Wall Street Journal takes on gender bias in college admissions…
A commentary I wrote that appears Friday.
The piece:
By RICHARD WHITMIRE
This week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced that it will investigate whether colleges discriminate against women by admitting less qualified men. It will strike many as odd to think that American men would need such a leg up. From the men-only basketball games at the White House to the testosterone club on Wall Street, we seem surrounded by male dominance.
And yet, when looking to America’s future-trying to spot the future entrepreneurs and inventors-there’s reason to be troubled by the flagging academic performance among men. Nearly 58% of all those earning bachelor’s degrees are women. Graduate programs are headed in the same direction, and the gender gaps at community colleges-where 62% of those earning two-year degrees are female-are even wider.
Economists at both the Department of Education and the College Board agree that, to ensure high future earnings, men and women have an equal need for college degrees, and yet only women are getting that message. The numbers are startling. This summer the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University published the results of a study tracking the students who graduated from Boston Public Schools in 2007. Their conclusion: For every 167 females in four-year colleges, there were 100 males.
In theory, the surge in the number of educated women should make up for male shortcomings when we’re looking at the overall prospects for the economy. But men and women are not the same. At the same levels of education, women remain less inclined to roll the dice on risky business start-ups or to grind out careers in isolated tech labs. Revenue generated by women-owned businesses remains less than 5% of all revenue. And while the number of women taking on economically important majors is rising, women still earn only a fifth of the bachelor’s degrees granted in physics, computer science and engineering.
Why males don’t seem to “get” the importance of a college education is a mystery, especially considering the current collapse of jobs that traditionally don’t require post-high-school study. (Even “cash for clunkers” isn’t going to mark the return of car companies as a major employer of uneducated men.) And who could miss the message of the recession, where as many as 80% of the workers laid off have been male?
Too many boys arrive at their senior year of high school lacking both the skills and aspirations that would get them into, and through, college. At a typical state university, a gender gap of 10 percentage points in the freshman class grows by five points by graduation day, as more men than women drop out.
All this explains why colleges have been putting a thumb on the scale to favor men in admissions. There just aren’t enough highly qualified men to go around. Determining that colleges practice discrimination doesn’t take much detective work. Higher acceptance rates for men show that colleges dig deeper into their applicant pool to find them. The final proof: Freshman class profiles reveal that the women, with their far higher high-school grade point averages, are more academically qualified than the men. Interviews with admissions officers reveal that the girls’ essays sparkle compared to the boys’, and girls far outshine boys in extracurricular activities as well.
The Commission on Civil Rights cited an example written about in U.S. News & World Report in 2007: Virginia’s University of Richmond was maintaining its rough gender parity in men and women only by accepting women at a rate 13 percentage points lower than the men.
It would be patriotic to report that this discrimination against women is carried out in the national economic interest of boosting graduates in key math and science fields. But, in truth, it’s really a social consideration. Colleges simply want to avoid approaching the dreaded 60-40 female-male ratio. At that point, men start to take advantage of their scarcity and make social life miserable for the women by becoming “players” on the dating scene.
The case to abolish male gender preferences is problematic. Most of those male preferences are granted by private colleges, which consider themselves on solid legal ground. (Some public colleges and universities also grant those preferences at considerable legal risk, an indication of the depth of the fear about broaching that 60-40 threshold.)
In truth, these gender preferences are a sideshow. The real issue is the flagging academic interest among boys, a phenomenon that dates back only about two decades. It’s a new issue to most Americans but hotly debated in countries such as England. So far, nobody has solved the boy mystery, but some countries are years ahead of the U.S. Australia has had some success with literacy-boosting programs for young boys. Until the code gets cracked, there’s a national economic interest in keeping those preferences in place-just for a few more years.
-Mr. Whitmire is the author of the forthcoming book “Why Boys Fail.”
Tags: admissions
November 5th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
The article certainly sums up the issues well. Now let’s see if it generates any real buzz. “Balloon Boy” coverage may be a bit much to hope for, but hopefully it will generate at least a little self-sustaining discussion.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:23 am
The issue of the overwhelming numerical dominance of women in higher education has been brewing for some time. There are a few factors that have contributed to this, and frankly I see precious little written about it, perhaps because it is so politically incorrect.
