. This pattern holds across progressive and conservative societies alike.

Early signals. Preschools expel boys at 4.5 times the rate of girls. Boys make up close to 60% of students held back a grade, are twice as likely to receive an ADHD diagnosis, and fill two-thirds of special education classes. Boys drop out of high school more than girls in nearly every US state (6.3% versus 4.4%).

College trends. In 1970 men earned 57% of bachelor’s degrees. Enrollment equalized in 1982 but continued shifting: the ratio is now approximately 58% women to 42% men, nearly the mirror image of 1970.

Three drivers

LaCorte identifies three factors behind the gap:

  1. Brain development. The prefrontal cortex, which handles impulse control, planning, and sitting still, matures later in boys. Kindergarten has effectively become first grade: children are now expected to read by year’s end in a grade that used to be mostly play and socializing. Recess has shortened and academic demands moved earlier, targeting the exact skills boys are slowest to develop.

  2. Behavior and grading. On standardized tests boys score about the same as girls, but they receive worse grades. The gap widens when teachers weigh behavior, participation, and homework timeliness. Grades measure not only what students know but how they behave. Boys bring more physical energy, a bigger appetite for risk, and a stronger urge to compete and roughhouse.

  3. Greater male variability. Boys are overrepresented in both the top 5% and bottom 5% of math scores by 10th grade, while girls cluster toward the middle (“males at the tails”). Boys make up two-thirds of the lowest GPAs but only one-third of the highest, suggesting school grading does not reward the male tail the way standardized tests do.

Proposed interventions and their evidence

LaCorte reviews several ideas and finds most unsupported by strong evidence:

  • More male teachers (nearly 90% of elementary teachers are women): a national analysis found no sign boys perform or behave better with a male teacher.
  • Boy-friendly teaching methods: a four-year UK project across dozens of schools could not make the case; techniques that engaged boys also engaged girls.
  • Starting boys a year later (Richard Reeves’s proposal): benefits were small and tended to fade, while the cost of an extra year of childcare was real.
  • Selective college admissions: at some selective colleges (Brown, Chicago, Brandeis), admissions offices put a thumb on the scale for male applicants to prevent campuses from tipping too female, but this benefits only boys already near the top.

Not only a poverty story

Among affluent two-parent white families, 49% of daughters finish college versus 38% of sons. When a family struggles, the son takes a bigger academic hit than his sister, and the gap worsens further down the income ladder. Poverty is not the driver, but it amplifies the effect.

Downstream consequences

Men without a college degree have been dropping out of the labor force in large numbers, while men with degrees continue working at historical rates. Men at the bottom of the education and economic ladder are most often excluded from marriage. Men without a bachelor’s degree die by suicide at roughly twice the rate of those who have one.

Two boy crises

LaCorte distinguishes two different problems: boys at the top who could have gone to college but choose skilled trades or entrepreneurship instead (which he argues can be a rational market decision), and boys at the bottom whose difficulties compound from early school struggles into adult hardship. Only one of these resolves itself.

The political framing

LaCorte notes that Title IX and a decades-long national effort pushed girls into classrooms, sports, and STEM programs when the college degree gap favored men by about 13 points. Now that the gap is larger in the opposite direction, there is no comparable national response. He attributes this partly to timing: “Help girls” became background noise, and suggesting boys need help now “doesn’t sound to many like fixing a new problem. It sounds like undoing an old victory.”

Limitations

LaCorte’s video is a journalistic synthesis, not a systematic review or meta-analysis. His sources are linked in a separate document; the video selects and narrates findings conversationally. The framing emphasizes that schools did not “set out to fail boys,” and the presenter’s editorial sympathies are conservative-leaning. The video should be treated as a survey of the landscape with a stated viewpoint, not as primary evidence.

  • Greater male variability — the biological hypothesis underlying the “males at the tails” pattern LaCorte reports in both test scores and GPAs
  • Some cold facts about math and gender — covers gender differences in mathematics specifically, including the tail-distribution pattern and the stereotype-threat literature
  • The Myth of Male Power — Farrell’s 1993 book documenting the downstream consequences LaCorte describes (suicide, labour-force exit, marriage exclusion) as systematic male disadvantage rather than individual failure
  • The Disposable Male — Gilbert’s evolutionary-psychology account of the same variability pattern LaCorte reports, treating greater male variance as a deep biological strategy
  • Male variability, education, and life outcomes tests LaCorte’s key claims against the external literature, finding his mismatch framing better supported than the active-hostility alternative but his suicide-as-downstream-consequence claim causally overstated
  • The most avoided number in America — LaCorte’s later episode on Black homicide victimization, by the same creator with the same sourcing structure
  • Father absence — the family-disruption evidence behind the “family struggles amplify the gap” pattern this episode reports

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