My wife Alison and University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot have just published an article in Engage on the apparently growing practice of sex discrimination on behalf of men in college admissions. Heriot serves as a Commissioner at the US Commission on Civil Rights, where Alison is her special assistant/counsel. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
While some news reports indicate that discrimination against women on the basis of sex in college admissions is increasingly common, there has been relatively little public discussion about it—especially compared to the much more heated public debate concerning race-based affirmative action. Not surprisingly, therefore, there have been few attempts to study the extent of the problem systematically….
Multiple news reports indicate that some colleges and universities, both public and private, have what they regard as “too many” women applicants and are therefore discriminating in favor of men—largely because more women than men apply to college and their academic credentials are in some ways better. Several colleges have more or less openly admitted to discriminating against women – including the University of Richmond (a private institution) and the College of William and Mary (a public institution). Others—including Southwestern University (Texas), Knox College (Illinois), Brandeis University (Massachusetts), Boston University (also Massachusetts), and Pomona College (California)—shy away from admitting directly that they are discriminating, but admit that maintaining an optimal gender balance by non-discriminatory means is difficult….
Sex discrimination in admissions at public universities is illegal under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. But under federal law, it is perfectly legal for private institutions to engage in sex discrimination in admissions—though once both sexes are admitted, neither may be discriminated against….
Perhaps the most attention-getting piece on this topic was a 2006 New York Times op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, in which she admitted that her office often gave preferential treatment to men. Some admissions insiders wrote in response to Delahunty Britz’s piece that these preferences were quite common—what was shocking was only Delahunty Britz’s candor in airing this information publicly. Inside Higher Ed noted that “[w]hile few admissions officers wanted to talk publicly about the column, the private reaction was a mix of ‘of course male applicants get some help’ along with ‘did she have to share that information with the world?’” Several years later, after the wave of chatter over Delahunty Britz’s piece had died down, Columbia University law professor Ted Shaw referred to such discrimination as an “open secret.”
[footnotes omitted].
The article also discusses the interconnections between admissions preferences for men and Title IX rules for college sports teams (the latter may have the unintended effect of incentivizing the former by making it harder for colleges to entice male students through increasing the number of men’s sports teams). Alison previously wrote about Title IX and sports here.
This issue is actually one of the rare points of political disagreement in the Somin household. I am less hostile than Alison to gender-balancing admissions policies that seek to keep the sex ratio (very roughly) even for the purpose of improving the social environment on campus. The problem of gender imbalance may be more serious at some institutions than others, and I don’t think it can justify very large gender preferences anywhere. As Gail and Alison point out, it’s a bad idea for colleges to admit “mismatched” male students whose academic skills are vastly inferior to those of the other students at the same institution. But, in some situations, I think there is a case for modest admissions preferences for the less numerous gender on campus. Some women students themselves may be dissatisfied with life on a campus that is, say, 70% female, and the same goes for male students at an overwhelmingly male institution. Obviously, other students probably couldn’t care less about the sex ratio at their university. But I don’t advocate that all universities with a gender imbalance should resort to admissions preferences to deal with it. I merely want the option to be legally available, at least at private institutions. Be that as it may, I do agree with Alison that such policies at public institutions are legally dubious under Title IX.
Steve says:
Given the propensity of some people to assume that any minority college student or graduate is an “affirmative action baby” (these people aren’t racist at all, or so they assure me), I fear the stigma that will inevitably arise as a result of policies like these. It’s possible that men will never be taken seriously again.
December 5, 2011, 6:16 pmKen says:
With regard to private institutions, would any libertarian dispute this?
December 5, 2011, 6:55 pmIlya Somin says:
I merely want the option to be legally available, at least at private institutions.
With regard to private institutions, would any libertarian dispute this?
Maybe not. But we have lots of nonlibertarian readers. And even for libertarians, things get more complicated when the restriction is imposed as a condition of getting federal funding (as in the case of Title IX).
December 5, 2011, 7:06 pmBob says:
@steve – They’ll treat us seriously when it comes time for us to clean up their mess… and then once the crisis is past they will demand to control everything again.
December 5, 2011, 7:09 pmToday's Tom Sawyer says:
The word “again” implies that men are/were taken seriously, but given the number of articles about how men are all immature children or players who present problems for the strong powerful women of our modern day and age, I feel that the damage is already done.
December 5, 2011, 7:19 pmBenjamin G Davis says:
Glad that gender balancing which benefits men is considered cool – Amazing. How recent was it that one could not find more than a token woman in a Law School class and misogynist professors and male students made the one or two women who managed to sneak in extremely uncomfortable. Or at business schools or whatever. Or the same professors taught courses to single sex classes at different times of the day.
Reminds me of adjusting the IQ test back in the day because women were scoring better than men – that was “not possible.” And of course, given the comments below on affirmative action for race, affirmative action that favors men is just “balancing” in a societal interest but letting in more then a pixie dust of minorities is social engineering and getting in the way of what the free market dictates.
December 5, 2011, 7:29 pmBest,
Ben
B
Vladimir says:
It’s a statistically sound assumption.
You want to discriminate against people based on the color of their skin. I do not. (But you’re not a racist at all, you assure me.)
December 5, 2011, 7:37 pmLTEC says:
I too am sympathetic with the idea that preference be given to the under-represented sex, so as to facilitate sexual companionship on campus, so as to have a better adjusted student body. Or perhaps the under-represented sex should be charged lower tuition — sort of like ladies nights at bars. Ultimately, however, I think such policies will do more harm than good. At universities, I mean. Not bars.
December 5, 2011, 7:48 pmHouston Lawyer says:
This discrimination is done primarily for the benefit of the women at the top of the class to the detriment of the women at the bottom.
From what I have read, the percentage of men applying to colleges has stayed relatively constant while the percentage of women applying has increased. Since too many people seem to want to go to college and a college degree has lost its value, I don’t have a solution.
Meanwhile the college dating scene has spiraled out of control. Too many women chasing the “cool” guys with the other guys remaining ignored notwithstanding that men are in short supply. I don’t claim to have a solution for that either.
December 5, 2011, 7:52 pmCalderon says:
Sex discrimination in admissions at public universities is illegal under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. But under federal law, it is perfectly legal for private institutions to engage in sex discrimination in admissions—though once both sexes are admitted, neither may be discriminated against….
When I first read that I found it surprising, but I guess since there still are some private same sex institutions (more all women than all men) it indeed must be the rule that federal law allows private institutions to discriminate on the basis of sex.
