# What if boys were never the problem? | Elephants in Rooms
# Uploader: Elephants in Rooms - Ken LaCorte
# Upload date: 2026-07-21
# URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU-MMBDdMUI
# Script notes: https://shorturl.at/DkoJh

[0.0] What's going on with boys in school?
[3.68] In the United States, women now
[5.56] dominate. Men earn just 42% of college
[8.92] degrees, the lowest share ever recorded.
[11.96] There are now millions more female
[13.96] college students than male. And college
[16.68] is the end of a sometimes troubled
[18.6] pipeline that starts at 4 years old.
[21.68] Boys are more likely to be held back in
[23.4] kindergarten, suspended in preschool,
[25.96] diagnosed with ADHD, placed in special
[28.8] education, and drop out of school. The
[31.32] elephant in the room is a simple one.
[33.24] What's the deal? I'm Ken Lacorte. I dug
[35.92] into the numbers and theories, and I'm
[38.0] not here to convince you of anything,
[39.96] but to hopefully give you a fair
[41.48] overview of what I've learned. So,
[43.6] here's where we're headed. First, the
[45.92] trouble with boys, looking at how bad
[48.16] the numbers are really are. Then, how
[50.4] boys are built differently and why that
[52.52] gets ignored. From there, why there's
[54.92] really no fix in sight, followed by the
[57.44] cost of failure, which is bigger than
[59.48] people realize. And I'll close with a
[61.76] silver lining and let you be the judge
[64.08] on that one. So, let's start with how
[66.16] bad the trouble with boys actually is.
[68.56] Now, most of my stats here are from the
[70.32] United States, but this isn't an
[71.96] American quirk, and it's not a very new
[74.44] one. The biggest study ever done on this
[76.56] looked at over a million students in 30
[78.52] countries. It found girls getting better
[80.84] grades than boys in essentially every
[83.04] subject going back to 1914. That's 6
[86.48] years before American women could even
[88.24] vote. Similar patterns showed up
[90.4] everywhere. Reading, for instance. Girls
[93.04] outperform boys in reading at every
[94.84] grade level and in every US state.
[97.52] Worldwide, in 2022, international
[100.56] testing covered 81 school systems around
[102.92] the world, and girls outread boys in 79
[106.76] of them. Zoom out beyond reading to
[108.6] overall school achievement, and girls
[110.76] come out ahead of boys in about 70% of
[113.12] the countries studied. Researchers also
[115.32] checked whether this track with how
[117.12] progressive a country was. The theory
[119.4] was that liberal societies might tilt
[121.6] classrooms toward girls. That didn't
[123.72] hold up. Girls out achieve boys in
[125.56] Scandinavia, but they also out achieve
[127.8] boys in gutter and Jordan. Places where
[130.32] women can barely leave the house without
[132.0] a man's permission. Whatever's dragging
[134.28] boys down, it's bigger than American
[136.44] politics and you really can't blame it
[138.56] on your local school board. For many
[140.28] boys, the trouble starts before school
[142.48] really begins. One Yale study found pre
[145.04] schools expelled boys at four and a half
[147.44] times the rate of girls. And And these
[149.56] are four-year-olds we're talking about.
[151.24] Boys make up close to 60% of every kid
[153.68] held back a grade. They're also twice as
[155.959] likely to get an ADHD diagnosis. And
[158.64] they fill up 2/3 of special ed classes.
[161.36] They also disappear more. Boys drop out
[163.56] of high school more than girls in nearly
[165.32] every state in the country. About 6.3%
[168.16] of young men never finish compared to
[170.04] about 4.4% of young women. The girls who
[173.2] stick around, they graduate on time more
[175.68] often as well. Follow those kids to
[177.48] college and the gap increases. Now, this
[180.48] part is something new.
[182.519] So, in the '60s, society started to make
[185.16] some profound changes. The women's
[187.239] liberation movement, birth control,
[189.239] shifting career and family norms.
[191.84] We went from a culture where women were
[193.6] expected to stay home and raise a family
[196.2] and men were expected to earn enough
[197.84] money to support them all.
[199.56] In a system like that, to many, a woman
[202.32] getting a degree was seen as more of a
[204.16] luxury than a need. In 1970, men earned
[207.68] 57% of America's bachelor's degrees. And
[211.08] in that changing culture, it's no
[212.959] surprise that college numbers became
[215.12] more equal. But they did more than that.
