Opinion
Does admissions fairness make my campus look too female? By
Kate CohenContributing columnist|Follow authorFollowMarch 11, 2024 at 6:15 a.m. EDT
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That’s different, though. Those schools are doing what affirmative action is supposed to do: redress deeply embedded societal discrimination that has led to persistent inequality.
A law that helped end slavery is now a weapon to end affirmative action
When a liberal-arts college lowers its standards for boys — especially White boys — it gives an advantage to a population that has not suffered historical disadvantage and continues to enjoy outsize prominence in almost every professional sphere.
Men are overrepresented in Congress, in the judiciary and law, in medicine, in technology and in finance. Women make up only 44 percent of tenure-track faculty, 36 percent of full professors and 33 percent of college presidents. At every level of academia, they are paid less than men.
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All of which raises the question: Why doesn’t educational achievement translate to professional equality?
Women have enrolled in college at greater rates than men since the early 1980s. They get better grades, drop out less frequently and are more likely to earn a four-year degree. In other words, women in higher education have long been exceeding the criteria that men established for academic success.
So why do women still earn 82 cents to the male dollar?
Here’s my theory: Girls and women excel at school, which features ostensibly objective criteria of achievement — grades, scores, classes taken, honors received. I say “ostensibly” because these criteria remain deeply unfair; literally the richer you are, the higher your SAT score. Still, measurable criteria keep unconscious bias in check.
In the world beyond school, however, unconscious bias is rarely restrained by the guardrails of, say, GPAs. When we choose our political candidates and our chief executives, we deploy non-metrics such as “electability” and “leadership” — qualities traditionally ascribed to men.
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Colleges that tip their scales in favor of boys are bringing those biases to bear four years early, overriding the guardrails to create a student body that feels desirable. In “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” a 2006 essay for the New York Times, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, then the dean of admissions at Kenyon College, explained ruefully: “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”
Maybe that’s true. I can imagine parents downgrading a college when they see more women than men on the campus tour. I can imagine female applicants, accustomed to comprising half their high school class, balking at the idea of comprising two-thirds, even if their own accomplishments made it so. Even if the price of having an “attractive” gender ratio is accepting discrimination against themselves.
That entrenched bias is precisely why colleges should stop giving boys a boost. Every time colleges bend their criteria to keep from becoming “decidedly female,” they perpetuate the notion that there is such a thing as having too many female students — and by extension, too many women in any given space.
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The high-achieving girl who loses out to a slightly lower-achieving boy — at Brown University, say, where in the 2021-2022 application cycle, the acceptance rate was 4 percent for girls and 6.7 percent for boys; or at Vassar College, where in 2020, the acceptance rate was 23 percent for girls and 28 percent for boys — what happens to her?
She’s fine. Let’s face it, we’re talking about a very particular socio-educational group. Only 3 percent of four-year college students attend an institution as selective as Vassar (which accepts fewer than a quarter of applicants), and less than 1 percent attend one as selective as Brown (which accepts fewer than one-tenth). Our high-achieving reject doesn’t give up on college; she goes to a less selective one.
But it won’t be the last time she works harder than a boy to get not quite as far, based on what people imagine is the right amount of “female.”
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Wesleyan’s Roth defended the practice of tipping the scale toward a 50-50 gender ratio by invoking life after college: “I think when schools become unintentionally focused on one gender, they have a diminished capacity to prepare people for the world beyond graduation.” True. Women who get a fair shot at college might graduate unprepared to accept unfairness in their professional lives. Men who learn in female-majority spaces might graduate unprepared to assume they should be in charge.
Imagine that.
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When the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action last summer, some colleges immediately ended their practice of giving admissions boosts to the relatives of alumni — because, as Wesleyan University President Michael Roth explained, giving an advantage to people who were already advantaged was “a glaring sign of unfairness.”
But Wesleyan is one of many selective colleges that continue to give preferential treatment to another advantaged group: boys.
Girls constitute two-thirds of the top 10 percent of their high school classes and apply to college at a higher rate than boys. A college that receives more (and more-qualified) female applicants than male but desires a “balanced” student body has to lower its standards for boys — and raise standards for girls.
