Shifting Higher Education Demographics
Walking into my tutorials this term, I saw that yet again I was in a class of entirely girls. In my Comparative Literature, English, and Art History classes, I do not have a single tutorial with a male student in it. Nor do I have a male tutor. Around seminar tables and in lecture halls, the overwhelming presence is female. I joke with my friends that it feels like I go to an all-girls school. While I’m sure this varies depending on department, the university’s own demographic numbers echo the same reality: St Andrews currently sits at roughly a 60-40 split between women and men. Similar to how the data says 20% of St Andrews students are American, it feels like far more.
On my trip in the shuttle back from Edinburgh airport at the beginning of term, the driver, who had been ferrying students back all day, casually mentioned that out of six trips, he had driven only three male students total.
St Andrews, of course, is not unique. Across the UK and globally, women now outnumber men in higher education, particularly in the arts and humanities. According to data from the House of Commons Library, women are significantly more likely than men to attend university, more likely to complete their studies, and more likely to graduate with a first or upper second-class degree.
At first glance, this might seem like a feminist success story. Women are excelling academically, showing up in greater numbers, and claiming space in institutions that historically excluded them. But alongside this shift has emerged a parallel cultural narrative: that university degrees don’t mean as much anymore, that college is “overrated,” or that higher education simply isn’t worth the time or money.
These claims are especially loud in more conservative media spaces, where higher education is increasingly framed as impractical or unnecessary.
The timing of this rhetorical shift is worth interrogating. For decades, a university degree was positioned as the gold standard of success, a marker of seriousness, intelligence, and cultural value. That status did not disappear overnight. Instead, it seems to have begun to erode as more and more women came to dominate university spaces.
There are many explanations offered for why fewer men are attending university. Some argue it’s economic: tuition fees are high and student debt is daunting (however, this is equally the case for female students), and entering the workforce sooner can feel more appealing. Others point to early education, noting that boys tend to underperform girls in K–12 schooling, receive less encouragement for academic success, or disengage from classroom environments earlier. Still others suggest that girls are simply outperforming boys, and the numbers reflect that reality.
But none of these explanations fully account for the cultural withdrawal we’re seeing, particularly men opting out of female-dominated fields and institutions altogether.
Male Flight and the Loss of Prestige
This is where the concept of male flight becomes useful. Male flight theory describes the phenomenon in which men gradually abandon spaces once they become coded as female. The term is intentionally reminiscent of “white flight” which refers to the mass departure of white residents from neighbourhoods as people of colour move in, a process historically followed by those areas being framed as declining in value. Similarly, when women enter professions, hobbies, or academic fields in large numbers, men often leave, and the cultural prestige of those spaces diminishes.
Research backs this up. A 2010 study examining veterinary school applications found that for every one percent increase in the proportion of women in the applicant pool, 1.7 fewer men applied. The presence of one additional woman applicant deterred men more than a $1,000 increase in tuition. In 1969, men made up 89% of all veterinary students. By 2009, that number dropped to 22.4%.
While that study focused on a specific profession, the logic scales easily to higher education in general. As universities, especially humanities departments, become increasingly female, they risk being culturally reframed as less rigorous, less prestigious, and less valuable. This reframing doesn’t happen because the education itself has changed, but because who it is for has.
What makes this dynamic especially frustrating is that even as women outperform men in higher education, the workplace does not reflect the same shift. In the UK, male graduates earn around 6% more than female graduates one year after graduation. Rather than shrinking over time, this gap widens dramatically, reaching approximately 30% ten years into graduates’ careers. Men are also more likely to be in “highly skilled” employment or further study shortly after graduating, despite women’s higher rates of degree completion and academic achievement.
This creates a stark paradox. Women dominate education, but men continue to dominate its rewards. The very institution that was sold as the great equaliser fails to deliver equality once women become its primary participants. At the same time, that institution is being publicly devalued, dismissed as unnecessary or indulgent, a coincidence that feels increasingly difficult to ignore.
Historically, this pattern is not new. Industries like teaching, nursing, and care work all lost cultural and economic prestige as they became feminised, despite their essential social value. Higher education, particularly outside of STEM and business fields, now appears to be undergoing a similar transformation. As women fill lecture halls and classrooms, the narrative shifts from reverence to ridicule.
This theory doesn’t give us a clean answer or an easy fix. It’s not saying that all men are deliberately avoiding universities because women are there, or that education is being consciously stripped of its value. What it points to is something quieter and harder to pin down, the way gender shapes how we see certain spaces over time. As women make up an increasing share of the student body, it’s worth paying attention not just to the drop in male enrollment, but also to how the way we talk about university starts to shift along with it.
If higher education feels less prestigious or less essential than it once did, the explanation probably isn’t just rising tuition or a tougher job market. It might also have something to do with who occupies that space, and how quickly our assumptions about value change when a space is no longer dominated by men.