Why do boys underperform in school in comparison to girls? Looking for answers, I have been reading the extensive “boy problem” literature as well as talking to young men themselves.

The answers in the research literature vary, but school itself is a common concern. I have written about the baleful effects, especially on boys, of pushing academic work down to younger and younger ages. Education scholars have also explored other boy-unfriendly aspects of school, including grading practices that reward compliance and the differential effects of teacher gender on performance.

Young men, however, often bring up something else. Their problem is that they couldn’t understand the necessity of what they were being taught. As far as they could tell the only reason to care about verb forms or a history lesson or much else in the teach-to-the-test curriculum was to get good grades and get into college. When they dared to ask, those were the usual reasons they heard—neither of which they found meaningful or relevant, and certainly none that lit the fires of motivation.

Of course, in the larger story told by schools and colleges, high marks and the college track are crucial because they lead to well-paying jobs and personally enriching lifestyles. But even that standard justification is playing less well. The question of whether “college is worth it” no longer receives an automatic affirmation, and the “college-for-all” norm has been widely panned as a terrible idea. Yet, kids in school are still constantly being told that the “jobs of the future” require college degrees.1

For many boys, however, the extrinsic payoff of future employment doesn’t sound very meaningful or personally relevant either.

Why not?

When I asked a college student I’ll call Sam why far fewer men than women go to college, he wasn’t entirely sure. He noted that all of his male friends were in college. Ability at math, though, is one issue he thought crucial. If a young man is “good at math,” Sam explained, he might be able to envision a field and a line of work worth pursuing. The STEM fields........

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