[218.36] They hit equal enrollment numbers in
[219.88] 1982,
[221.56] but the numbers kept going in the same
[223.08] direction. Today, it's flipped almost
[226.16] exactly. Men now hold the same smaller
[228.68] numbers women held back when everyone
[230.36] agreed the system was rigged against
[232.0] them, again about 58% to 42% and the men
[235.92] who do enroll finish less often. They're
[238.76] a minority of students, but a majority
[241.12] of dropouts. So, that's the what's
[243.36] happening part of this. But, I think the
[245.28] more interesting part is the why.
[247.0] Because the more I dug into it, the less
[249.0] it looked like something schools did to
[251.24] boys and the more it looked like a
[253.0] mismatch between how schools work and
[255.88] how boys work. I studied for this test,
[258.359] but if I deserve an F on a wrong fact,
[260.64] let me know in the comments and I'll
[261.92] address it below. My sources and notes
[264.2] are in the description as well. All
[265.88] right. So, I didn't see anything to
[267.56] imply that schools set out to fail boys,
[269.88] but there are a lot of differences
[271.24] between girls and boys. They're built
[273.28] differently and they don't arrive at
[274.96] school looking the same. Three big
[277.0] differences drive things.
[278.76] How brains develop, how boys behave, and
[282.2] how boys ability spreads out differently
[284.4] than girls. Start with the brain. The
[286.84] prefrontal cortex handles impulse
[288.72] control, planning, sitting still when
[290.919] you don't want to, and it matures later
[293.24] in boys than girls. Put a five-year-old
[295.64] boy and a five-year-old girl in the same
[297.44] kindergarten class and developmentally
[300.12] she's usually ahead of him. I mean, not
[302.16] necessarily smarter, just further along
[304.64] with the skills that schools reward. 50
[307.16] years ago, that mattered less.
[309.32] Researchers who've compared old
[310.8] kindergartens to today's find that it's
[313.2] basically become first grade. Kids are
[315.36] expected to read by year's end in a
[317.44] grade that used to be mostly about play
[319.4] and socializing. Recess got shorter. Sit
[322.4] still and focus starts earlier every
[324.84] single year. School got more demanding
[327.6] of the exact thing that boys are slowest
[330.12] to develop, which brings me back to
[332.08] ADHD. Because boys get diagnosed at
[335.12] roughly twice the rate of girls. And,
[337.52] you know, I wondered how much of that is
[338.919] a real disorder and how much of that is
[341.08] a five-year-old boy getting graded
[343.24] against both girls and a six-year-old
[345.96] standard. Harvard researchers studied
[347.96] over 400,000 kids and found the youngest
[350.72] ones in a class, the ones born right
[352.76] before the cutoff, were about a third
[354.92] more likely to get an ADHD diagnosis
[357.56] than their oldest classmates.
[359.56] The only difference was a few months of
[361.44] age.
[362.4] And then there's behavior. And And this
[364.12] is often where grades come from. I mean,
[366.56] on average, boys bring more physical
[368.92] energy, a bigger appetite for risk, a
[371.28] stronger urge to compete and to
[373.28] roughhouse. So, researchers dug into why
[375.72] girls pull ahead on grades, and it turns
[378.28] out it wasn't really brains, it was
[380.88] self-control. The ability to sit down,
[383.72] focus, finish the assignment. On
[386.08] standardized tests, boys score about the
[388.6] same as girls. But they get worse
[390.8] grades. That gap widens most when
[393.32] teachers weigh grades on behavior,
[395.36] participation, and turning in homework
[397.16] on time. Grades aren't just measuring
[399.48] what kids know, they're also measuring
[401.88] how they behave. And And boys aren't
[403.88] just behind on average, they're also
[406.08] scattered further to the edges. On those
[408.6] same standardized tests where they score
[410.4] about even with girls overall, boys pile
[413.16] up on both ends. More of the highest
[415.48] scorers and more of the lowest at the
[417.72] same time. By 10th grade, boys are
[420.64] overrepresented in the top 5% of math
[423.0] scores and the bottom 5%. Girls cluster
[426.919] towards the middle, and researchers call
[428.919] that the males at the tails. It's not
[431.16] settled science across every trait, but
[433.36] it shows up pretty reliably when we
[435.28] measure raw ability. And it gets wider
[437.96] as kids get older. But it changes when
[440.24] you swap the test for a report card.