The first factor is the feminization of the primary and secondary education establishment. Feminist principle has been applied at all level, and women dominate the teaching profession. The biases of feminism against men are played out in the classroom, where boys are treated as defective girls. While this exits to some level in nearly every classroom in America, it is far worse in Public Schools, and in the heavily secularized private schools. It is better in Christian schools. Someone with the time and desire could do a very good study on college rates for boys and girls from different school backgrounds - home school, private secular school, private religious school, and public school.
The second factor is the deliberate skewing of admissions criteria to favor linguistics over mathematics. I was in the first co-ed class of Hunter College High School, originally a girl’s High School, and a major tracking High School for New York City. When boys were admitted, there was tremendous fear that boys would come to dominate the population, as they did at Stuyvesant & Bronx Science. The response was to double the value of the linguistic portion (by adding a second linguistic portion) and thus dilute mathematics and logic as basis for admission. This produced the desired effect of essentially 50/50 of the brightest students in NY. Please understand - this was a deliberate engineering attempt - the purpose was to create a certain type of student body. One should note that just a few years ago, the SAT was changed to follow that model. The results of doing so were predictable. As the bell curve of women’s “intelligence” as measures by these types of exams, shifted to the higher range in order to create a 50/50 mixture at the top end of the range, the average “intelligence” was skewed dramatically towards domination by women. This is reflected in the “qualification” for college favoring women.
Third is the broader societal shift away from manhood as an idea of life. The very principle of manhood is either denigrated, or so exaggerated that manhood and violence become equated. Much could be written on this subject - it was a marvelous irony that the Journal printed your piece on the same page as the review of the Ghetto Lit movie “Precious.”
Solutions: This is the hard part.
1)
November 6th, 2009 at 10:27 am
The issue of the overwhelming numerical dominance of women in higher education has been brewing for some time. There are a few factors that have contributed to this, and frankly I see precious little written about it, perhaps because it is so politically incorrect.
The first factor is the feminization of the primary and secondary education establishment. Feminist principle has been applied at all level, and women dominate the teaching profession. The biases of feminism against men are played out in the classroom, where boys are treated as defective girls. While this exits to some level in nearly every classroom in America, it is far worse in Public Schools, and in the heavily secularized private schools. It is better in Christian schools. Someone with the time and desire could do a very good study on college rates for boys and girls from different school backgrounds - home school, private secular school, private religious school, and public school.
The second factor is the deliberate skewing of admissions criteria to favor linguistics over mathematics. I was in the first co-ed class of Hunter College High School, originally a girl’s High School, and a major tracking High School for New York City. When boys were admitted, there was tremendous fear that boys would come to dominate the population, as they did at Stuyvesant & Bronx Science. The response was to double the value of the linguistic portion (by adding a second linguistic portion) and thus dilute mathematics and logic as basis for admission. This produced the desired effect of essentially 50/50 of the brightest students in NY. Please understand - this was a deliberate engineering attempt - the purpose was to create a certain type of student body. One should note that just a few years ago, the SAT was changed to follow that model. The results of doing so were predictable. As the bell curve of women’s “intelligence” as measures by these types of exams, shifted to the higher range in order to create a 50/50 mixture at the top end of the range, the average “intelligence” was skewed dramatically towards domination by women. This is reflected in the “qualification” for college favoring women.
Third is the broader societal shift away from manhood as an idea of life. The very principle of manhood is either denigrated, or so exaggerated that manhood and violence become equated. Much could be written on this subject - it was a marvelous irony that the Journal printed your piece on the same page as the review of the Ghetto Lit movie “Precious.”
November 6th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Sorry about the double posting.
Solutions:
1) A return to the original SAT format. The original shift at Hunter was a deliberate attempt as social engineering. To see it replicated across academic society broadly is very troubling.
2) A return to single sex education, ESPECIALLY in secondary education. We need boys charter schools, where men are the teachers, and leadership and courage in boys is developed. The current school model rewards passivity and meekness.
3) An actual study of college admission rates and schooling types. I have anecdotal evidence only - no hard numbers - but I think it is legitimate to extrapolate from my limited data until better analysis is done.