Men are falling behind in college enrollment. Here’s what one N.J. school is doing about it.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said Montclair State’s Male Enrollment and Graduation Alliance was launched in 2020. It was created in 2022. Daniel Jean’s title has also been updated. He is the university’s assistant provost for special programs.

On a recent weekday morning, Daniel Jean stood on a stage in a conference room at Montclair State University and asked the crowd to stand.

Before him were dozens of rows of young Black and Hispanic boys bused in from high schools in nearby Paterson, Jersey City and Newark.

“They believe one out of three of us will go to jail,” Jean’s voice boomed from the microphone, reciting an often-repeated, decades-old statistic about Black men. “One. In. Three.”

Jean, an assistant provost at Montclair State, then asked the roughly 300 young men to loudly repeat two motivational phrases: “I am unstoppable. I will achieve.”

The boys were at the public university in Essex County for the Educational Opportunity Fund Boys to Men Future College Graduate Conference, hosted by the university’s new Male Enrollment and Graduation Alliance, or MEGA.

The alliance’s goal is simple — encourage young men to attend and graduate from college.

Women have been steadily outpacing men in college enrollment and graduation for decades. In 2022, there were three women for every two men enrolled in college, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. And Black and Hispanic men especially lag behind their white peers.

But experts note that it’s not that the number of men are declining in college enrollment — rather, women are just consistently enrolling at a higher pace than their male counterparts. In New Jersey, women made up about 56% of enrolled college students in two- and four-year schools, while men made up about 44% of students in 2020-2021, according to the latest available state data.

At Montclair State University, the gender gap is even wider — 64% of enrolled students in the fall of 2020 were women, according to data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS.

Although it’s not a new trend, the gender gap on college campuses has concerning long-term implications, from declining marriage rates to rising extremism and violence among men without college educations, experts say. Some worry the combination of the pandemic and the previous widespread availability of low-paid jobs has discouraged many men from pursuing college or finishing their degrees.

Colleges nationwide, including some in New Jersey, have started to step up their recruitment of men — especially young Black and Hispanic teens — to help keep a gender balance on campus.

Some Christian schools have introduced new sports teams to recruit more male students, according to Christianity Today, while other colleges are simply lowering acceptance standards for male applicants, according to the the Hechinger Report, an education news service.

At Montclair State, the university’s event for young men this month was both a slick sales pitch — advertising the school’s small class sizes, athletic opportunities and test-optional application process — and an earnest appeal to the students in the room that education is a crucial path forward for many, regardless of which college they attend.

Launched in October 2022 by Jean and his co-lead Carolina Gonzalez, an assistant dean, MEGA helps host events and develop recruitment pipelines from local high schools. The group also collects and analyzes data, raises community awareness and provides students with information.

“In certain communities, you get more credit from coming out of jail than you do from graduating college,” said Jean, who serves as an assistant provost for special programs at Montclair State. “So, we’re trying to address that mindset. And part of it is, we hope these scholars can understand they have unlimited potential.”

The Montclair State event included students from low-income schools in urban areas. Superintendents, principals and school counselors received emails inviting their students to the event.

Jean is familiar with the environment some of the students come from. Raised in Newark, Jean’s high school best friend died shortly after graduation from street violence, he said. His own experience highlights the importance of boys having mentors in their lives, he said.

Jose Aviles, the principal of Barringer High School in Newark — where 79% of students are economically disadvantaged, according to state data — spoke at the conference. He described growing up in the projects in Brooklyn and seeing the impact of gun violence.

“I have two brothers. They chose prison, I chose college,” Aviles told the students. “Sounds familiar? How many of you guys are in there, in a similar situation?”

In New Jersey, women outnumber men in college enrollment in every racial group, but the size of the gap varies. Asian students have the smallest gender gap in the state. In 2020, 5% of enrolled college students in the state were Asian women, while 4.6% of all students were Asian men, according to state data.

But the gender gap nearly doubles for Black students. Black women account for 8.4% of enrolled college students in New Jersey, while Black men only make up 4.5% of the state’s students.

The gender gap has massive implications, said Claudia Buchmann, a sociology professor at Ohio State University and the co-author of “The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools.”

Its causes are complicated and varied, she said. Boys graduate from high school at a lower rate, and historically, there are more jobs for men in the labor market that don’t require degrees, so they have less incentive to enroll in college.

Whatever the reasons for the declining percentage of men in college, the consequences are widespread.

“Increasingly, to have a middle class quality of life, you need two income earners in the household,” Buchmann said. “Good paying jobs require a college degree. So, this is impacting American families, it’s having an impact on marriage rates and family stability.”

It’s not only diminishing the United States’ global competitiveness in higher education, but it’s also worsening what’s been referred to as a crisis of masculinity, Buchmann said. Some young men are increasingly turning to violence, political divides and extremism, she said.

“All these young men who are on shooting sprees and angry, and part of it is because they were, for many, many decades, led to believe that they’re on top of the hierarchy, simply because they’re men,” she said. “And now, they’re falling and have no sort of motivation or passion, and they’re angry.”

Reduced education is also tied to higher incarceration for men. In 2010, a third of young Black men who dropped out of high school were incarcerated, according to a report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

“By the end of 2015, the Black-white gap in incarceration for high school dropouts was substantially larger than the gap among those with some college education or more,” the report said.

At the university’s event, many students said they were receptive to the speakers’ encouragement, finding their information and stories helpful. Some said they already planned to attend college.

Shaied Uddin, 17, attends John F. Kennedy High School in Paterson and was accepted to Montclair State, where his older sister already attends. He said he plans to study computer science.

But, not everyone from his school is interested in pursuing a college education, which can be “kind of demoralizing,” Uddin said.

The lack of Black and Hispanic male students on college campuses is “overwhelming,” Jean said.

“Once we make an observation, we have an obligation that we have to do better, we have to do more,” he said.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Brianna Kudisch may be reached at bkudisch@njadvancemedia.com.