By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Ask what’s happening to boys and young men, and you’ll get two very different answers depending on who’s asked. One camp says the data is overstated, a moral panic dressed up in statistics. The other says boys are being failed, and failed on purpose, by institutions that built their rules around a different kind of student, worker, and defendant than the one actually showing up. The second version holds up better once you start pulling the actual regulations, enrollment tables, and mortality data — not because boys are uniquely victimized, but because a specific set of policy choices, made by name, by named agencies, on a documented timeline, have landed harder on boys and young men than on anyone else in the room.
That’s the version this piece is going to make the case for: not a vague cultural mood, but a stack of receipts.
“Not a vague cultural mood, but a stack of receipts.”
The Rules Nobody Balanced
Start with the one most easily traced to a specific decision, on a specific date, by a specific agency: campus due process.
For four years, the U.S. Department of Education’s 2020 Title IX regulations required schools to provide students accused of sexual misconduct — the “respondents,” in the law’s language — a live hearing, the right to cross-examine the complainant through an advisor, and a ban on using a single official as both investigator and judge of the same case. On April 29, 2024, the Department published a 423-page final rule that swept away those protections. Schools were newly permitted to resolve cases without a live hearing at all, to let a single Title IX coordinator serve as investigator, judge, and sole decision-maker, and to exclude certain categories of evidence from consideration even when that evidence was relevant. The new rule took effect August 1, 2024. Fewer than six months later, on January 9, 2025, a federal court in the Eastern District of Kentucky vacated the 2024 rule in State of Tennessee v. Cardona, in a ruling whose effect has been read as nationwide, finding it exceeded the Department’s statutory authority and ran afoul of the First Amendment and the Spending Clause — reinstating the 2020 rule’s due-process baseline in the meantime.
None of that back-and-forth is abstract to the students who lived through it. Title IX proceedings are overwhelmingly brought against male students — a pattern well-documented enough that, by 2022, a database tracking due-process lawsuits by accused students against their universities had logged 140 active cases nationally, brought by students who said campus tribunals denied them a fair hearing before ending their education. That’s not a claim about whether any individual complaint was true. It’s a claim about what happens when the procedural floor disappears: single-investigator models with no hearing requirement and no guaranteed cross-examination are, on their face, weaker due process than a live hearing with an independent decision-maker, for anyone accused of anything, in any venue. The 2024 rule made that trade explicitly, in writing, in the Federal Register. It is exactly the kind of transparent, citable policy record this publication’s sourcing standard is built to identify — not vibes about “the culture,” but a regulation with a docket number.
The Discipline Gap
The due-process story starts in college. The pattern that produces the students who end up there starts much earlier.
Federal Civil Rights Data Collection figures — the U.S. Department of Education’s own mandatory biennial survey of every public school district in the country — show boys have been suspended and expelled at roughly twice the rate of girls for as long as the data has been broken out by sex. In the 2013–14 collection year, 7.3 percent of male students received at least one out-of-school suspension, compared with 3.2 percent of female students — more than double. The gap starts before kindergarten: in the 2020–21 collection, boys were 54 percent of all preschool enrollment nationally but accounted for roughly 80 percent of preschool children who received an out-of-school suspension and 85 percent of those expelled — a four-year-old expelled from preschool is, four times out of five, a boy. Boys also make up roughly two-thirds of students receiving special-education services under IDEA, and account for about three-quarters of special-education students removed from the classroom for any duration, according to a 2025 analysis of IDEA discipline data.
“A four-year-old expelled from preschool is, four times out of five, a boy.”
This is not a claim that any individual suspension was unwarranted — plenty were for real safety issues, and the same federal data shows sharper, better-documented racial disparities layered on top of the sex gap that deserve their own scrutiny. But a consistent two-to-one gap, present at every age from preschool onward, across a data set the federal government itself collects specifically to monitor disparate discipline, is a policy-relevant fact about how zero-tolerance frameworks interact with how boys, on average, present behaviorally at young ages. A school system that suspends and expels boys at roughly double the rate of girls, starting in preschool, is making a structural choice about which children get instructional time and which get sent home — before any of those children have had the chance to demonstrate anything about their character.
The Classroom Gap That Follows
“This isn’t a story of boys checking out by choice.”
The downstream academic numbers are the ones most people already sense, even without the discipline data behind them. The OECD’s 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment found 15-year-old girls outperforming boys in reading in nearly every country tested, the U.S. included — a gap that matters because reading proficiency is one of the strongest known predictors of later college readiness. A 2019 U.S. Department of Education analysis found 46.4 percent of high school girls took an AP or IB course, compared with 37.8 percent of boys.
By college age the compounding is visible in enrollment tables. NCES data on 18-to-24-year-olds shows the enrollment-rate gap between men and women held at roughly 10 percentage points as of 2022, essentially unchanged from a decade earlier. Men now make up about 42 percent of undergraduate enrollment nationally as of fall 2025, down from a majority share as recently as 1970 — a crossover that happened in 1979 and has accelerated sharply since 2010. Men who do enroll complete four-year degrees at a rate roughly six points lower than women’s, per a 2023 analysis of NCES data — worth verifying against a direct NCES Digest of Education Statistics table before this figure carries the piece.
