The boy crisis nobody talks about

Friends —

Today’s post is sponsored by Surfshark VPN.

In America, women earn 58% of college degrees. Men … just 42% . That’s the lowest share ever recorded.

When the numbers for women were lower, the country treated it as a problem to solve. We instituted Title IX and held investigations, and there was a national push to get girls into universities and STEM programs. It worked spectacularly well. Women’s enrollment was even with the guys in 1982, then blew right past it.

But now that the gap is bigger in the other direction, there are no laws, no commissions, nothing. I think a lot of it is timing. Because we heard for decades that we need to help girls, it’s now something we just continue to accept as fact. When someone suggests boys might need help now, a lot of people hear that as taking something away from girls.

And college is just the end of a pipeline that starts at four years old. Boys get expelled from preschool at four and a half times the rate of girls, and they make up two-thirds of the lowest GPAs in the country — while scoring about even with girls on standardized tests. Grades measure whether you sat still and turned the homework in, and that’s the exact thing boys are slowest to develop.

Some of these young men aren’t failing at life, though. College costs several times what it did a generation ago, plenty of degrees no longer earn back what they cost, and men in the skilled trades are out-earning a lot of degree-holders, without college debt. An 18-year-old who does that math and picks the paycheck over the diploma made a smart call.

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But he’s the kid who had college as an option and didn’t pick it. He’s not the kid who got expelled at four. Those are two very different boys with two very different problems. Only one of them is going to be fine without any help from us.

I made a video about everything I learned, and you can check it out here.

Thanks to Surfshark VPN for sponsoring this newsletter!

The threats you don’t see coming are the ones that get you.

On a recent international trip, I found myself at the airport, and I realized how vulnerable all our information is when we travel. Logging on to airport WiFi to do some work, scanning a QR code at a restaurant, checking accounts from a hotel lobby … any of those moments can expose passwords, financial accounts, and personal data to anyone else on that network. Most people don’t think twice about it. But 1 in 4 public WiFi networks lacks sufficient encryption, and crowded spaces are prime hunting grounds for fake hotspots designed to steal your information.

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There are a lot of bad actors trying to steal your data and your money. Surfshark hunts down the threats before they reach you.

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And also … What if Hitler had won World War II?

I’ve watched a few “what if Hitler won” videos, and they’re all a bit fantastical — more dystopian novel than history. I wanted to do a clearheaded version, because the real story doesn’t need any embellishment. Hitler wrote his plans down, in detail, with maps.

The part I can’t shake is how close it came. At least three times, one different decision would have handed him all of Europe. In December 1941, German scouts were fifteen or twenty miles from the Kremlin, close enough to see Moscow through field glasses. We like to think the good guys were always going to win, but that’s not necessarily true.

Here’s my takeaway, though. The Reich probably would have cracked eventually. The money was fake, the empire ran on conquest, and the leadership was a pit of vipers. But “eventually” is doing a lot of work there. The difference between a regime that rots on its own in fifty years and one you stop in 1945 can be measured in tens of millions of dead and a lot of misery.

Freedom wasn’t inevitable. People chose it, in specific moments, and they could have chosen otherwise. Check out my video on that possible alternate history and let me know what you think.

– Ken