Seeking gender balance, selective schools giving men a leg up in admission
hechingerreport.org
hechingerreport.org
Men are more likely to go into the trades, and we need people to do that. The average age of people in the trades is very high. Who are you going to call when they retire?
Let the market sort it out, distorting markets often produces a worse outcome.
Dating, for one thing. When my daughters apply to college, I imagine they won't want to go to a school that's 65/35, since that would create a very skewed dating dynamic (to the benefit of boys and the detriment of girls).
At the time (~1980) among undergraduates Caltech was about 15% female, 85% male. There were probably some who did make off campus dating work but I never heard about it.
Even if a significant fraction could make off campus dating work, with that much of an on campus imbalance the ratio of the remaining males looking for an on campus date to on campus females would still likely be large and that's pretty annoying for everyone, but especially so for the women who if they were not currently dating were being constantly hit on.
If you value dating above all else, send your kids to a party college.
Or students simply will choose to go to a different school, where dating prospects are better.
I heavily doubt this is a justified incentive to prescribe quotas. If university was for dating, I probably wouldn't have picked computer science and electrical engineering.
Even if it may feel different some times, universities aren't a breeding ground where dads can put their daughters to get engaged.
> If university was for dating, I probably wouldn't have picked computer science and electrical engineering.
I also never suggested people choose a major in order to date (that would seem extreme — though I definitely knew people who signed up for specific classes for this purpose!).
And I also didn't suggest that I would send my daughters to university to get engaged — that's a straw man. Instead, I pointed out that my daughters themselves probably wouldn't want to go to a school where the dating prospects are dismal. My guess is that most people would feel the same way!
Most importantly, I was not in any way indicating that this should be required (which would "limit access to education," as you refer to it). I'm just pointing out that schools could have rational reasons for not admitting students on a sex-blind basis, and that perhaps it shouldn't be knee-jerkingly rejected.
> In the 21st century where you can meet people from thousands of miles away within minutes?
This is not how college students want to date, FYI. I say this as someone who has been in multiple long-distance relationships, and eventually a long-distance marriage (but met these girlfriends locally, like most people do).
Double standards go both ways - if men are demonstrably struggling I don't think it's unreasonable to give them a bit of a push. I would expect the same consideration for women.
Ultimately, let the person choose whether or not they want to apply or go into a profession that doesn't require post secondary education and apply supports where needed.
I was interested to see this legal explanation because I had read in a prior HN thread that schools could choose to be single-sex, but once they decided to admit both sexes they were forbidden from discriminating. The HN comment linked to an authoritative-looking website (Dept of Education?), but this seems to pretty clearly indicate that private schools are exempt.
EDIT:
Here's a link to a page on the Dept of Education's Office of Civil Rights website, which gives the impression that schools that receive federal funding (which is basically all of them) cannot discriminate on the basis of sex or gender in admissions. It mentions no exception for private institutions. [1]
But this other page on the same website shows the exemption for private institutions. Very strange that the first page, which has a section on the "scope of Title IX" would not mention that this rule does not apply to the thousands of private universities and colleges. [2]
1: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/tix_dis.html
2: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/t9-rel-exemp...
There's also a way to do it that doesn't involve giving one gender a boost in admission. Instead (1) try to get more people of the desired gender who are qualified to make it without a boost to apply, and (2) try to get more people of the desired gender that are accepted by multiple schools to decide to go to yours.
That's the approach Caltech took. When I was there in the '80s it was 85% male (it is 54% male nowadays). That was annoying and distracting for everybody. They made it a priority to get more balanced, and the approach was to work on the pipeline.
When I, a pretty average for Caltech male, was offered admission they sent me a letter and told me the deadline to accept and how to do so, and that was pretty much it. If I had picked another school Caltech wouldn't have tried to get me to change my mind. It would have just been "tzs didn't accept...offer that spot to the next kid on the waitlist".
If I had been a female, they probably would have sent a faculty member to visit me and my parents at home and try to convince us that Caltech was the place to be.
Same on the pre-application side of things. They'd send people out to meet top female high school STEM students and try and convince them to apply. For males you had to be really special to get that kind of recruitment.
Public institutions (which cannot legally discriminate on sex because of Title IX), and institutions in states where sex-based discrimination is disallowed, may see their student body shift even more female if they no longer consider standardized test scores.