The Missing Men of UNC

Walk into almost any undergraduate classroom in the UNC System today, and one thing becomes immediately apparent: Men are often a minority. This is not something announced in orientation materials or highlighted in strategic plans, but it is visible in lecture halls, student organizations, and group projects across campus. What once felt like a subtle shift has become harder to ignore, raising a basic but surprisingly under-asked question about public higher education in North Carolina: Where have all the male students gone?

When I arrived at UNC-Chapel Hill freshman year, I wasn’t thinking much about gender ratios, nor did anyone suggest I should. But, over time, in lecture halls, student organizations, and study groups, the imbalance became harder to ignore. It was discussed, mostly, in terms of dating. My friends would talk about the 60:40 ratio of female to male students, complaining there weren’t enough guys to go around. Male students were fewer, often more dispersed, and sometimes less engaged with campus life. At first, I assumed this was simply a quirk of my own experience. Only after stepping back did I realize that this pattern extended far beyond one campus, reflecting instead a broader and largely unexamined shift within North Carolina’s public universities.

That sense of imbalance is confirmed when enrollment data across the UNC System are examined more closely. At many universities, women now account for more than 60 percent of the undergraduate population, a proportion that would have been difficult to imagine even a generation ago. Of the 16 institutions in the UNC System, only three are not majority female, and even there the undergraduate populations are roughly evenly split between men and women. That short list of exceptions—Elizabeth City State University, North Carolina State University, and UNC Charlotte—underscores how widespread the imbalance has become across the system. Regardless of geography, mission, or student-body size, most UNC campuses are moving in the same direction. This shift is not the result of a single admissions cycle or a short-term disruption but is part of a longer-term trend that has quietly reshaped campus culture. The more pressing question is not whether the imbalance exists but what has changed in the pathways to college and why those changes appear to be affecting young men so pronouncedly.