Michigan officials discussed ways to better prepare the state’s boys and men for the future during a conference in Lansing Wednesday.
Speakers brought up issues like a lagging number of males going to college, or going on to work in health, education, and literacy jobs, known as HEAL professions.
Richard Reeves is a founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He said Michigan needs to focus more on hands-on learning and scholarships to show boys and men which careers are possible.
“One of the problems is that for a lot of boys and young men, they see many of the educational pathways as just not for them. They see them as female-coded, they see girls doing much better. They see colleges are now obviously skewing very female. So, I think it’s incredibly important for policymakers to do some real work around just the way these opportunities are presented,” Reeves said.
State numbers show females have led males in college enrollment for more than a decade.
In April, Governor Gretchen Whitmer directed the state to work on closing the education gap between men and women.
Reeves said policymakers should devote the same resources to closing gender gaps that disadvantage men as they do to gaps that hurt women. He argued not doing so allows male-centered social media accounts to fill that vacuum with misogynistic content.
“If we don’t do it and we don’t use policy to signal that we invest in our young men, then we shouldn’t be surprised if we then lose them to various people who are coming on to say, ‘They don’t care about you,’” Reeves told conference attendees at the Lansing Center Wednesday.
The event, called Moving Michigan Males Forward, was put on by the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Achievement, and Potential, or MiLEAP.
Jason Wilson is a deputy director with the department. He said scholarships and apprenticeship programs stood out to him as ways to address gendered gaps in learning. But he said people need to first care about boys and men falling behind in some areas before the state can make progress.
“None of that really gets activated at its peak level unless we as a state take this issue very seriously and care about it first and foremost and it becomes top-of-brain ... as something that we’re talking to our sons and our husbands and our brothers about,” Wilson told reporters.
Aside from Reeves’ keynote speech, Wednesday’s event also featured panel discussions on how to engage males in higher education and the labor market.
Onjila Odeneal is CEO of the Detroit Promise, a program that helps Detroit high schoolers cover trade school or college tuition. She said it should be easier to understand options for school or job training.
“Some of the smartest people that I have ever met ... are people who never went to college to date. And that’s because we didn’t create practical, simple pathways to navigate that are attached to real careers,” Odeneal said.
