“Demographic Realities”

Jennifer Delahunty Britz, dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, has an interesting OpEd in today’s New York Times about the increasing difficulty of talented young women (relative to talented young men) getting into selective colleges.

The essay is quite well done, and I recommend it, but what particularly interested me was the following:

… The reality is that because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

We have told today’s young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How’s that for an unintended consequence of the women’s liberation movement?

…

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges? These are questions that admissions officers like me grapple with.

Query: if the Equal Rights Amendment had passed (the intention of which was to make gender discrimination the equivalent of race discrimination), would applying different admissions standards to men and women have been legal?

UPDATE [24 March]

Katha Pollitt of The Nation , commenting on the OpEd discussed above, asks:

Remember when opponents of affirmative action argued that it hurt blacks’ self-esteem because they’d never know if they had succeeded on their merit? According to this theory, first-rate students who would have been accepted anyway are stigmatized by being lumped together in the public mind with students accepted only because of their race, and this is stressful and anxiety-producing all around. Much better not to take race into account, and let excellence be the only criterion.

I wonder how those champions of meritocracy feel about gender- based college preferences for men.

That’s easy: we oppose preferences based on gender just as strongly as we oppose preferences based on race, religion, or ethnicity. Anyone who doubts this need look no farther than the howls of protest (discussed most recently here) coming from Michigan because the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative would ban gender preferences along with those based on race and ethnicity.

For the record, I should add that not all criticism of racial discrimination comes from those who are “champions of meritocracy.” Although I rather like merit, I don’t consider myself a “champion of meritocracy,” and merit in fact plays really no role in my opposition to racial/gender/ethnic preferences.

UPDATE II [26 March]

Long-time reader Alex Bensky sent the following email, which I post here with permission:

Mr. Rosenberg, for a diverting and interesting few minutes, I direct you to the letters section of today’s New York Times, at least the national edition. There is a spate of letters on the paper’s recent article discussing the fact that more women than men apply to colleges and a number of these schools have set quotas on women.

One writer claims that the obvious analogy to affirmative action is wanting because affirmative action was intended to remedy the effects of past discrimination. Well, no; the analogy might not have held water when affirmative action was aimed only at blacks. Once the emphasis shifted to “diversity” the analogy became exact. After all, if the purpose is a student body that looks like America, by definition about half of America is male and therefore it seems required that half of a university’s student body would have to be male.

It could happen that once this sinks in the universities will realize the fatuity and inherent discrimination involved in diversity as they have defined it and return to genuine affirmative action–opening up, helping people qualify, etc.–and dump “diversity” as practiced.

It could happen. Then again, it also could happen that Lucy Lawless is about to ring my doorbell and ask if she can come up and get out of these wet clothes.

Otherwise, my sympathy for these outraged and unhappy female applicants is limited. After all, someone has to suffer when we engage in positive discrimination, right? They should be proud to be helping their dream schools demonstrate diversity.

The letters to the New York Times, which are printed under the heading “Colleges Slam the Door on Girls,” appear here.

Madeline Langlieb of North Woodmere, N.Y., writes:

It is sad that women who have tirelessly fought for equal rights and opportunities in education are getting their ideals mailed back to them in thin envelopes.

Like Ms. Delahunty Britz’s daughter, I excelled in a rigorous schedule filled with Advanced Placement courses. I participated in extracurricular activities, did well on my SAT’s and had an after-school job. It makes me cringe to think that if I had been born the opposite sex, I might have been accepted to my dream school.

I’m sure Ms. Langlieb was as well qualified and deserving as she claims, but I wonder whether she thinks “[i]t is sad” that whites, Asians, Arabs, [East] Indians, non-preferred Hispanics and others who may “have tirelessly fought for equal rights and opportunities in education are getting their ideals mailed back to them in thin envelopes.”

What, in fact, were the “ideals” they fought for if not non-discriminatory equal treatment?

Heather Wood of Tulsa, “an ardent supporter of gender equality and affirmative action” (I wonder if she believes in preferences for women), finds herself “on unfamiliar footing.” Her first thought was “women have earned their place in our elite institutions; let’s give it to them,” but she quickly had second thoughts because she worrid about “what effect this debate will have on race-based affirmative action.”

One can almost sympathize with her plight. It’s hard, after all, to believe in gender- and race-blind equality and at the same time favor lowering standards on the basis of gender or sex to promote “diversity,” or anything else.

Ms. Wood tries to remove herself from the horns of the dilemma on which she is impaled by arguing that it’s O.K. to judge blacks, but not men, by lower standards because

Affirmative action’s strongest argument is that it helps level the effects of past (and present) discrimination. I have a hard time believing that men can make a straight-faced argument of historical systemic discrimination.

Ms. Wood may well be right about the strongest argument for affirmative action, but right or not it is an argument that the Supreme Court has flatly rejected. Thus no current “affirmative action” program (which is to say, program that employes racial preferences) can be defended on the grounds Ms. Wood attempts to use to free herself of contradiction.

