RALEIGH – In this case, turnabout is far, far away from fair play.
U.S. News reports that many colleges and universities are “rejecting women at rates drastically higher than those for men.” Once upon a time, preferring men over women in college admissions would have been considered unjust discrimination – and in government-run institutions at least, illegal. Now, with affirmative-action extremism gone amok, tipping the scales in favor of male applicants is considered progressive.
The problem, for those who keep score of such things, is that for many institutions of higher education a merit-based admissions system would result in significantly more women than men on campus. For a variety of reasons, the pool of young women applying to American colleges today is, on average, better prepared and more impressive than is the pool of young men.
For one thing, girls perform better in grade school. The female-male gap grows during the high-school years. It isn’t just academics – the girls also waste less time watching TV, playing video games, misbehaving, and honing their athletic prowess (which is fun and good exercise but only a ticket to future academic and professional opportunities for a very few). Girls participate more in extracurricular activities that colleges value, such as the arts. More girls graduate from high school, and they are more likely than male graduates to apply to college, anyway.
How disproportionate is the freshman class these days? The trends are interesting. During the early 20th century, the numbers of men and women in college weren’t all that different – and, of course, both were tiny percentages of the overall population. However, the two groups had very different opportunities. Most of the female students were in colleges of education, nursing, or other programs preparing them for traditionally female occupations. The opportunities for men were far more numerous (a condition that, to the extent it reflected archaic assumptions and prejudices, made everyone in society worse off). After World War II, the GI Bill propelled a large number of men into college, shifting the percentage heavily in their direction. But during the 1960s and 1970s, the gap shrank, thanks to increasing economic returns to education (which increased the demand for skilled labor and consequent female demand for college education) and liberalizing social attitudes. By 1980, men and women were on campus in about equal numbers.
Now, nearly 60 percent of college students are female – and that’s after many institutions have intervened to give males a big advantage in the admissions process. The scale-tipping isn’t evident everywhere. The most elite schools, such as the Ivy League and the Dukes and Stanfords, don’t resort to discriminating against women because they get strong applicants of both flavors in roughly equal proportions. But in the next tier, admissions without regard to sex would typically result in 55-45 splits, with 60-40 splits fairly common and larger disproportions entirely possible at some campuses.
Can’t have that. The diversity argument – that the quality of education is significantly determined by sexual and racial bean-counting – has triumphed in academia. Originally, affirmative action didn’t simply mean giving preferences to members of groups disadvantaged by past discrimination. In the broadest sense, it meant seeking to overcome the vestiges of discrimination by making aggressive efforts to recruit from those groups – be it for admissions, contracts, or jobs – and making investments at earlier stages, such as improving K-12 education, that would yield better applicants in the future. Final decisions were still to be made on the basis of individual characteristics and performance, not membership in any particular group.
Category-conscious decisions were never completely out of the mix, nor should they have been. For example, it was legitimate to remedy a specific case of discrimination by a specific institution against a specific group of individuals by ordering a result. And within the world of voluntary contract, it should always have been legal for private institutions and individuals to set up whatever programs they wanted, such as a Girl Scout troop made up of, well, girls or an outreach program for disadvantaged black teens.
As a devotee of individual liberty, I don’t want the government telling educational institutions what to do. Indeed, I have no problem with single-sex schools and colleges, which may well be excellent settings for particular students who would otherwise fall through the cracks. But I do find it more than a little unsettling that the very 60s radicals who used to protest the patriarchy are now running America’s universities and denying admission to promising applicants because they are women.
It’s another example of how “progressives” aren’t, in the end, very progressive.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.