My 12-year-old daughter insists girls are smarter than boys, and the data about who goes to college these days make me wonder if she isn’t on to something.

Without getting into a discussion of genetics and intelligence, she’s right about the nation’s colleges, where almost 57 percent of students are women.

If the numbers were reversed, deep thinkers would be calling for massive government action. Even now, programs for females, who make up only 49 percent of the 18- to 24-year-old population nationally, far outnumber those for boys.

Before the PC police put me in the gulag, let’s be clear: Boys’ underachievement does not result from the discrimination that once held women back.

No one is suggesting we return to an era where girls’ needs are secondary. But somebody, somewhere, better start thinking about boys. They are now the pressing problem.

Simply put, a 21st-century society in which men are much less educated than women will face serious problems:

l Strong minds rather than strong bodies are the coin of the realm in the global economy. If the male population can’t compete in a highly sophisticated, high-tech economy, the country overall will suffer.

l A nation of men with inferior intellectual backgrounds and economic prospects will likely be one of lower marriage and higher divorce rates.

That’s a problem because the data show that higher marriage rates are the most efficient tool to reduce poverty and pathology in society.

In fact, this situation is already playing out today in the African-American community, where the gender imbalance in education is a “disaster” for the black family, said Theodore Shaw, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

His point is that already, with an even larger share of African-American college students being female than among whites, black women complain there is a dire shortage of marriageable men.

Little more than a third of black women are married, a driver of the black community’s greater poverty and social problems. Almost six in 10 white females are married.

Yes, there are millions of families, even now, in which the wife brings home the bacon and the husband takes care of home and hearth. But as a societal model the idea of the woman as the primary breadwinner, and the husband as tending more to domestic needs, is problematical, especially for raising children.

Moreover, there is a need to understand what the country will face if this trend continues unchecked, and to figure out how to cope with the changes that will be required.

Here’s an indication. Women are now a majority of medical students, and this is reshaping the profession. The Council on Graduate Medical Education has revised its forecast to warn that the United States will face a shortage of doctors.

“Women don’t spend as many years of practicing medicine” as do men, said Dr. Michael Fleming, president of the American Academy of Family physicians. “It’s common sense. Women go to med school and have babies, and a percentage work less than full-time or don’t work at all for a time” to care for their children.

There are no easy answers to why the gender imbalance in college exists, much less what to do about it.

U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige says the gender imbalance in college “is something we need to be interested in,” but he doesn’t have any ideas about what to do.

Unfortunately, at this point, no one else seems to either. At the very least, we need to start thinking about the subject.

Peter A. Brown is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel.