Education
Few men on campus. NC college gender gap longstanding and growing
WFAE | By Kate Denning | Carolina Public Press
Published February 28, 2026 at 11:00 AM EST
Students walk across campus on Sept. 30, 2025, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Where are all the men? That’s the question the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal is asking in its new policy brief analyzing enrollment data, which found that women outnumber men at every UNC System institution but one — not including the North Carolina School of Science and Math, which was not part of the analysis.
The same trend holds true within the NC Community College system at large.
The “gender gap” rings true for higher education in general, and it has since the 1980s, but has grown more pronounced over time.
The brief found male and female enrollment was nearly 50-50 at both the UNC and NCCC systems in 1980, with women having a slight edge. While enrollment overall has increased since then, 2023 data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows men make up 41% of the UNC System undergraduate student body and 39% of the NCCC System.
At the individual UNC System institutions, every university saw a lesser percentage of men enrolled in 2024 than it had in 2015 with the exceptions of Elizabeth City State and Fayetteville State. Though male enrollment fell by nearly 5% from 2015, NC State remains the only university to enroll more males than females as of 2024 — by less than half of a percent.
slope visualization
Nationally, 20% of U.S. men finished college and just 14% of women in 1970. By 2010, the percentage of men who finished college reached about 27%, but the percentage of women skyrocketed to 36% by the same year, according to research published in 2025.
More recently, 2024 analysis from the Pew Research Center showed 47% of U.S. women ages 25 to 34 have a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of men of the same age.
Jenna Robinson, president of the Martin Center and co-author of the brief, told Carolina Public Press she was aware of the national enrollment trends happening on college campuses, but she didn’t necessarily think it had existed in North Carolina for as long as it has.
“We found what we expected — over the years, more women have been going to college than men,” she said. “One thing I didn’t expect, though, was that the imbalance goes back as far as it did. We collected data as far back as IPEDS has data broken down in this way. For as far back as you can go with these data, women have outnumbered men. I found that a little bit surprising.”
Why the gender gap in enrollment?
The explanation for the disparity in enrollment at North Carolina colleges today is that men simply aren’t applying at the same rates as women in the state. But the reason for boys’ seemingly lesser interest in higher education is where much of the debate lies.
“A gap in applications has existed for at least two decades, but it has notably widened in recent years,” the brief reads.
“In the 2024 academic year, 128,554 men applied for admission to a UNC System institution, while 201,877 women applied. It’s not that large numbers of male applicants want to attend college and are turned away; they have a disproportionate lack of postsecondary interest from the start.”
Part of the problem is boys’ current performance in K-12, Robinson said. They aren’t graduating at the same rate as girls, and they don’t score as well on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. But it also appears that boys and men just have different preferences.
The brief suggests a “broken education system” in which classrooms are more conducive to female learning could be the root, pointing to research that says girls are more inclined to sit still for longer lengths of time and are less affected by shorter recess periods. Reading material also tends to cater to girls’ interests more than boys’, it says.
When boys have experiences during their K-12 education that causes them to decide, for example, that they don’t like sitting at a desk or prefer to work with their hands, that can result in the decision to opt out of college, Robinson said. But as long as they have other goals and a means of achieving them, that fact alone isn’t necessarily cause for concern.
“If they want to go into the military or become an entrepreneur and start working right away, and they have a good plan and a good path, then I would say that’s not a problem,” she said.
“Having an imbalance on its own isn’t a problem. But if this is a bigger ‘failure to launch’ problem for boys, then that is something we should be concerned about.”
Associate Professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education Daniel Klasik told CPP there are convincing arguments that say the enrollment gap could be attributed to the “gendering” of careers like teaching and health care, which are traditionally female-coded jobs and require college degrees.
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