As for the merits of the arguments, I’m with Alison. In the past, most institutions were same sex, and there’s no real indication that it harmed the students’ education. Many institutions are located in cities or towns where people can find opposite sex companions. Even for those located in remote areas, not having a steady date for several years is not going to kill them, and indeed may help them focus on their education. Finally, to some extent this might be a self-correcting issue: if men hear that dates are easier to come by in college because of unbalanced women/men ratios, they may be inspired to work harder in high school. I do not think the benefits of trying to equalize the gender ratios is worth the unfairness or, indeed, the potential stigma (thought my understanding is that the elite colleges still tend to have more men than women).
As a tangentially related aside, I normally enjoy Gregg Easterbrook’s TMQ columns. But he had one several weeks ago about how youth football might be causing less men to go to college because of brain damage that was one of the most fact-free, statistic-free, and on-its-face-implausible claims I’ve ever read.
December 5, 2011, 7:57 pmAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
.
This practice should be outlawed. The men that at the bottom of the admission barrel are being harmed. They are the ones most likely to fail to graduate. Add to that the surplus of grads makes a degree barely (at best) worth the cost for many if not most.
This practice is only good for the education industry.
December 5, 2011, 8:06 pmSteve says:
Almost all of Easterbrook’s claims are fact-free and statistic-free, although he can be an engaging writer. Imagine the logic required to write that a team should have rushed on 4th-and-goal from the 2 because the average rushing play gains 3.4 yards.
December 5, 2011, 8:08 pmReaderY says:
Laws that seek to maintain gender balance in the dating pool definitely have a rational basis.
December 5, 2011, 8:08 pmjcc says:
from the OP:
“…for the purpose of improving the social environment on campus…”
Regarding claims that females in the work force work less average hours (per stated cycle) than a male counterpart, or at the least, are somehow less productive or are productive for a lesser time span over a career, do you think that – if true – would be a sufficient basis for preferential admission to males? There seem to be some similar claims referring specifically to the prevalence of female students seeking to be MD’s and DVM’s and coming or present shortages, ostensibly because female doctors and vets might desire a dual-track career, that is, mother and part-time professional, while the male MD/DVM is more likely to be a full-time worker.
I’m not sponsoring this point of view, only questioning whether it is could be or would be a valid rationale for gender preference, especially if the existing justification is about parity in a social environment, which strikes me as a rather weak stalking horse for the “save the jobs for the real breadwinners” kind of thinking?
December 5, 2011, 8:38 pmragebot says:
I seriously considered asking if you went to high school, but though better of it.
December 5, 2011, 8:42 pmCalderon says:
Man, now you’re going to make me defend him. In fairness to G. Easterbrook, his stats about going for it on fourth down actually are based on the likelihood of converting on fourth down, not just what the average play gains. He does cite studies, etc. on this particular issue. I agree that his current hobbyhorse about needing some kind of trick to pick up 4th & short instead of just running straight ahead is a hypothesis, but perhaps if more teams go for it on 4th & short we’ll be able to get some data.
Sadly, all this reminds me how annoyed I’m going to be as an atheist Bears fans when the godly Tim Tebow and Denver Broncos beat the Bears next week … clearly god had a hand in the injuries to Cutler and Forte.
(And with this post, I promise not to talk any more about football or Gregg Easterbrook to avoid derailing)
December 5, 2011, 8:48 pmjustinp says:
I’d be somewhat more worked up about this if the colleges that are being examined– which seem to be more or less elite institutions with very, very low admit rates– didn’t already have all sorts of wildly arbitrary selection processes.
I’ve talked to a lot of admissions officers at highly selective institutions and they are quite adamant that a huge majority of their applicants would do perfectly well at the institution– academically, socially, etc. It really does come down to a whole lot of very fine distinctions based on random circumstance, often based on requests from various departments as well as the adcomm’s subjective beliefs regarding what would produce a balanced class. Sometimes they need a bassoonist, other times they feel as though the school would be better off if they admitted a few more quirky kids who didn’t appear to have been helicopter-parented… and sometimes they don’t want to inadvertently become a women’s college.
The point is that this stuff is more or less a matter of tiebreakers– a way of sorting between people with basically similar numbers.
December 5, 2011, 8:57 pmwm13 says:
Interestingly, there isn’t an aggregate gender imbalance at the top universities–not once you factor in Caltech, MIT, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, etc. Why don’t the authorities in, say, Virginia, just arrange some Va. Tech/William & Mary mixers rather than practicing “affirmative action” at the latter institution?
December 5, 2011, 9:40 pmMDT says:
Benjamin G. Davis,
Glad that gender balancing which benefits men is considered cool — Amazing. How recent was it that one could not find more than a token woman in a Law School class and misogynist professors and male students made the one or two women who managed to sneak in extremely uncomfortable. Or at business schools or whatever.
Heh. You should’ve been in my classes at Cal. It was the women who made the men uncomfortable, because we generally kicked ass. Women who actually do go in for hard sciences and engineering generally do.
I had one “misogynist” professor at Cal; he was a visiting professor from Japan, and taught an honors linear algebra class with about thirty men and three women in it. We three sat together as a rule, and the prof. tended to look in our direction every time he made a point, as if to say, “Did you girls get that?
One of us was actually a high school junior. She got the only A+ in the class. (I got a B+, and was way miffed about it — lowest grade I’d seen in my life.)
December 5, 2011, 9:42 pmbrlegg says:
To the extent that the 14th Amendment applies to sex, then this is clearly unlawful if done by the government. To the extent that there is no state action, then it is not unconstitutional. It may violate Title IX, if Title IX is Constitutional under the 10th Amendment. It probably violated state Equal Protection requirments in state constitution. In college admissions, there is no compelling state interest in gender balance. College is not a dating service. There is no 1st Amendment interest in sex balancing under an academic enhancement theory.
December 5, 2011, 10:04 pmKen Arromdee says:
It’s the same argument as with standard affirmative action.
I’d suggest that like with regular affirmative action, it depends on why the men have poorer qualifications. A smart black person who has low grades because he lives in poverty will genuinely benefit from affirmative action. One from a middle-class background who’s just a poor student may be let in and find he can’t handle it, losing overall. Are the men who are given preferences more similar to the first category or the second?
The reduced number of men in college was preceded by years of feminist ideas that favored women–the claim that men are given too much attention in classes (which left out the fact that the attention consisted of reprimands), “take your daughter to work day”, etc. If that’s the cause of the problem, then it’s likely that the men with the lower grades are in fact as willing and able as the women so affirmative action should benefit them.