This isn’t a story of boys checking out by choice. A September 2025 University of Tennessee labor-economics analysis found the college-enrollment gap between young men and women was almost exactly matched by an employment gap running the other direction — men that age were more likely to already be working. The alternative on-ramp into skilled trades exists and is being used: men hold roughly 90 percent of active registered apprenticeship slots nationally, per 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics data. What hasn’t happened is any comparable public investment in making that path as visible, funded, or prestige-bearing as the four-year-degree track that boys are, on the data, less well set up by K-12 systems to complete.
The Weight Carried Alone
The mental-health picture deserves the same rigor applied everywhere else in this piece, including where it complicates a clean story.
The hard fact: men die by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women. CDC data for 2023 put the age-adjusted rate at 22.7 per 100,000 men versus 5.9 per 100,000 women. Among teenagers specifically, boys aged 15 to 19 are about 2.5 times more likely than girls the same age to die by suicide, even though girls that age are roughly 2.5 times more likely to attempt in a way that results in an emergency-department visit — a genuine puzzle in how boys’ crises surface versus how the system catches them.
The trend line complicates the crisis narrative in a way worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: a Jed Foundation analysis of CDC mortality data from 2021 through 2024 found youth and young-adult suicide rates falling across every age group from 10 to 24, driven largely by declining rates among boys and young men specifically, while rates among girls held statistically flat. The much-cited “male loneliness epidemic” statistic — a fivefold jump, from 3 percent to 15 percent, in men reporting zero close friends between 1990 and 2021 — comes from a single Survey Center on American Life poll. The American Institute for Boys and Men’s 2025 review of the wider evidence found men and women look similar on most standard loneliness measures, and that young men in particular often report lower loneliness than young women. The honest claim is narrower than the panic headline: men have thinner support networks and fewer close friendships, not a uniquely collapsing mental state relative to women — and getting that distinction right matters more than winning the argument.
“The honest claim is narrower than the panic headline.”
The Missing Variable
None of the above happens in a vacuum, and this publication’s beat sits at the center of the variable most often left out: family structure.
Census Bureau figures for 2023 show close to one in four American children under 18 — around 19 million children — living in a household without a resident biological, step, or adoptive father, the overwhelming majority living with their mother instead. Decades of research, going back to McLanahan and Sandefur’s foundational work comparing single- and two-biological-parent households, has found children raised with one parent score worse on average on reading and math measures and are more likely to leave school before completing it, independent of race or the parents’ own education level.
“An unenforced custody order is a structural failure whichever parent is excluded by it.”
This publication’s beat is the machinery that produces and sustains that absence — custody statutes, enforcement gaps, parenting-time orders that exist on paper and nowhere else. That machinery runs on the same standard applied throughout this piece: an unenforced custody order is a structural failure whichever parent is excluded by it. But given that roughly 85 percent of father-absent households are mother-headed, the aggregate weight of enforcement gaps in family court falls disproportionately on children missing a father specifically — which means every other gap catalogued above compounds on top of a home-life instability that starts before any of them.
What Follows
“It isn’t a story about boys being disliked. It’s a story about rules built without checking what those rules would do to boys.”
Put these five data sets next to each other — due process rules rewritten and then struck down within a year, a discipline gap present since before kindergarten, a reading and enrollment gap that starts in elementary school and compounds through a bachelor’s degree, a suicide rate four times higher even as it improves, and a family court system that structurally under-enforces the parenting time of the parent statistically more likely to be pushed out — and a pattern with an actual paper trail comes into focus. It isn’t a story about boys being disliked. It’s a story about a specific set of rule-writers, at specific agencies and in specific statehouses, building disciplinary codes, admissions pipelines, and custody-enforcement regimes without checking what those rules would do to the population of children, students, and defendants who happen to be male.
That’s a fixable category of problem, and fixing it doesn’t require agreeing on who’s to blame for the culture. It requires the Title IX due-process baseline to hold regardless of which administration is in office; it requires school discipline data broken out by sex to actually inform policy instead of sitting in a federal database nobody reads twice; and it requires custody enforcement to mean something on the day an order is violated, not just on the day it’s signed. Those are specific, auditable, achievable asks. They’re a better use of the energy currently going into arguing about who “demonized” boys in the first place.
“Those are specific, auditable, achievable asks.”
Sources: U.S. Department of Education, Final Rule, “Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance,” 89 Fed. Reg. 33474–33896, Docket ID ED-2021-OCR-0166 (Apr. 29, 2024), verified against the Federal Register’s official document record; State of Tennessee v. Cardona, Civil Action No. 2:24-cv-072-DCR (E.D. Ky., Jan. 9, 2025); CBS News/Title IX For All database of respondent due-process lawsuits (2022); U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2020-21 and 2013-14 Civil Rights Data Collection, school discipline tables; EDFacts/IDEA discipline data (2025 analysis); OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (2022); U.S. Department of Education (2019 AP/IB participation data); National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics and College Enrollment Rate indicators; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024 apprenticeship data); Carruthers and Verville, “Where Are the Young Men?,” Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research, University of Tennessee (September 2025); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, WISQARS and WONDER mortality data (2023–2024); The Jed Foundation analysis of CDC youth suicide trends, 2021–2024; American Institute for Boys and Men, “Male loneliness and isolation: What the data shows” (2025); Survey Center on American Life, “The State of American Friendship” (2021); U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (2023), as reported by N-IUSSP; McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent (1996).
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