Will top schools continue ‘legacy’ admission preferences? Many say yes.
If you’re looking for gender parity on campus, “there’s not a lot you can do other than discriminate,” Charles Deacon, dean of admissions at Georgetown University, told the Hechinger Report.
Articles on this so-called affirmative action for men sometimes mention that girls get admissions boosts, too — when they apply to schools with an emphasis on science or technology, where girls are underrepresented in the applicant pool. Girls are twice as likely as boys to get into Caltech or MIT, to make up for the fact that they are half as likely to apply.
That’s different, though. Those schools are doing what affirmative action is supposed to do: redress deeply embedded societal discrimination that has led to persistent inequality.
A law that helped end slavery is now a weapon to end affirmative action
When a liberal-arts college lowers its standards for boys — especially White boys — it gives an advantage to a population that has not suffered historical disadvantage and continues to enjoy outsize prominence in almost every professional sphere.
Men are overrepresented in Congress, in the judiciary and law, in medicine, in technology and in finance. Women make up only 44 percent of tenure-track faculty, 36 percent of full professors and 33 percent of college presidents. At every level of academia, they are paid less than men.
All of which raises the question: Why doesn’t educational achievement translate to professional equality?
Women have enrolled in college at greater rates than men since the early 1980s. They get better grades, drop out less frequently and are more likely to earn a four-year degree. In other words, women in higher education have long been exceeding the criteria that men established for academic success.
So why do women still earn 82 cents to the male dollar?
Here’s my theory: Girls and women excel at school, which features ostensibly objective criteria of achievement — grades, scores, classes taken, honors received. I say “ostensibly” because these criteria remain deeply unfair; literally the richer you are, the higher your SAT score. Still, measurable criteria keep unconscious bias in check.
In the world beyond school, however, unconscious bias is rarely restrained by the guardrails of, say, GPAs. When we choose our political candidates and our chief executives, we deploy non-metrics such as “electability” and “leadership” — qualities traditionally ascribed to men.
Colleges that tip their scales in favor of boys are bringing those biases to bear four years early, overriding the guardrails to create a student body that feels desirable. In “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” a 2006 essay for the New York Times, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, then the dean of admissions at Kenyon College, explained ruefully: “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”
Maybe that’s true. I can imagine parents downgrading a college when they see more women than men on the campus tour. I can imagine female applicants, accustomed to comprising half their high school class, balking at the idea of comprising two-thirds, even if their own accomplishments made it so. Even if the price of having an “attractive” gender ratio is accepting discrimination against themselves.
That entrenched bias is precisely why colleges should stop giving boys a boost. Every time colleges bend their criteria to keep from becoming “decidedly female,” they perpetuate the notion that there is such a thing as having too many female students — and by extension, too many women in any given space.
The high-achieving girl who loses out to a slightly lower-achieving boy — at Brown University, say, where in the 2021-2022 application cycle, the acceptance rate was 4 percent for girls and 6.7 percent for boys; or at Vassar College, where in 2020, the acceptance rate was 23 percent for girls and 28 percent for boys — what happens to her?
She’s fine. Let’s face it, we’re talking about a very particular socio-educational group. Only 3 percent of four-year college students attend an institution as selective as Vassar (which accepts fewer than a quarter of applicants), and less than 1 percent attend one as selective as Brown (which accepts fewer than one-tenth). Our high-achieving reject doesn’t give up on college; she goes to a less selective one.
But it won’t be the last time she works harder than a boy to get not quite as far, based on what people imagine is the right amount of “female.”
Wesleyan’s Roth defended the practice of tipping the scale toward a 50-50 gender ratio by invoking life after college: “I think when schools become unintentionally focused on one gender, they have a diminished capacity to prepare people for the world beyond graduation.” True. Women who get a fair shot at college might graduate unprepared to accept unfairness in their professional lives. Men who learn in female-majority spaces might graduate unprepared to assume they should be in charge.
Imagine that.
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