December 5, 2011, 10:05 pmTheCrankyProfessor says:
We need our treasured young men … because so far alumnae just don’t GIVE as much. The best thing, of course, is when two of them marry each other, but if a well-to-do female grad is married to a man who is not a grad, the only predictor I’ve noticed is that if SHE is a legacy she might give big.
December 5, 2011, 10:11 pmHouston Lawyer says:
If it is perfectly OK to discriminate in admissions based on race, why would it be bad to discriminate based upon sex?
December 5, 2011, 10:57 pmConnie says:
Is there any evidence for this, other than a whole bunch of blathering on the roissy-type blogs?
December 5, 2011, 11:03 pmHey Skipper says:
How much of this developing gender imbalance is due to adding “disciplines” that most men wouldn’t touch with the mucky end of a barge pole?
For instance, if memory serves, Washington State University now has schools of Hospitality Management and Fashion Design, both of which are bound to skew the numbers at least a little bit, ceteris paribus.
December 5, 2011, 11:17 pmricky says:
The proof is in the pudding, Prof. Somin. Look at the unprecedented economic boom we’re experiencing now that the feminine genius has been unleashed!
December 5, 2011, 11:37 pmys says:
MIT-Wellesley mixers are a time-honored tradition.
December 5, 2011, 11:49 pmAnatid says:
… There was a point in time that the college dating scene was under control?
I bet you thought of yourself as one of the “nice” guys, didn’t you.
December 6, 2011, 12:04 amAnatid says:
Hospitality Management = hotel manager, yes? Maybe I’m out of touch, but this seems like the sort of job that would appeal to both genders equally?
I wonder if for things like Fashion Design, there’d be an interactive effect with sexual orientation. (Assuming that the stereotype of male fashion designers is anything like the reality; if I’m wrong, someone please smack me.) Admitting more male fashion design students wouldn’t necessarily have much of an impact on how many men are available to date women at the school. I would not necessarily extend this guess to all female-dominated professions; purely anecdotally at least, for example, every male nursing student I’ve known has been straight.
December 6, 2011, 12:05 amcaptcrisis says:
I agree with Houston Lawyer’s assesment
Interesting situation, thoughtful post. Thanks to all.
December 6, 2011, 12:13 amHey Skipper says:
I suppose.
In any event, I actually took the minute or so to look at WSU’s website. There are a couple Social “Science” areas, a la gender studies, that would be both new and primarily female, but nothing like enough to account for the gender changes in matriculation.
FWIW, I have always believed AA hurt more than it helped when women and minorities who are not Asian were the targets. The fact that my son could be a new target for AA doesn’t change my opinion a bit.
December 6, 2011, 12:55 amneurodoc says:
Long ago, MIT and Wellesley entered into a formal exchange agreement with MIT, permitting their students to sign up for courses at the other school. Shortly thereafter, one of the NYC tabloids (Daily News?) had big picture of Wellesley girls leaning out of one of their quad windows with a bedsheet sign saying, “Better the Bronx Zoo.” Years later neurodoc had occasion to chat with the then president of Wellesley (whose husband happened to be a professor engineering at MIT) and told her semi-seriously that he hoped to never see anything like that again.
There is no “substitution effect” where dating is concerned? And hasn’t the appeal of bright but geeky guys increased over the past couple of decades as their income potential has increased? Supposedly, that is observable in Silicon Valley bars.
Qu’est-ce que c’est “roissy-type”?
December 6, 2011, 1:42 amneurodoc says:
Anatid, as a recent college grad, moreover a scientist type (and from CA?), how do you think income expectations effect think the appeal of young single men to young single women? Do smart but geeky guys have a better chance of it with “cool” women than they once did because smart and geeky is a better bet in $$$ terms these days than it was in days of yore? Or is that Silicon Valley stuff exaggerated or aberrational there and not true more widely? (Greater than previous reproduction rates among the seriously “geeky” has been suggested as a contributing factor to increased numbers of diagnosable Pervasive Personality Disorder, or autism spectrum cases.)
December 6, 2011, 1:57 amneurodoc says:
No athletic scholarships and no admission preferences for athletes is part of the answer, though it will never happen. Yes to college sports, but an end to the distorting, and frankly pernicious effects they have at so many schools. “Minor” mens sports dropped in order to comply with Title IX rules and the economic consequences thereof is but one reflection of how things are as opposed to how they should be. Tail wagging the dog, and few chose to acknowledge the problem. (New football coach at OSU to get $4M+ per year in compensation.)
December 6, 2011, 2:09 amNeo says:
Short term solution: Weight room and fitted shirts and tank tops while on campus.
December 6, 2011, 3:35 amNeo says:
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/
December 6, 2011, 3:42 amAnatid says:
From what I’ve seen, I’d say the Silicon Valley effect is absolutely true, but it’s also double-edged. Smart and geeky men, by virtue of income, become more attractive to women; at the same time, smart and geeky women, for the same reasons, become more attractive to men. Social ineptitude is mutually understood and accepted.
Will being a brilliant software engineer get you a smokin’-hot babe for a wife? No, it won’t. (There are exceptions to this.) But unless you’re a complete jerk, there’s probably an accountant with a cute smile who shares your love of HP Lovecraft, or a genetics lab tech with a great laugh who plays Dungeons and Dragons, or an IT consultant who loves to cuddle and is willing to put up with your cat’s YouTube fame.
It is less the case that shy, successful people are purchasing access to a mate and more the case that the shy, successful people have finally found a common breeding ground to spawn.
And let’s be honest, for our hypothetical software engineer, lifelong happiness is far less likely to be found in a trophy wife than it is in someone who can enter into a heated debate about the new leveling system in Skyrim. Looks don’t last, but Skyrim is forever.
December 6, 2011, 4:02 amMike s. says:
Actually, MIT’s sex ratio is now close to 50-50 (the class of 2014 was 53-47).
And Mrs. S., who went to MIT with me when it was more like 75-25, has looks that have lasted quite nicely for the last 30+ years, thanks. Some women who look like trophy wives can discuss computational fluid dynamics just fine.
December 6, 2011, 6:46 amneurodoc says:
neurodoc intended only a semi-serious question, but got back a mostly serious answer. The answer doesn’t address the “temporal” part of the original question.
