I didn't slog through all 11 pages of letters, sorry, but those of you who focused on time hit the nail on the head. It's not just the working poor, either. There are plenty of middle-class families, especially when both parents work, that are just too exhausted to cook "real food" when they get home, plus they may get home with the kids at 6:00 or 6:30 and don't want to eat at 8:00 pm.

Now, there are ways to minimize this (boneless chicken breasts! The crock pot! The pressure cooker! The roast potato!) but I think that the proliferation of The Cult Of Good Food has worked against people realizing this. I could be wrong, but the well-equipped and prepared kitchens in cooking shows, the endless lectures on RIght and Wrong cooking styles may have led many people to think that cooking is difficult and complex and takes forever. In fact, most people could probably produce a simple, healthy meal from mostly scratch in 30-40 minutes but are too paralyzed by anxiety to even try that. I have many times seen my students bypass the fresh broccoli to buy frozen because the frozen broccoli has instructions.

I love to cook and I love food, but there are many factors that keep people dependent on fast food.

Here's what I haven't gotten about the "boy crisis":

The argument seems to be: the classroom is female-oriented because it demands sitting, listening, taking notes, none of which is a male strong suit, so boys are having problems.

This is what I'm not getting: and this situation is different from the pre-1970's era, when men ruled, how exactly? I was in school in the 1960's and 1970's and there was even more sitting, etc. than schools have today. So how have schools somehow suddenly failed boys? By letting girls compete with them? By changing the curricula in female-oriented ways? And if the change is mostly to encourage girls to follow male-oriented pursuits, how can that have harmed men? If males don't value education in the same numbers as women, does this necessarily mean that education is wrong and that the education-rejecting men are right?

"Fifty years ago I was riding in the elevator of building 7 at MIT. A world-renowned Bio researcher and professor told us (students) that although we thought we were pretty smart, the truly smart didn't waste their time in college."

Fifty years ago you might not have needed a Ph.D. to do research in Biology. Times have changed.

My reasons for why 42% of college enrollees are male?

First: From where do you draw that particular statistic? It's not that low at my institution so knowing the origin of the stat would be useful.

I don't know why fewer men than women are going to college. I don't have stats on why. I don't think anyone has those stats. There are a lot of speculations, but remember stats are numbers. The interpretation of the numbers are what you want. With complex situations, a single, simple interpretation is not likely and if that interpretation is your goal, you're bound to be disappointed.

I think however it's easy to see a number like 42% and assume that fewer males are going to college than before. It may be that now that females have unlimited access to education that they simply are more interested in it than men or that they have fewer obstacles in some ways than men, but that doesn't mean fewer men are going...they just have more female company. If those are the cases, then what I think you want is to define what opens up education to women and see if you can use that information to help men.

It is clear that more women are college-bound than men and that this trend is spilling into professional schools and in areas formerly male dominated...a recent awards ceremony at my institution gave high awards in chemistry and physics to female students. I don't think most professional schools are very lecture and classroom-heavy, so the idea that classrooms are anti-male wouldn't explain that.

It's not clear to me whether more women than men WANT to go to college, or if men are being shut out by better-prepared women. That would seem to be important in figuring out reasons.

Ph.D.s are in large part "union cards" for research-oriented work, so people who want to do research often get them. I never said that a Ph.D. is the ultimate proof that you're smart, although there is more to getting one that just sticking your nose to the grindstone. But there are plenty of creative, brilliant Ph.D.s (Robert Sapolsky comes to mind) and my best friend is a creative, brilliant mandolin maker who never went past high school. He did an apprenticeship with a mandolin maker, I did one (which is what grad school is basically) with a researcher.

I am going to continue to disappoint RF, I see. I am not entirely convinced that there is a huge drop in the absolute numbers of men going to college. As to why more women than men go to college, I don't know so I can only generate possibilities. It seems clear that there are large chunks of males who find the idea of college to be "sissy" or in the case of some minorities, "white". My older male colleagues think that there is a macho, anti-education bias in a lot of young men. This would seem to be more of an issue of traditional sex roles than of misandry. It's my sense that misandry is mostly an issue in child custody. I am hard-pressed to see it in action on a college campus, and I honestly can't speak to the experience on a high-school campus.

I am indeed a psychology professor. I am actually well-regarded on campus by colleagues and students. And I'm not going to engage in an insult-fest, so my posting is ending here.

I don't get it. Did I miss something?