(Soft music) The cost for college has just skyrocketed where many of our families cannot afford it.

These are positions that we need, right?

We can’t exist as a country without those specialty careers.

We can do something about that to control those costs at a time when everything is so expensive, we can make college more affordable and accessible.

And we’ve taken that approach in Michigan in a really aggressive way.

We’ve got to show them that the world is theirs to have as well, and find pathways for them to reengage.

I think that will lead to less radicalization across the board, which we’ve been seeing in our country really grow.

I’ve chosen the path to go to college because the majority of males in my family, they didn’t attend college.

I haven’t really thought about going to college, but I would definitely go to a trade school to learn.

It’s really important for the future of all of our communities that whether it’s skills training, professional certification, going to a two year college or four year college, that men choose to invest in themselves.

Education is an important pillar of society’s foundation.

It heightens the ability to build a skilled workforce, provides economic growth opportunity, and reduces crime and poverty, just to name a few benefits.

But an ongoing decrease in male enrollment is creating worry among state and national leaders.

Today, we explore men’s feelings on education and what Michigan is doing to keep them in the classroom.

(Soft intense music) Over the past several decades, the U.S.

has seen a decline in male enrollment, when it comes to higher education.

2024 research shows there’s 2.4 million more female undergraduates than males on U.S.

campuses, and 45,000 fewer boys are graduating high school every year compared to girls.

These trends aren’t just happening nationally.

In 2025, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive directive, expanding access to college and trade schools for males.

Proposing the largest CTE investment in Michigan history.

So we built these great programs open to everyone, but we need to do a better job of getting more young men signed up.

The directive supports the governor’s sixty by 30 goal: to increase the percentage of Michigander’s with a post- secondary degree or certificate to 60% by 2030.

So we went straight to the source, speaking with Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist, about what this all means.

The directive was very simple.

You know, we want men to be able to stay in Michigan and succeed.

And part of success means having access to a full set of options for how to participate in the economy.

All of the jobs that are going to be available today and going forward.

The ability to start a business and to be able to build something that you’re proud of in Michigan.

But there’s work to do, and that’s why we’ve decided to focus on this important element of what we need to make sure Michigan can be at its best and at it’s strongest and be a leader in the economy going forward.

One of these programs includes Michigan Reconnect, which allows Michiganders 25 and older, to receive tuition-free associate degrees or skill certificates.

While more than 66,000 people have enrolled in the program, the governor’s office says women outnumber men two to one.

But we see participating in these programs that we’ve created to make those pathways as really essential and enough men have not been participating in it thus far.

You know, we have men lagging almost 20 percentage points behind women in terms of pursuing or enrolling in college six months after graduation from high school.

Well, that’s a problem that we can actually do something about.

So this executive directive was about asking all of our state departments and agencies to find a way to be able to more directly influence and reach men and open them up to the options and possibilities that higher education and that skills training and certifications can make available to them and to be aggressive about it.

And we’re looking forward to seeing those interventions really come into play here in this coming school year.

It raises the question, with a record amount of aid and support programs in place, coupled with an emphasis on marketing to boys and men, why aren’t males grabbing as quickly at these opportunities?

We don’t exactly know why.

We know that women have done better academically for a long time.

Women tell us they feel better, safer, more accomplished in academics than men identify.

Again, why that is is unclear.

Ryan Fewins-Bliss is the executive director at MCAN, the Michigan College Access Network.

His team has partnered with the state to address these issues.

MCAN is about systems change, so we’re trying to fix the systems that are causing the barriers to exist or the systems that are barriers themselves in higher education.

Since 2009, 2010, enrollment in all types of institutions, women have outpaced men.

For so many years, men outpaced women, and we were trying to make sure we were doing stem for women and programs for women to make sure we could balance that out.

And then the lever switched, and suddenly it’s more women by far than men.

What stands out to me is programs that traditionally in the past would have been perhaps not geared toward men, but men would naturally be inclined to join like the Michigan Reconnect Program, all of those programs are still dominated by women.

There’s some real wins in that, right?

That these women are breaking into fields that they should be, but we’re clearly missing the men still.

There’s definitely a feeling among a male population in this country that they’ve been left behind.

And I think academics is one of the places where they feel left behind.

It’s not for them, they’re not right for it.

It doesn’t do anything for them.

They pay a lot of money and don’t get a return on investment.

A lot of those are steeped in myths, but it’s hard to tell someone who’s feeling it that what you’re feeling is a myth.

This is going to be be kind of a hard question to answer, I’m sure.