Houston Lawyer opined that the increasing gender balance over time has benefitted geeky guys little or not at all. (“Meanwhile the college dating scene has spiraled out of control. Too many women chasing the ‘cool’ guys with the other guys remaining ignored notwithstanding that men are in short supply.”) neurodoc has no data to offer, but thinks what HL maintains is logically improbable, since markets adjust in response to supply and demand. Your response does not explain how an income effect is observable in the dating market if it is indeed a “double-edged” phenomenon as you say. Geeky guys, now perceived as having higher income potential (HIP), see geeky women with perceived HIP as more desirable than they once did, or you posit that there are greater numbers of educated geeky women these days to match up with geeky guys? And can it be as HL says it is that the college dating scene has spiraled out of control to the disadvantage of geeky men notwithstanding the increased gender imbalance in enrollments?
Well 40 years ago, when MIT was truly hell, the sex balance was more like 90-10. But then the school started changing in response to the world around it.
Did your wife live in McCormick? Do you Voodoo’s vulgar characterization of MIT co-eds?
December 6, 2011, 8:24 amneurodoc says:
Michele, neurodoc understands fully your take on that honors math class experience, but he wonders if you ever considered the alternative hypothesis that there was no “misogyny” or condescension involved and what you observed could be otherwise explained? You and the other two women chose to sit clustered together rather than disbursed among the men, with the professor a visitor coming from a very different culture. Might he not have been showing the three of you what he imagined to be simple politeness, something like a man waiting for a woman to go through a door before going through it himself?
December 6, 2011, 8:38 amwm13 says:
That may be (I have these statistics at home, but not in the office). On the other hand, most of the other schools at MIT’s level are about 50/50, so the HYPSM group may have a slight male tilt. The plain fact is, if you do the numbers, the supposed predominance of women on campus is not true over the universe of top schools. So most of the discussion of this issue in the popular press is based on a false premise. (This is actually a pretty common phenomenon in the popular press.)
December 6, 2011, 8:47 amrob bob says:
I have seem some stats showing this. Can’t find them now.
December 6, 2011, 9:05 amrob bob says:
This may be mostly imagined, but I have heard it explained that market does not adjust because many urban women today with no plans to procreate or settle down will prefer being one of many with a high status male than one on one with a lower status male.
Personally, I never had trouble getting a date, married young, and never lived in an urban environment while single post-college. So I don’t have some axe to grind, I just think this is somewhat interesting.
December 6, 2011, 9:26 amConnie says:
So that would be “no.”
Neurodoc, as usual, google is your friend; but in this case you may consider yourself lucky that you are unacquainted with the blog type in question.
December 6, 2011, 9:33 amAnon says:
Perhaps 25 years from now, the use of gender preferences will no longer be necessary.
December 6, 2011, 10:33 amGiant Frog says:
Too bad the paper had no actual evidence, but here’s some from google:
“harvard college women’s center” = 31,600 (putative) results.
“harvard college men’s center” = 1 result, someone wondering if there is such a thing (there isn’t).
Repeat as necessary for any other college or university. Repeat as necessary for “outreach” programs and scholarships and you’ll get similar results.
December 6, 2011, 11:15 amSmooth, Like a Rhapsody says:
If the argument in favor of quotas is that the over-represented gender won’t like it, that is too weak to survive Title IX.
The diversity argument is that the student experience is enhanced by the presence of the under-represented groups—we are no where near a situation where females are going to wonder what is is like to have people of a different gender around to interact with on a daily basis.
December 6, 2011, 11:30 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
GF, sounds like some enterprising folks need to set up a men’s center at Harvard.
December 6, 2011, 12:01 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Poked around at the women’s center site. It looks like they support women’s issues. One might wonder what those are. Well, they are women’s health issues (gynecological and contraceptive), sexual assault, child care, and LGBT support. In addition there is a leadership award open to any gender, a woman in science award, and maybe some other stuff. My school didn’t have a women’s center, or if it did I wasn’t aware of it; but it was a single-sex school anyway. I can’t see that I would have made a great deal of use of these offerings but clearly some women do.
GF, what would you have a men’s center do?
December 6, 2011, 12:10 pmTatil says:
As there is no reason I know that makes male children more likely to be from a poor neighborhood than women, I’d say it is the latter. At least with race, we know for sure some groups have a larger proportion living in poverty. Of course, this brings up the question, if the students from poor neighborhoods need or deserve a leg up, why do we use race as an imperfect metric?
December 6, 2011, 12:14 pmex parte animal says:
So, each prefers a policy that would benefit his/her respective sex.
What a coincidence!
December 6, 2011, 1:18 pmDavid Friedman says:
“The diversity argument is that the student experience is enhanced by the presence of the under-represented groups—we are no where near a situation where females are going to wonder what is is like to have people of a different gender around to interact with on a daily basis. ”
Your version of the diversity argument doesn’t require anything close to proportional representation in college of minorities, merely enough of each to be noticeable, but the lack of proportional representation is routinely taken as a justification for affirmative action.
In the case of gender, on the other hand, given that a large part of the function of college is (whether or not it should be) dating and marital search, there really is an argument for the desirability of something close to equal numbers.
December 6, 2011, 2:52 pmGiant Frog says:
You got the sexes reversed, of course. More verbal questions (vs math or visual) were added to in order to make men and women get the about same average.
December 6, 2011, 2:58 pmMDT says:
Tatil,
As there is no reason I know that makes male children more likely to be from a poor neighborhood than women, I’d say it is the latter.
My thought experiment: Suppose you have two equal-sized cohorts, identical in every demographic particular but one — that is, they’re from the same homes, the same backgrounds, the same nation. And it’s a really large sample; it’s the United States.
So Sample A turns out to be several times more likely to be murdered, several times more likely to commit suicide, maybe ten times more likely to be incarcerated, several times more likely to be killed or maimed at work, and by the way tends to die several years, on average, before Sample B.
Which Sample do you suppose is generally thought of as oppressed?
At least with race, we know for sure some groups have a larger proportion living in poverty. Of course, this brings up the question, if the students from poor neighborhoods need or deserve a leg up, why do we use race as an imperfect metric?
Oh, we do that because if we didn’t, we’d inadvertently end up skewing our enrollment stats even further. There are a lot of poor but bright Asian-American kids. And you can’t tell who’s poor in a campus brochure photo, but you can get some idea of the racial ratios — assuming you care about such things. Some people do, and some of them are college administrators.