[442.44] Boys make up 2/3 of the lowest GPAs in
[445.0] the country, but only a third of the
[446.88] highest. Same boys and their same
[449.4] brains, but they're measured in two
[451.36] different ways. Now, think about how
[453.08] schools get developed. One curriculum
[455.72] with one pace and one behavioral
[457.48] standard. All designed for the average
[459.76] kid. Now, that works better for most
[462.24] girls, but it misses those boys on both
[464.8] ends. The kid who's bored out of his
[466.8] skull and checks out, and the kid who's
[469.08] genuinely struggling. So, there's no
[470.96] single boy crisis. There're really two
[473.52] different boys and two different kinds
[475.28] of trouble. And that distinction matters
[477.64] for everything that follows. Now, one
[479.56] more thing, because I expected this to
[481.32] be a poverty story, but it's beyond
[483.72] that. Among affluent two-parent white
[486.24] families, 49% of their daughters finish
[488.96] college, but only 38% of their sons do.
[492.52] So, the gap shows up at the very top of
[494.72] the income ladder, where money isn't an
[496.52] excuse. But,
[498.56] economists track brothers and sisters
[500.36] growing up in the exact same families,
[502.52] and found a rough upbringing hits boys
[505.08] harder than it hits their sisters. When
[507.12] a family struggles, the son takes the
[509.48] bigger hit in school. And that gets
[511.48] worse the further you go down the income
[513.2] ladder. Poverty isn't a driver here, but
[515.84] it makes the boy problem hit harder
[518.039] wherever it lands. So, years ago, when
[520.2] schools looked this lopsided, we passed
[522.159] federal laws. This time, that's not
[525.0] happening. Although, some of the young
[526.56] men may be solving their own problem.
[528.4] But first, today's sponsor is a really
[530.56] fun one.
[531.6] It's It's a book, but it's not just a
[533.6] book. It's more like a book that a
[535.32] wizard in Middle-earth might have on his
[536.96] table.
[538.04] It's the ultimate guide to rebuilding a
[540.2] civilization by Hungry Minds.
[542.92] It's a 400-page illustrated encyclopedia
[545.72] of humanity's greatest inventions and
[547.76] discoveries. The illustrations combine
[549.88] engineering drawings with medieval art
[551.6] styles in a way I genuinely haven't seen
[553.68] before. It's the kind of book that you
[555.72] say you'll flip through for 5 minutes,
[557.56] and suddenly you realize you've lost an
[559.32] hour. Diving into it reminds you of how
[561.28] much there actually is to know, how
[563.2] things work, why they work, and what
[565.4] humans figured out over centuries of
[567.48] trial and error. It was conceived
[569.36] through a $2 million Kickstarter, and it
[571.36] covers 180 topics in 23 chapters.
[574.52] There's also a a quest inside of it,
[576.32] which I won't spoil, but it adds another
[578.56] layer if you're a person who likes to
[580.12] really figure things out.
[581.96] Honestly, it's a great gift for a
[583.72] curious person or just for yourself.
[586.44] Check it out at this link below and use
[588.2] code elephants10 for 10% off or scan the
[591.64] QR code. Okay,
[593.88] back to school.
[595.16] In 1972, when the college degree gap
[598.0] favored men by about 13 points, the
[600.52] country responded. Congress passed Title
[603.12] IX against sex discrimination.
[605.28] Universities were investigated. A
[607.24] decades-long national effort pushed
[609.72] girls into classrooms, sports, and STEM
[612.28] programs, and it worked spectacularly
[614.72] well. But now that gap is even larger in
[617.16] the opposite direction, and there's
[618.88] really no fix in sight. No no new laws,
[621.88] no blue ribbon commissions, really no
[623.92] national effort of any kind. I mean, why
[626.64] not? Now, there've been some
[628.28] experiments, starting with who's
[630.48] standing at the front of the room.
[632.0] Almost 90% of elementary school teachers
[634.32] are women. And a lot of boys, they go
[636.6] from kindergarten through sixth grade
[638.6] without ever having a single male
[640.24] teacher. Heck, many of them go back home
[643.12] to a house with no father in it either,
[645.48] and the absence of men stacks up
[647.2] throughout the day.