Vaughn Carney of Stowe, Vermont, a former “educator, administrator and admissions officer,” writes that

the practice of ‘gender norming’ in college admissions is hardly new.

It is the dirtiest little secret in higher education, primarily because it operates in favor of young white male applicants in the form of quotas. Without this practice, nearly all of the elite, historically male colleges would be more than 80 percent female.

The fact that these same colleges practice “race norming” (in effect separating applicants into separate pools by race and pick, according to some proportional “goal,” the best from each group) is not even a secret, though it is routinely denied.

As a Stanford grad, more than once, I especially appreciated my alma mater’s frankness as reported by Catherine Hammond of Tempe, Ariz.:

I applied to Stanford in 1964 as a National Merit finalist with all A’s except for a B in solid geometry/trig. The rejection letter stated that the quota for women that year was fixed at 400; the quota for men was 800.

What we seem to have lost is that overt quota system — small progress to be sure.

Have we lost that quota system, or has it only become covert, like racial quotas goals?

Finally, as a father whose daughter had an especially rewarding college experience at Bryn Mawr, I especially liked the following letter from Brett Jocelyn Epstein of Helsingbord, Sweden:

My advice to all the talented, smart young women who are concerned that they will face a gender barrier is to consider women’s colleges. I found the atmosphere at Bryn Mawr to be stimulating, warm and highly conducive to intellectual and personal development.

Equality — treating everyone according to the same standards, whatever they are — can be a scary concept. Sometimes it means that members of one’s own group (whatever that group is) have less of what is required than members of other groups. I find it disappointing that so many people, when faced with that apparent dilemma, abandon the principle of equality rather than their group loyalty.

Women (including usually my wife) have long since given up asking me for advice. But if they did, I would urge them to stand by the principle that feminists articulated so well, if so fleetingly, in urging passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have written into the Constitution the same principle, applied to gender, that was embodied in the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Perhaps in reviving that seemingly dormant principle, at least some women would be willing to apply it again to race and ethnicity as well.

UPDATE III [27 March]

Writing on ACTA Online and not her home blog, Critical Mass, Erin O’Connor makes an argument similar to mine:

The irony is that Britz brings the logic of affirmative action full circle; in lamenting the lost opportunities of young women who are rejected by colleges in favor of less qualified male applicants, she makes, however unwittingly, an eloquent argument for meritocracy across the board. In this sense, the most compelling thing about Britz’ piece–entitled, tellingly, “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected”–is the manner in which it accidentally makes a case quite other than the one she ostensibly means for it to make.

UPDATE IV [27 March]

Also see the discussion at InsideHigherEd [HatTip to Erin O’Connor], which confirms that the longstanding admissions office duplicity about the extent of race preferences has now spread to sex:

While 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?”

Lawyers who work on higher education law were also intrigued by issues raised by the column, but most wanted to talk on background and more than one asked a variation of the question “did her president know she was going to write that?”

Interestingly, this article argues that gender discrimination in admissions is illegal if it occurs at public institutions:

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 bars gender discrimination in all education programs at institutions receiving federal funds (all but a handful of colleges).

Of course in identical language Title VI bars race discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds, and that hasn’t prevented those institutions from discriminating by race, i.e., giving racial preferences, until the cows come home. Why should Title IX prevent what Title VI has not?

Here’s a creative answer: it may be necessary to violate Title IX in order to comply with Title IX:

Private institutions are covered in terms of how they treat students once they are admitted, and that includes athletics. That could be relevant to the admissions issue because one reason cited by advocates for affirmative action for men in admissions (although not cited by the Kenyon dean) is that a lopsided gender ratio in enrollments can make it more difficult to comply with Title IX in athletics. That’s because the most straightforward way to comply with Title IX’s rules for athletics participation is to demonstrate “proportionality” — that the percentage of female athletes is roughly the same as the proportion of female undergraduates. Institutions that are majority female and that have a football team often find proportionality daunting.

And Joyce Smith, executive director of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, offered what may or may not be “a compelling governmental interest” in discriminating in favor of men in admissions: “If you have a dance, you have to have enough folks to dance with,” she said.

Finally, Katha Pollitt of The Nation, discussed in the first UPDATE above, digs her hole even deeper in comments to Inside Higher Ed when

she called the male favoritism “scandalous,” and said people would never stand for the equivalent logic about other groups. “Boys won’t apply to schools that are too majority female? What about whites? What about Christians applying to schools where there are so many Jews. It’s saying that the market place forces [admissions officers] to discriminate. I think it’s shameful.”

In her fury, Ms. Pollitt has apparently forgotten that one of the leading arguments for racial preference extensive enough to create a “critical mass” of minority students is precisely the same that she ridicules here: that minorities will not apply to schools that don’t have “enough” minorities. And one of the traditional arguments for busing (and other means of racial school assignments) is that students will not voluntarily attend schools with “too many” whites or blacks.

Oh well. If people applied their stated principles consistently there wouldn’t be any preferences, based on race or sex, in the first place.