December 6, 2011, 3:10 pmEdgar99 says:
Having just gone through the college admissions grinder with my high school son, its kind of hard to believe there is any “preference” for males. I’ll believe it when I see a gender imbalance in average SAT scores at a school. First, at every single admissions tour at a selective college, one will encounter an admissions officer who will brag to the assembled parents and potential applicants that their school’s applicant pool is so highly qualified, they could replace all of their accepted students with the best of their rejects and have an equally qualified class. Any gender imbalance is likely random or due to “holistic admissions criteria.” Every selective college in the U.S. makes admissions decisions upon “holistic” criteria, which judging from various schools’ web sites consists of such nebulous projections that students who like vinyl records or old movies are “interesting” and will add to the overall quality of the accepted class. Other than providing sinecures for admissions officials, holistic admissions processes serve no other purpose than to inflate application statistics based by suckering kids into shelling out application fees on the off chance that their “unique” attribute will open the magic gates. Finally, a rejection from a non-selective school is really a favor to the applicant. Such a rejectee should take advantage of the opportunity to miss college and go ahead and get started in a trade. They will be much better off in the long run.
December 6, 2011, 4:29 pmBobo from Texas says:
Something needs to be done now to eradicate the institutional sexism that is obviously rampant throughout higher education.
December 6, 2011, 4:33 pmSmooth, Like a Rhapsody says:
@david freidman: A large part of the function of college is (whether or not it should be) dating and marital search.
For whom? Twas’nt for me. I assume you mean for the chix who are just there for the MRS degree. And, once again, AA is not meant to aggrandize the position of the over-represented—that is exactly the opposite of what it is for, in fact.
This a ridiculous theory upon which to base a policy that will cause women to lose spots that they would otherwise earn on college campuses.
December 6, 2011, 4:43 pmRobert says:
I think everyone is missing the real issue here which is why women would have superior ‘academic achievement’ to men. There is no conceivable reason why this should be so other than the system is designed to favor them in the first place in which case affirmative action for men at the college level is not discrimination but a remedy against discrimination.
December 6, 2011, 5:02 pmDaily scoreboard « Don Surber says:
[...] From Glenn Reynolds: “IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS, affirmative action for men. Next I think we need a campus Men’s Center, and sensitivity training for professors and staff on [...]
December 6, 2011, 5:02 pmHadley says:
I think colleges should be completely free to make whatever admissions decisions they want, on any basis. Period.
December 6, 2011, 5:04 pmdee nile says:
It’s not possible that women are simply smarter and harder-working than men?
Not even conceivable?
December 6, 2011, 5:29 pmadam says:
Is it possible that women don’t wish to attend a college or university where men constitute a substantial minority? Colleges realize that the best female applicants demand that schools provide a wide array of social services, not the least of which is the opportunity to interact with a generous selection male students.
December 6, 2011, 5:34 pmgab says:
Harder working? Yes. Smarter? IQ smart? Reasoning smart? Seems unlikely, but I’d be open to evidence.
As my 20 y.o. daughter is a junior at UCLA, and having asked and talked about the gender imbalance issue – she’s very much in favor of tipping the scales to the boys side. I asked her if she realized that may have caused her to be excluded – she of course had and replied, “I’ll take my chances…”
December 6, 2011, 5:42 pmPedro says:
Just a tempest in a teapot if you ask me.
December 6, 2011, 5:54 pmSmart men are foregoing the silly practice of paying huge sums of money to get credentialed.
They are going out and doing it.
Crap if you want to learn basic science just sit in on lectures and tell paying students you lost the syllabus.
Some of the best physics was done by amateurs in a garage!
If you want a degree in Sociology the 3 year syllabus can be put together from a collection of colleges.
Just do the readings and you’ll be farther ahead than most of the kids on campus.
If you are good you can sit in on lectures, tutorial sessions, theses defenses and any number of sessions that paying students don’t even take advantage of.
I’ve got one kid at school for 5 years now. I hound her every week to make sure we’re getting what both of us are paying for. She’s as enthusiastic and sponge-like as I was at her age. She’s determined to show me that I’m a cynical bastard.
I wish the colleges used the PC bible and a blinder then admitted students on their academic and whatever other “life-experience” attributes along with the quality of their admission essay only.
It would make the whole corrupt college and university system go away sooner.
Can't find a good name says:
I understand your overall point, but that particular combination wouldn’t work too well; it’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Va. Tech to William & Mary.
December 6, 2011, 6:09 pmJohann Amadeus Metesky says:
Yes, there are brilliant women. Just a lot fewer or them than brilliant men. There are also more developmentally disabled males than females. On average, men and women have equal intelligence, but the distributions are different.
There’s a reason why there were only three women in that class. Women as smart as you are rare.
December 6, 2011, 6:09 pmGene Schwimmer says:
Since the shortage of males results from the feminized, anti-male atmosphere on today’s campuses, colleges should be made to handle the imbalance of male students the same way they handled the “imbalance” in women’s sports: Admit all the academically qualified males and then, if there are “too many” female applicants, cap the number of female applicants accepted each year at the number that equals the number of male applicants.
December 6, 2011, 6:23 pmMDT says:
Johann Amadeus Metesky,
Hey, now, you shouldn’t go around the Internet using your full name (if it is that) and saying the sort of stuff that got Larry Summers fired. Walls have ears. Or modems, at least.
I do need to respond to neurodoc‘s point, though. This professor never treated the three women in the class (I almost said “girls,” which would have been apt enough — I was 16, my classmate with the A+ was 14) with anything other than courtesy, and he was a scrupulously fair grader, albeit in a style I wasn’t familiar with. (No partial credit here: If you get the wrong answer, your score on that question is zero. A policy that does concentrate the mind wonderfully, but not — in my case — wonderfully enough for an A.) So, yes, it was likely rather a difference in manners and mores than misogyny — which is why I put “misogynistic” in quotes to begin with.
December 6, 2011, 6:30 pmInstapundit » Blog Archive » IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS, affirmative action for men. Next I think we need a campus Men’s Center, and … says:
[...] COLLEGE ADMISSIONS, affirmative action for men. Next I think we need a campus Men’s Center, and sensitivity training for professors and staff [...]
December 6, 2011, 6:36 pmsubmandave says:
“Sex discrimination in admissions at public universities is illegal under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.”
And yet, I’m sure one could find reams of justification for the preferential treatment given women back when I was going through the process in the early ’80s.
