Feds to Explore Gender Bias in College Admission
by Mark Sklarow, Executive Director, IECA
Sometime this week the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is expected to formally launch an investigation into gender bias in the nation’s colleges. The charge is that college admission policies favor male applicants. Some colleges will respond to this charge with a hardy “yes, of course we do.”
The year I enrolled in college, males accounted for 57% of the undergraduate population. Today those numbers have reversed with women accounting for nearly 59%, as males are more likely to explore work, enlist in the military, or find themselves incarcerated. To many colleges, there is a benefit to a student body that is more evenly split between the sexes and some fear the results of an imbalance should female populations top the 2/3 mark…a figure not wholly unrealistic in smaller liberal arts colleges. College administrators, and educational consultants, fear that such a campus would become less and less appealing not only to some males, but many female candidates as well.
While the federal investigation may focus on a wider cross-section of schools, anti-discrimination laws apply only to public universities, as private schools have enjoyed the right to discriminate based on gender—a law that has allowed some institutions to remain single-sex. The investigators are likely to explore the grade point averages, test scores, and other details between admitted and rejected males and females.
Most colleges, public and private, will argue that they view all candidates as a whole: not only grades and scores, but personal and community-based experiences also. So, too, I suspect, they will note that colleges believe their students and their institutions are best served with a diverse student body. That said, when evaluating candidates for admission, schools likely look at a number of factors beyond scores and grades to ensure such diversity: race, religion, the state where the candidate was raised and educated, areas of interest and passion—and gender.
The Supreme Court, looking at the role of race in admissions, determined that colleges had the right to consider race among other factors, as colleges sought a diverse student body. In the case of the white student who brought the case claiming discrimination, the courts saw that providing some benefit to underrepresented minorities was an acceptable practice. Such actions, said the court, were designed in part to create a dynamic and diverse student body which benefited all students.
The question now is whether male undergraduates have become, in essence, an underrepresented minority deserving of some benefit in college admission. For me the more critical question is whether colleges retain the right to seek as diverse a student population as it wants, and does this extend to the right to favor some characteristics over others in order to achieve that aim. It is not, of course, as simple as it seems. For we should have no doubt that some small number of colleges, given permission to discriminate among applicants based on social characteristics, would do so for less noble purposes than a diverse student body.
For the time being I support colleges—and this from the father of two girls—because I do ascribe to the belief that all students benefit when the entering freshman class has students both urban and rural, American and foreign, Christian and not, female and male.
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Hi Mark!
After reading the initial reports of this investigation, I did my own research on about 30 DC area colleges and universities using published data. My findings showed that the VAST majority of schools did NOT discriminate against girls in admissions. In fact, you could make the case that a few discriminated against boys!
There were a couple of exceptions. For example, the College of William and Mary accepted 43% of their male applicants, but only 29% of their female applicants. The other issue I discovered was that several universities appeared to have abruptly removed their statistics from their websites (Georgetown, University of Maryland etc.), which appeared curious.
Anyway, thanks for keeping up your wonderful blog. I like the diversity of topics and information you provide.
Nancy