But how affordable is college right now?

Because we’ve seen an increase in aid, I feel like there’s...would it be correct to say there’s more aid than ever before available?

In Michigan, there is more aid than ever before, absolutely.

If you live in a community college district in the state, you go for free.

If you don’t live in a community college district, you go for the cost of the difference between the community college in district rate and the out of district rate.

If you qualify for the Michigan Achievement Scholarship, you can go to a public or a private university and get up to $5,500 taken care of.

There’s all sorts of other programs, we have 14 operational promise zones in the state.

We have the Kalamazoo promise, we have other scholarship programs, we have community foundation scholarships.

It’s never been this affordable in terms of aid.

It has been cheaper, which feels more affordable, certainly where you could work over the summer and earn up all of your tuition money for the entire year and be taken care of.

That obviously can’t happen anymore.

College is ridiculously expensive.

I mean, it was already expensive when I went to college.

I was a freshman at the University of Michigan in the year 2000, and I’m a scholarship kid, like that’s the only way that I got to Michigan to be able to afford to get two engineering degrees, my parents couldn’t afford that.

That’s why we’ve done programs like, just yesterday I talked about a program called Ticket to Tuition, where we awarded kids just for filling out their FAFSA form between $10,000 and $50,000 scholarships to go to colleges in Michigan.

At the announcement we had a young woman who’s going to Grand Valley State to study nursing.

We had a young man who’s going to Wayne State to be pre law.

We had a young woman who’s going to Michigan State.

So these are people who are now that we’ve removed money as the barrier between them and higher education, they’re looking now to pursue it here in the state of Michigan.

But we have work to do to make sure that’s accessible to everyone.

It breaks my heart when I see families or young people, especially young men saying that they’re not even going to consider college because they cannot afford it.

We used to think that the biggest barrier was affordability.

It is still a big barrier.

But what we have learned as we have increased the state based financial aid in Michigan by almost 400% over the last five years, is it is not necessarily the biggest or only barrier.

Folks have children of their own.

They have transportation issues.

They’re housing instable.

They’re food instable.

There’s these other things that if you don’t solve those problems, even if you pay for the tuition to go to college, it doesn’t solve the larger issue of being able to access it.

And so that has been a trend we have seen dramatically grow.

Colleges have been really great about understanding these basic needs struggles that students have, mental health care is part of that as well.

I think every college in the state has launched some sort of programs, food pantries, housing assistance, all sorts of stuff.

You know, you blow a tire and you need $600 immediately, they have emergency funds, they get this problem.

It’s not going to solve all the problems, so communities also need to wrap our arms around these students.

And as we look at folks like community foundations, which have traditionally given scholarships to students, we’re asking them to shift their thought about how they invest, and maybe it’s some of these other ancillary services where the real need is.

If we have free community college like we do in the state, for those in district and we have great financial aid, the investment from private scholarship providers is less, but the investment in these other basic needs infrastructure is more.

So trying to fix that system in that way.

Have you seen disparity in the access that people are able to get?

Whether that’s by race, maybe geographic location, I guess, interest in industry.

Yeah, disparity abounds in our system.

First generation college going students, those are those whose parents didn’t go to college, come in with a lot of deficits.

A lot of assets as well, but some deficits.

Students of color, and low income students, we see a lot of similarities between like, inner city urban Detroit students, and students from Huron County in the thumb.

They don’t look alike, their experience is different, but their access and their barriers are similar because of some of the disparities that we see across the state.

For a long time, we would say the system is broken.

It’s not working the way it was supposed to.

What we have learned is the system is not broken.

It is actually designed exactly how it is operating now to keep a certain segment of society out.

Folks that, you know, back in the 1700s, people decided weren’t worthy of a college education or didn’t need a college education.

That’s still happening in 2025.

Major disparities.

So MCAN’s role is trying to tear down those barriers at the systems level.

The problem is not the student, the problem is the system.

So what our colleges are doing, what our governments are doing, what are K12 institutions and districts are doing, that’s where the barriers lie.

And I want to be clear, it’s not usually people at the lead of those organizations saying, we’re going to actively put up barriers for these students.

It’s built into the DNA of the system, things that have been existent for 100 years, perhaps.

And it’s hard to get them out.

It’s hard to get the gremlins out of those machines.

I’ve heard before, you know, school just isn’t for me, or school maybe isn’t for everyone.

How do you answer to, I guess, statements like that?

Well, every school is different, right?

There’s CTE programs in K12 schools.

There’s vocational programs and CTE programs in college.