I find it mildly humorous that many who would cry “racism” at the hint that academic performance that breaks along racial lines might be related to actual differences in ability, almost in the next breath use the higher academic performance of women as justification for greater acceptance rates and proportion on campus. I find it highly troubling that many in the legal profession who write, enforce, and interpret our laws seem to skew toward this tendency.
December 6, 2011, 6:50 pmMDT says:
No, submandave, it’s not sex discrimination if it benefits women.
I find it mildly humorous that many who would cry “racism” at the hint that academic performance that breaks along racial lines might be related to actual differences in ability, almost in the next breath use the higher academic performance of women as justification for greater acceptance rates and proportion on campus. I find it highly troubling that many in the legal profession who write, enforce, and interpret our laws seem to skew toward this tendency.
Me, I should like to see the people who design such policies carry them out to the letter. Race- and sex- norm admissions. Model your class on the 2010 Census, and don’t deviate from the percentages you find there. No legacies, no athletic scholarships. Just admit the top of whatever racial/gender category you’re looking at, up to the stopping-point. Then stop.
I wonder who would complain first? The parents, or the faculty?
December 6, 2011, 7:15 pmFat Man says:
Near as I can make out most of them are out and out communists.
December 6, 2011, 8:00 pmSlocum says:
As Gail and Alison point out, it’s a bad idea for colleges to admit “mismatched” male students whose academic skills are vastly inferior to those of the other students at the same institution.
But I doubt this is true in this case. Male students still outscore females on the college admissions exams, but they trail in high school GPA. The ‘affirmative action’ for males is just, in effect, reversing a trend that favored females–namely, universities placing more weight on GPA and de-emphasizing test scores. 30 years ago, I was admitted into the honors college of a public ivy by virtue of 99th-percentile test scores (even though I had just a good, but not great, GPA). It was a male pattern of achievement that universities used to recognize. They stopped doing so, though, and now they find they have to put a thumb on the scale to make up for it.
December 6, 2011, 8:02 pmMDT says:
Fat Man,
Near as I can make out most of them are out and out communists.
Well, not I. I suppose I’m in a tiny minority here, but I’m a non-libertarian conservative. I had a socialist phase, but that was when I was about 13; I think I might be forgiven, thirty-plus years on.
December 6, 2011, 8:48 pmEugene Volokh says:
Gene Schwimmer: Can you point to some evidence, please, that suggests that the shortage of males indeed stems “from the feminized, anti-male atmosphere on today’s campuses,” as opposed to other possible causes?
My suspicion is that few men refuse to go to college — or even to a particular college — because they’re afraid that campus atmosphere is “anti-male.” Indeed, I would think that many men who are making decisions based on such factors (as opposed to on whether the college would provide a good education, would provide a good credential, or is in the right place or charges the right amount) might actually prefer going to colleges where more women are present, because this might provide more romantic or sexual opportunities for them. But I’d be happy to hear evidence that it is indeed the supposedly anti-male atmosphere that is predominantly or even substantially driving student decisions.
December 6, 2011, 8:49 pmricky says:
To be completely honest, I just don’t understand how anyone could expect university education to mean anything after it was transformed into a 100% social engineering and spoils system. You politicize it, you destroy it. Right now we’re still in the process, but OWS is already airing out the corpse of higher education.
December 6, 2011, 9:02 pmMutinousDoug says:
OK,
December 6, 2011, 10:02 pmA Men’s “Center” that allows pipe and cigar smoking and has a pool table?
Sign me up,
Doug
MDT says:
EV,
You put it more pedantically than I would, but that’s it. Young men might possibly reject a “woman’s college” that had just gone co-ed; but they would not reject a “historically male” college, especially a prestigious one, because there were more women than men. I mean, from the straight male perspective, what is there not to like?
December 6, 2011, 10:12 pmMDT says:
ricky,
Were you “completely honest,” you would be using other words.
December 6, 2011, 10:23 pmElliot says:
With all the talk lately about the cost/benefit of college, loans, job prospects, etc, I wonder how gender ratio and aptitude within gender of applicants will change.
December 7, 2011, 12:20 amElliot says:
With all the talk lately about the cost/benefit of college, loans, job prospects, etc, I wonder how gender ratio and aptitude within gender of applicants will change.
December 7, 2011, 12:20 amNeo says:
It’s just amazing that women dominate fields like Psychology, forcing men to take those even more difficult STEM curricula, like engineering.
December 7, 2011, 12:32 amSanta says:
Too big to fail often means too necessary to fail.
I do not believe in affirmative action for anyone. Only the strongest survive so why should universities accept someone who didn’t work as hard as others? In a few decades I don’t want women to whisper that a man only got into college because of a quota.
First, let’s realize why women outnumber men in university enrollment. Boys are failing in primary education. Teachers (95% chance it’s a woman) sedate millions of boys every morning with some form of ADHD drug. She is then free to spend the majority of her time coddling her girl students. Boys are told to be quiet and not make any noise which is a perfect environment for girls to thrive. Meanwhile, little Johnny isn’t learning anything but because he’s quiet the teachers could care less.
Young women won’t choose a university where they outnumber men by a wide margin. It’s simple economics for the admissions office. Either they admit young men who don’t meet their standards or see the number of applications fall. With fewer students who will pay the exhorbitant salaries of the university staff?
There is only one real solution for the education problem in our boys. They…Must…Fail… I want boys to fail. I want fewer men in universities. I want fewer men working outside the home. I want the marriage rate to plummet. I want a sharply declining birth rate. I want men to fall flat on their faces!
I want men to pay for becoming sissy’s who are afraid to confront feminists on issues of equality. Beta males should not be allowed to spread their genes.
Only when women see their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers failing will they realize the feminists push for equality was never their goal. Feminists goals were a complete role reversal and the destruction of strong men leading their familes. Feminists won’t be happy until men are subservient to women in all aspects of society. That time is quickly approaching.
December 7, 2011, 5:38 amSanta says:
Women outnumber men in universities nearly 2 to 1. A young man can pick any school he likes and have plenty of young women to choose from. Women however don’t like those odds and want schools where the ratio if even. When women have to compete for eligible males only the prettiest and smartest have a chance to find companionship.
December 7, 2011, 5:42 amConservative Activist Judge says:
They just need to get rid of the fake majors like women’s studies. The balance will come back naturally.
December 7, 2011, 6:04 amSanta says:
A quick Google search finds tens of thousands of websites devoted for scholarships for women. When you look for men you find a handful (mostly for male nurses).