[648.64] The obvious fix seems simple. Get more
[650.8] male teachers in classrooms. Give boys
[653.0] someone who used to be a boy himself.
[655.24] It's a reasonable theory, but the
[657.12] evidence doesn't really back it up. A
[659.24] national analysis found no sign that
[661.32] boys actually perform better or behave
[663.88] better with a male teacher. Britain,
[666.28] they tested out targeted education
[668.16] styles. A four-year project across
[670.32] dozens of schools tried various
[672.44] boy-friendly teaching methods, and they
[674.64] couldn't make the case for that either.
[676.6] The techniques that engage boys, they
[678.68] turned out to be the same techniques
[680.08] that engaged girls. Another idea is to
[682.96] start boys in school a year later,
[685.16] letting them mature before the demands
[686.72] kick in.
[687.8] It It's the idea behind Richard Reeves'
[689.6] book of boys and men, and some parents,
[692.6] they already do it on their own.
[694.4] But the research here, it's also kind of
[696.36] thin. I mean, economists who've studied
[698.2] it, they found that the benefits were
[699.8] small and they tended to fade, but the
[701.96] cost of an extra year of child care and
[704.32] and a later start to working in life
[706.04] were real. Anecdotally though, I've seen
[708.44] that sometimes have some good effects. I
[710.56] really found only one place where the
[712.28] system tilts towards boys, and it's not
[714.52] what I expected. At some selective
[716.56] colleges, so many women apply that
[718.88] admissions offices they put their thumb
[720.84] on the scale for men just to keep the
[722.76] campuses from tipping too much female.
[725.04] At Brown, male applicants get a roughly
[727.52] 39% better shot. The University of
[730.12] Chicago, about 30%. A former Brandeis
[733.12] admissions officer flat-out admitted
[735.28] they had lower standards for men. But
[737.8] that's in a small number of selective
[739.56] schools, really propping up young men
[741.84] who are already near the top. And I
[743.68] believe that a big part of the reason we
[745.28] don't see a larger outcry over this is
[747.76] all about timing. I mean, a lot of
[749.56] politicians and a lot of regular people,
[752.0] they're still fighting yesterday's war.
[754.48] For decades, we repeatedly heard the
[756.32] same message. Help girls. Help them in
[759.24] school. Help them get into college. That
[761.72] message worked so well that it it became
[763.64] background noise and and the kind of
[765.44] thing that everyone just assumes is
[767.32] still needed. Except that battle's
[769.52] largely over and and girls won. So, the
[772.24] second you suggest boys might need help
[774.16] now, it doesn't sound to many like
[776.52] fixing a new problem. It sounds like
[778.6] undoing an old victory. And that's a
[780.68] harder sell. All right. So far this has
[783.04] mostly been about grades and diplomas.
[785.4] But the cost of failure goes well beyond
[787.6] that. The classroom gap turns out to be
[790.36] a precursor for worse problems. Because
[792.76] the boys who land at the bottom in
[794.16] school tend to become the men who land
[796.6] at the bottom later. In work, in
[798.839] marriage, and in some cases, whether
[800.88] they make it at all. School isn't the
[802.6] whole cause, of course, but it's the
[804.4] first place you see the trouble start.
[806.4] Start with work. There are lots of great
[808.52] trades and ways to make money without
[810.12] college, but having a four-year degree
[812.56] roughly doubles your earnings. And that
[814.84] compounds into different wealth
[816.32] categories over a lifetime. And over the
[818.36] last few decades, men have been dropping
[820.48] out of the labor force in huge numbers.
[822.76] The ones who are not working and not
[824.68] looking, almost every one of them has a
[826.48] high school education or less. Men with
[828.68] degrees, they kept working at roughly
[830.96] the same rates that they always did. I
[832.96] mean, a degree doesn't hand anyone a
[834.72] job, but the economy stopped rewarding
[837.28] unskilled work the way it used to. Then
[839.44] let's look at marriage. I mean, a lot of
[841.6] college-educated women marry those
[843.6] without a degree, but the men getting
[845.72] left out of marriage entirely are most
[848.28] often the men at the bottom of the
[849.88] schooling and the economic ladder. And
[852.2] all those factors can coalesce into the
[854.0] worst statistic here, suicide. In 2023,
[858.08] over 30,000 American men over 25 took
[861.0] their own lives. And men without a
[862.88] bachelor's degree, they die by suicide
[865.6] at roughly twice the rate as men who
[867.76] have one. Now, let me be clear. I'm not
[869.8] talking about the average guy without a
[871.28] degree. I'm talking about the ones with
[873.44] the most troubles. College isn't some
[875.36] sort of a golden ticket, but the
[877.04] schooling gap is worth taking very
[879.28] seriously.