The classroom doesn’t necessarily look look like a room of 30 people sitting at a desk.

I mean, folks who go into journalism are in studios and doing editing and, you know, cool, fun technological stuff.

Folks who go into auto repair are in a shop and they’ve got the cars up on the lift and they’re doing the work.

So I think we have not done a great job of communicating to students, especially men, that the classroom doesn’t exactly look the same as your high school classroom looked like.

We reject the dichotomy of sort of career versus college or trade school versus four year.

We know in Michigan’s economy, we need all of those things And so we really use the phrase the right match and fit for every student.

What is the right institutional match for a student and the right fit for them?

And that could include things like finances.

It could include things like personality and the ability to be far from home.

Academic rigor is certainly part of that.

But we think there’s a place for everybody.

This is something that Emmanuel Soloman Armstrong is working through with students at Grand Rapids Public Schools.

My intent is to make sure that we take as many hurdles away that are already set in front of students before they even enter our high schools.

And it started for me on a personal level, growing up in Detroit, graduating from Mumford High School and going to Western Michigan.

I found that even my personal experience, I found there weren’t too many people that looked like me at Western Michigan, right?

And so I took that experience into my position.

And now what we’re seeing is the cost for college has just skyrocketed where many of our families cannot afford it.

But the thing we do as counselors is to make sure that every student graduates with a plan, and that plan is not just your high school diploma.

As the counselor coordinator at GRPS, Armstrong’s offering students a pathway, to get ahead by learning ahead.

We’re sitting on the campus of Grand Rapids Community College, specifically Grand Rapids Learning Center, which is a high school that’s located on a college campus.

So as students are working towards a high school diploma, they’re also earning college credit, right?

So we understand that doing four years in high school, and then having that cutoff called graduation, and then navigating the system to enroll and participate and being on someone’s college campus as a freshman, we want to take some of the chance out.

So we’re very intentional about providing dual enrollment opportunities inside our high schools.

For Randon Beasley, Jr or as many call him, RJ, it’s an opportunity to create a vision for those behind him.

I’ve chosen the path to go to college because majority of males in my family, they didn’t attend college.

My mom was one of the first to go to college after graduating with five degrees, so I chose to keep following in her footsteps, to show the pathway for my nephews.

So what do you plan on majoring in and what career path are we looking at?

I plan on majoring in business with science pre-reqs to get into medical school.

So I’ll be graduating with roughly close to almost 40 college credits, so I’ll just need a year left to get my associate’s degree.

And then after that, it’ll take me two years to get my bachelor’s.

So the goal is to own medical clinics in every state, so 50 states, basically in the United States, and then also open up a foundation where I’ll be the head of that and the head of the medical clinics, and then also do consulting for school districts on how to deal with child behavior and how to implement it at such a young age.

So then more black African American males can be more emotionally, like, be able to be more, know how to control their emotions more and stuff and be able to express themselves without feeling like it’s bad to do it, basically.

On the other end of the classroom, Jason Cole feels confident he’s found his path through a passion of trade work.

I’ve been doing a little research and I think it’s a better option for me to go to a trade school to actually learn what I like to do.

I was going into trade school to do automotive technician.

I like, I have a history on cars and stuff.

I like a lot of cars.

I’ve been into them for a very long time, and that’s what I want to do.

I would choose a trade school over college because I like hands on learning, they’re actually showing me what I would be doing.

I will be trying to attend a trade school for automotive technician in the fall.

I’ll be certified in, like, six months.

I like to do it much quicker so I can learn more.

Armstrong says understanding the changing landscape is an important part of understanding male aspirations, and being able to support them in their desired directions.

A lot of us work 30 years inside a career, and we’re still paying that student loan back after we retire, right?

So if there’s not programs from the federal government that forgives our loans or things like that, a lot of us spend our careers not necessarily upside down, but we have extra debt that that we could help, you know, support our children, or we could, you know, do whatever we would like to do with extra income.

Many of us work full careers and retire, still paying that loan back that, you know, we may have taken out 30 plus years ago.

Now we’re in this age of technology where students can earn income before they graduate high school.

Social media, YouTube, video games, right?

Now, that may not be a career, but those are opportunities that some of us Generation X didn’t have, right?

And so we’re seeing the opportunity where students can earn early, and we’re also seeing that students can create their own businesses and they can create income.

They can have multiple streams of income by the time they graduate from high school.

So ultimately, students have the full option, if it’s a two year college, four year college, if it’s getting a credential, if it’s going to trade school.