December 7, 2011, 6:08 amMDT says:
Neo,
It’s just amazing that women dominate fields like Psychology, forcing men to take those even more difficult STEM curricula, like engineering.
Ugh. Go away. You could take psychology yourself, if you wanted to. Speaking as a MechE grad from Cal who once contemplated taking OChem just for the fun of it (I am, as you will have gathered, a nerd, and the daughter of two MolBio PhDs), I would respectfully request that you take your prejudices off to a place of your own choosing, and choose chemical engineering as your major; it’ll give you a massive intellectual workout and be lucrative into the bargain.
Of course, maybe you’re a woman yourself, playing games. Sorry, Neo, but I never bothered seeing The Matrix.
December 7, 2011, 10:39 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Sounds like Bertie Wooster and the Drones’ Club.
: )
December 7, 2011, 12:11 pmGiant Frog says:
Are you claiming that there is not anti-male bias at most universities – something that’s obviously true and trivial to demonstrate, as I mentioned above – or are you claiming that it doesn’t matter?
++
December 7, 2011, 1:43 pmBashing Men on Campus
…
NOW, THERE HAS NOT BEEN (and never will be) a U.S. government-funded study of the effects of classroom feminism, political correctness, and anti-male affirmative action on male American college students. So I do not have the benefit of statistics here. However, I can draw on both personal experience (as someone who pursued, and completed, a Ph.D. in the humanities) and the abundance of anecdotal evidence which comes my way as editor of Choosing the Right College, a guide to over 130 American colleges compiled with information gathered from thousands of faculty members, alumni, and current undergraduates.
…
Nearly every elite campus we cover features some sort of “women’s center” — typically dominated by radical feminists or lesbians; at the same time, traditional male preserves such as fraternities are frequently under attack. At Colgate University, where a women’s studies professor became president, the school in 2003 decreed that all fraternities had to close and sell their buildings to the college — to be transformed into “diversity housing” units.
…
IT GETS WORSE AS YOU BURROW DEEPER into academia. I know several highly qualified graduate students who left degree programs in the humanities because of the intense promotion of feminism (enforced by punitive grading) in the classroom. While I persevered and finished my Ph.D. in English, I knew better than to apply for academic jobs; one glance at the panels presented at the annual Modern Language Association (essentially the job-fair for English majors) told me that as a white male I was not welcome. Traditional Western philosophy was dismissed as “phallocentrism”; an entire new discipline, “Queer Theory,” was erected to assert the equivalence of same-sex relationships with marriage; panel after panel singled out and discussed female writers, and never male — unless, lucky things, they happened to be “Queer.” The job notices I saw posted were all, to the last flier, adorned with a standard affirmative action notice, always some variant of: This university especially encourages applications from women, African-Americans, Asian Pacific Islanders, and… essentially everyone but me. I knew how to take a hint.
…
++
Santa says:
Laura, I’d love to see centers for men where they fought for our civil rights. I could spend days talking about issues where men are second class citizens in reference to family law. Ask any guy with children who’s ever been divorced how that worked out for him. I’d also like to see fewer restrictions on vasectomies. Some hospitals won’t perform the procedure unless a man is a certain age, has children, or gets his wifes approval. It drives me nuts thinking women can get an abortion without a single thought but a married man can’t get a vasectomy without his wife going to the doctors office to give HER permission?
Other issues men need help with is primary education. Women are outnumbering men in universities because the feeder system is geared towards young girls.
Did you know men suffer more rapes in the US annually than women? Most of the time the victims are in prison but rape is rape. The military is also having problems now with rape. 10% of all reported rapes last year by service members were men raping other men.
Here’s a question. Why do you see little pink ribbons everywhere supporting breast cancer research when colon cancer kills more men than breast cancer kills women? I understand breasts are universally loved but how come no one seems to care about men dying from a horrible disease? Save the ta-ta’s but not the @ssholes.
One more thing. Why are there only a handful of scholarships for men? There are tens of thousands of scholarships available only to women so why don’t men merit equality?
I could go on all day about injustices men suffer and the need for a men’s civil rights movement.
December 7, 2011, 2:04 pmGiant Frog says:
Cancel out the women’s center. With cigars and pool tables.
Seriously, they’re both stupid ideas, just useless or destructive bloat. How about a “Student’s Center”? Or is that not divisive enough?
FWIW:
Translated from Newspeak, the Why is:
December 7, 2011, 3:06 pm- to promote discrimination against men.
- to foster the idea that men are dangerous and the only “safe space” is one free of men.
Smooth, Like a Rhapsody says:
I no longer believe in Santa.
December 7, 2011, 3:08 pmTheOldMan says:
I went to college to get a couple of engineering degrees. I did not care about male/female ratio, black/hispanic/oriental/caucasian ratio, drinking/sober ratio, and so on. I did care about the quality of the engineering college. Things certainly have changed since I went to college 33 yrs ago.
December 7, 2011, 4:57 pmneurodoc says:
That’s the kind of clap-trap one hears from those who are supremely confident that they “know” of what they speak, when what they “know” is flat out wrong. There will always be misdiagnosed medical conditions. Most often it is because the correct diagnosis has been missed altogether; not so often but occasionally because diagnostic criteria have not been properly applied, with the result being “false positives.” Undoubtedly there are children (and adults) who have been given the diagnosis of ADD or ADHD incorrectly, but the notion that a huge portion of those who have been given the diagnosis don’t in fact have these neurologic conditions is wrong. And the drugs most often used to manage ADHD, e.g., Ritalin, Adderal, Cylert, etc., are CNS STIMULANTS NOT SEDATIVES!
Hey, but why let mere scientific facts get in the way of a cathartic rant about the emasculation of American males.
(Oh, and while most elementary school teachers may be women, if the medicine is not being taken at home and the teacher is giving it to the child at school, and they are doing so per a physician’s or other licensed health care professional’s orders. Teachers can’t prescribe these meds, nor can others who aren’t licensed health care professionals. And even though zuch pretends at times to prescribe major psychotropics for others here, he is only pretending.)
Skeptic that he is, neurodoc doesn’t find it credible that you ever believed in Santa, or at least not in a good many years. Nonetheless, he thanks you for the chuckle you caused him.
December 7, 2011, 5:19 pmneurodoc says:
Does your guide to colleges cover Bowdoin, a small liberal arts school rated higher than Colgate, at least by USN&WR? They too closed their fraternities and did not do so under a woman president who had been a women’s studies professor. Bowdoin is not a “jock school,” but jocks are part of the scene even after the closing of fraternities (hockey, not a particularly genteel or feminine sport, is big there), and from what neurodoc knows of the place, it hasn’t been “feminized” so as to make any red-blood young male uncomfortable.