[880.6] That five-year-old who's already falling
[882.28] behind, that's not a separate story from
[884.72] the man struggling at 40. It's the same
[887.44] kid who grew up. Now, this might sound
[889.88] all bad for boys, but there is a silver
[892.839] lining, at least for some of them. It
[895.52] shows up when you look at where the
[897.04] money actually is and who's walking away
[899.4] from college on purpose. And why
[901.72] skipping college isn't always the
[903.36] failure that some people assume it is.
[905.24] Start with the money.
[906.839] Men still dominate some of the
[908.12] highest-paying fields out there, like
[910.32] engineering and computer science, where
[912.36] they earn more than 75% of the degrees.
[915.08] Women now hold the majority in biology,
[917.2] law, and medical school. So, the men
[919.48] take the degrees that pay, that's
[921.2] certainly not true across the board. But
[923.24] on the flip side, a lot of degrees just
[925.76] don't pay off anymore. College costs
[927.8] several times what it did a generation
[929.48] ago, and a growing share of majors, lots
[932.48] of them heavily female, no longer earn
[934.96] back what they cost. You can borrow many
[937.16] thousands of dollars for a degree that
[939.08] leaves you in debt with no real career
[941.36] boost. That's not a blanket argument
[943.36] against college, but one against
[945.16] assuming college is automatically a good
[947.36] trade. And some of the men skipping it
[949.84] seem to have figured that out. Skilled
[951.64] trades have gotten genuinely lucrative.
[953.92] Electricians, linemen, welders,
[955.88] plumbers, many of these now outearn a
[958.48] lot of degree holders, and they do it
[960.48] without that debt. And it's not just
[962.44] some of the trades, either. I mean,
[963.64] we've seen some of the most valuable
[965.24] companies on Earth being built by men
[967.64] who walked away from college or never
[969.32] went at all. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs,
[971.44] Mark Zuckerberg. In tech especially,
[973.96] many employers now care a lot less about
[975.88] your degree and more about what you can
[977.92] build. A whole generation is now smartly
[980.4] asking whether the diploma is worth what
[982.92] it costs. And And young men, they're
[985.64] acting on that question first, skipping
[987.8] college in bigger numbers. So, when a
[989.6] capable 18-year-old skips an overpriced
[991.92] English degree and finds a paying career
[994.2] that didn't need college,
[996.08] that's not someone failing. That's
[998.04] someone reading the market correctly and
[1000.08] getting out of a bad deal before it
[1001.8] happens.
[1002.92] He looked at the options, and he took
[1004.6] the best path. Still, this rosier story
[1008.04] it mostly belongs to the young man who
[1009.72] could have gone to college and chose not
[1011.44] to. Not the ones who needed an education
[1014.08] that they never got. So, the takeaway,
[1016.64] why are so many young men skipping
[1018.08] college?
[1019.16] Some of them are making a smart move,
[1021.4] but a lot of them, they just don't mesh
[1023.52] with school. There isn't one boy crisis
[1025.92] here, but two, almost opposite ones.
[1028.52] Different young men with completely
[1030.079] different problems, and only one of them
[1031.959] fixes itself.
[1033.48] And for our society,
[1035.0] to many raising the alarm can sound like
[1037.28] taking something away from girls when
[1039.28] it's really just admitting that the
[1040.839] finish line has changed. Look, men and
[1043.04] women are more similar than they are
[1044.319] different. But those differences,
[1046.52] they're fascinating. And it's a topic I
[1048.4] keep coming back to. I made another
[1050.2] video asking a question that gets some
[1052.28] people going before they even hear the
[1053.84] answer.
[1054.92] Are women bad at math?
[1057.56] This video will make you smarter, but
[1059.36] not necessarily at math.
[1061.36] I'm Ken Lacourt. I tried my best to keep
[1063.48] my thumb off the scale and give you a
[1065.0] fair look at all this. I hope it was
[1066.88] worth your time. Thanks for watching.