WPost sets a high bar for writing the college admissions bias story
Washington Post education writer Daniel de Vise does a great job detailing the admissions bias against women. There’s so much to this story that de Vise doesn’t have space to explore. While researching my book I visited American University (60% female) and talked to both university officials and students. AU was facing the typical housing dilemma: students want co-ed housing, but how does that happen with lopsided gender numbers? Either some women get frozen out or the dorms are unevenly stacked, which leads to overcrowded bathrooms for females.
And my online conversations with male students revealed the dating dilemma that surfaces in any 60/40 college — guys who could barely get a date in high school suddenly imagine themselves as players, which makes life miserable for the women.
Best of all is their graphic, showing the admissions rates at nearby colleges and universities. Most interesting, of course, is William & Mary, a public college that in the past has conceded they grant admissions preferences to men. How do they get away with it? In Virginia, the elite W&M can get away with things that James Madison University would never dare try — the state legislators would jump all over them if local female applicants were discriminated against. W&M, on the other hand, benefits from a national reputation prized by the legislators.
(photo courtesy of the Washington Post)
Tags: admissions bias
December 14th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
This is the paragraph that jumped out at me: “… men, who are more likely to drop out of school and more apt to go into the military, manual-labor jobs or prison.” I realize that the article was about affirmative action for college, but I wish he had expanded on this at least a little more.
December 14th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
This writer repeats the myth that there has been discrimination against women in college admissions that disappeared only in recent decades. That has not been true in most public colleges and universities since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, and in many cases, earlier. It is true that until about the 1970’s Ivy League schools admitted only men, but even they were balanced by the Seven Sisters, which were usually nearby (and in some cases formally affiliated, most famously Harvard and Radcliffe). To this day Barnard College admits only women, although it is part of Columbia University. There were certainly private institutions of varying size that admitted only men or only women and a very few that still do, but since the development of extensive state school systems, private schools have accounted for only a small fraction of the college student population.