I’ve been planning to write about retaining men for several weeks. I had it all planned out. I’d chart the number of times in the past five years that male retention rates have lagged behind female retention rates, suggest that this might be an issue for us to address, clap my hands together, and publish the post. Then I looked closer at the numbers behind those pesky percentages and thought, “Now this will make for an interesting conversation.”

But first, let’s get the simple stuff out of the way. Here are the differences in retention rates for men and women over the last five years.

It looks like a gap has emerged in the last four years, right? Just in case you’re wondering (especially if you looked more carefully at all five years listed in the table), “emerged” isn’t really the most accurate word choice. It looks like the 2013 cohort was more of an anomaly than anything else since the 2012 cohort experienced the starkest gap in male vs. female retention of any in the past five years. Looking back over the three years prior to the start of this table, this gap reappears within the 2011, 2010, and 2009 cohorts.

But in looking more closely at the number of men and women who enrolled at Augustana in each of those classes, an interesting pattern appears that adds a least one layer of complexity to this conversation. Here are the numbers of enrolled and retained men and women in each of the last five years.

Do you see what I see?  Look at the largest and smallest numbers of men enrolled and the largest and smallest numbers of men retained. In both cases, we are talking about a difference of about 20 male students (for enrolled men: 304 in 2016 for a high and 285 in 2015 for a low; for retained men, 253 in 2016 for a high and 232 in 2012 for a low). No matter the total enrollment in a given first-year class, these numbers seem pretty consistent. By contrast, look at the largest and smallest numbers of women enrolled and retained. The differences between the high and the low of either enrolled or retained women are much greater – by almost a factor of five.

So what does it mean when we put these retention rate gaps and the actual numbers of men and women enrolled/retained into the same conversation? For me, this exercise is an almost perfect example of how quantitative data that is supposed to reveal deep and incontrovertible truth can actually do exactly the opposite. Data just isn’t clean, ever.

Situating these data within the larger conversation about male and female rates of educational attainment, our own findings begin to make some sense. Nationally, the educational attainment gap between men and women starts long before college. Men (boys) finish high school at lower rates than women. Men go to college at lower rates than women. Men stay in college at lower rates than women. And men graduate from college at lower rates than women. So when the size of our first-year class goes up, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the increase in numbers is explained by a disproportionate increase in women.

Finally, we have long known (and should also regularly remind ourselves) that retention rates are a proxy for something more important: student success. And student success is an outcome of student engagement in the parts of the college experience that we know help students grow and learn. On this score, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that we ought to focus more of our effort on male students. I wrote about one such example last fall when we examined some differences between men and women in their approaches toward social responsibility and volunteering rates. A few years back, I wrote about another troubling finding involving a sense of belonging on campus among Black and Hispanic men.

I hope we can dig deeper into this question over the next several weeks.  I’ll do some more digging into our own student data and share what I find. Maybe you’ve got some suggestions about where I might look?

Make it a good day,

Mark