December 7, 2011, 5:35 pmMDT says:
neurodoc,
When last I was at Bowdoin (at a summer chamber music festival, oh, 28 years ago), there were still frats; we were being put up in them. Sharing them with a Unitarian-Universalist convention. It was a bit odd, to be honest.
And to judge by the condom I found in my bunk, “feminization” hadn’t progressed very far by 1983.
December 7, 2011, 5:53 pmwm13 says:
Supporting Prof. Volokh, I can’t imagine that any men are actually deterred from attending college by a supposed “feminized” atmosphere. My daughter has visited any number of campuses this year (she’s a high school senior), and while she’s been to a number of frat parties and maybe a class or two, she hasn’t visited a single women’s center or thought about any courses other than econ and math. Like most young people, she wants to make money when she grows up.
It’s important to remember that the overwhelming majority of students view education in purely instrumental terms, and that they don’t have much respect for their professors, don’t share their values, and don’t consider them role models. That’s why most students can’t wait to get the hell out into “real jobs” once they get their degrees, and don’t become academics. So while the professoriate may be deeply infected with dopey left-wing views, the students don’t know or care.
December 7, 2011, 6:09 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Yeah, I just noticed the thing about female teachers drugging boys with ADHD drugs. The school can only give the kids meds if there is a prescription from a doctor, and while the teacher may suggest to a parent that he get the kid checked out, the teacher can’t take the kid and get him a prescription. (Actually, my sister was a teacher in the Tupelo public schools for a while, and if I remember correctly, they were told NOT to tell the parents that their kids probably had X condition or needed meds, or anything of the sort.)
December 7, 2011, 6:21 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Laura, I’d love to see centers for men where they fought for our civil rights. I could spend days talking about issues where men are second class citizens in reference to family law. Ask any guy with children who’s ever been divorced how that worked out for him.
That doesn’t sound like a men’s center at a university, but it does sound like a subject for a men’s studies minor.
I’d also like to see fewer restrictions on vasectomies. Some hospitals won’t perform the procedure unless a man is a certain age, has children, or gets his wifes approval. It drives me nuts thinking women can get an abortion without a single thought but a married man can’t get a vasectomy without his wife going to the doctors office to give HER permission?
Perhaps you are unaware of the hoops a woman who isn’t of a certain age, or doesn’t have at least two kids, has to go through to get her tubes tied. My SIL who has never married was turned down flat when she tried to have that done in her early 20′s. She couldn’t get a doctor to do it until she was 35.
Other issues men need help with is primary education. Women are outnumbering men in universities because the feeder system is geared towards young girls.
Once again, a men’s studies concentration would be more applicable here than a men’s center at a university.
Did you know men suffer more rapes in the US annually than women?
I would have to see some stats, as well as a definition of “rape”. I know that men are sometimes victims of rape, sometimes by women, but men suffer MORE rapes than women?
Most of the time the victims are in prison but rape is rape. The military is also having problems now with rape. 10% of all reported rapes last year by service members were men raping other men.
Men who are in prison should never be raped. American courts don’t sentence American men who have broken the law to systematic rape as a punishment. Ditto the military. It should never happen.
Here’s a question. Why do you see little pink ribbons everywhere supporting breast cancer research when colon cancer kills more men than breast cancer kills women? I understand breasts are universally loved but how come no one seems to care about men dying from a horrible disease? Save the ta-ta’s but not the @ssholes.
I can only tell you that if you want ribbons and fund raisers for colon cancer, prostate cancer, or anything else, you will have to make that happen. Study the Susan G. Komen foundation and you can see how it’s done. My mother is suffering from metastatic breast cancer and she gets mighty tired of seeing those pink ribbons in October – she can’t get away from it. And that “save the ta-tas” thing bugs the crap out of me because they are not talking about my 76-year-old mother’s missing breast. It isn’t causing anyone but her and those who love her any tears. You have to be hot to matter. Nothing new there.
One more thing. Why are there only a handful of scholarships for men? There are tens of thousands of scholarships available only to women so why don’t men merit equality? There are scholarships available to everyone, and then there are scholarships available to women. I suppose this situation is left over from the day when women had a harder row to hoe, to get to school. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, it’s easier to turn this on than to turn it off.
I could go on all day about injustices men suffer and the need for a men’s civil rights movement.
Then start one. Other movements had their iconic founders. Be the change you want to see in the world.
December 7, 2011, 6:32 pmAffirmative Action for College Males « Upset Patterns says:
[...] game, means discriminate against women) in order to balance out the gender-ratio in colleges? Ilya Somin comments on and quotes an Engage article discussing some of the current events related to the topic: My wife Alison and [...]
December 7, 2011, 10:45 pmMDT says:
laura(southernxyl),
I would have to see some stats, as well as a definition of “rape”. I know that men are sometimes victims of rape, sometimes by women, but men suffer MORE rapes than women?
I think it’s that the total number of rapes suffered by men annually is greater than the total number of rapes suffered by women. That is, more women than men are victims, but the men tend to be victimized many, many more times each. That is because they are mostly in prison.
Of course, they don’t count, because men raping men in prison is just fantastically amusing.
December 8, 2011, 8:14 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Of course, they count, MDT, and they aren’t amusing at all. They count to me, and they count to you, don’t they?
There’s also this.
I’d still like to see stats. I’ve tried to find them but everything I see is broken down into prison rape, statutory rape, stalking, acquaintance rape, and so on, rather than just raw numbers of male victims and female victims. Numbers somewhere?
December 8, 2011, 9:49 pmnamae nanka says:
a blast from the past:
“An ongoing inspiration for Vest is the MIT community itself, he said. “When I look around at an MIT student body whose undergraduates are 42 percent women, 6 percent African-American, 11 percent Hispanic American, 2 percent Native American, and present a huge range of diversity in so many other dimensions, it seems to me that a miracle has happened,” he said.
“But that is just the point. It is not a miracle. It is not a natural occurrence. It is the result of determined, conscientious effort, over more than three decades, often against seemingly insurmountable odds. It is the result of institutional leadership and occasional courage. It is a result of the determination of innumerable families and communities. The goal was as simple as it was profound: to give every young person the opportunity to succeed.”
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/mlk.html
December 19, 2011, 12:35 pm