Our job as educators, is to make sure that they’re aware, as the students are aware, and that their families are aware that these options exist.

Some of those options may have existed, but there was a stigma around not going to college and going into a trade.

But I would think that we need to be really conscious about the shift that we’re in right now.

The increasing cost of college puts a lot of our students in debt upon graduation with a college degree, right?

Versus going into automotive tech and that’s your passion.

Working as an apprentice or working underneath someone who’s been in that field for several years, that can open you up to open up your own business and provide jobs for more people who are interested in that.

There’s no right or wrong answer, but we do believe strongly that you need more than a high school diploma in today’s economy.

It is not debatable.

College makes a difference.

College is your best case into the middle class.

College will raise your wages.

We all have examples of that one student who’s not using their degree.

Of course, there are outliers, but overwhelmingly, the data says, your best in investment in yourself is a certificate or a degree from a college.

If you watch the wage chart, what’s really interesting, and this is what gets a lot of people, and I think this could get more men than women, you’re offered pretty high wages right now in our economy, coming right out of high school.

Even going into fast food, restaurant business, factory, wherever you can access without a whole lot of education.

It’s perhaps more money than you or your family has ever seen before.

It’s hard to say no to that.

But what we see is, if you watch the trend line, those wages do not grow very much.

And so as your life changes, you get a car, you want to go on vacation, you get a spouse and perhaps have children.

Your need for cash grows, but the wages become pretty stagnant in those positions.

When you have a certificate or a degree, it’s just, it’s remarkable.

The data on the chart just goes way up.

Your ability to earn wages over the course of your lifetime grows dramatically.

And those first years, we’ll see that going right into the workforce might be more money, long term we see having a certificate or degree is the investment.

Data doesn’t only apply to individuals, studies show education can lead to lasting benefits and even health outcomes for entire communities.

That’s why leaders today say they’re continuing to push against current systems, to find access points that work for all.

My message is college still matters.

No matter what you’re hearing in the media, no matter what you’re hearing on Facebook, no matter what you’re hearing from your uncle when you go to the family reunion, the data is clear.

What’s really cool about a community is all sorts of things change when more people in that community have gone to college.

Things that you wouldn’t necessarily equate with having college degrees and having more people with college.

So things like voting goes up.

Volunterism goes up.

Obesity goes down.

Smoking goes down.

Wages for everyone in the community goes goes up, even if they didn’t go to college.

So having a high attainment rate in a community is transformative for everybody.

It’s really exciting what we see happen when we get more people to go to college.

They’re entrepreneurs, they filled current jobs that are needed, they dream big, they start new things, they build families, they build wealth.

It’s what we want out of a middle class for our folks in this country.

Men and boys want to do things that matter.

They want to do things that are important, that feel important to them personally, that are important to their families, that are important to their communities.

They want to make sure they’re having an impact.

And so it’s up to us to make sure we can frame all the opportunities that are available in Michigan.

Ask things that matter and that are worth pursuing, because without that, our communities can’t grow and thrive economically.

So we have to make sure that we are positioning Michiganders positioning people, positioning our women and men who are our strongest assets in this state, to be ready to take full advantage of the opportunities that are available to them.

I think that everybody has a role to play in making sure that young men pursue every opportunity that’s available to them.

This is something that we in state government are taking and putting a unique point of emphasis on, but we all can do something.

Everyone in the community can make sure that every young man knows about opportunity.

Everyone in a school building can make sure every young man knows about every opportunity.

The women who love these men can make sure they know about these opportunities and invite them to participate.

Don’t berate them.

Just let them know what’s there.

And I think that if we all pitch in, we’ll all make a difference.

Years ago, positions that we hold would have had the name of guidance counselors.

We don’t call ourselves guidance counselors anymore.

We’re academic school counselors and our job is to make sure that every student that graduates has a plan for their post secondary success.

We don’t get in the business of saying that this path is right or this path is wrong.

Sometimes we put a lot of pressure on 17 and 18 year olds to figure out where they want to be at age 45 and 50, right?

The landscape has changed.

It has shifted, but it shouldn’t students and families shouldn’t see it as a filtering process where I’m not good enough for college.

You are.

You deserve college, and it’s our job as educators to make sure that we remove those barriers, so our students can fulfill their dreams that they have.

So as you get ready to go to college, are you excited about your future?

Yeah, I am, but I’m a little nervous, though.

The reason why I’m nervous is because I just don’t want to fail in life.

I want to make sure I’m able to accomplish everything that I said.

So I’m just trusting the process and just taking one day at a time.

Thanks for watching.

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