January 25, 2024 | OPINION | By Charlotte Maley
Affirmative action in higher education, at least on the basis of race, has been an extraordinarily contested issue in college admissions for over four decades. While this is surely a nuanced debate that deserves ample attention, there is another kind of affirmative action that is even more pervasive in college admissions that flies almost completely under the radar: one that is concerned with gender identity.
Today, women make up 60% of the nation’s undergraduate population, and many colleges and universities admit that they were only able to reach this ratio by being far more lenient on male applicants than they were on female applicants. According to Angel B. Perez, a former admissions counselor at Trinity College and the current chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, if most schools were “fair” in their evaluation of students, 80% of college classes would be female.
“I can’t come up with a class of 20% men—that’s just not good for the campus,” stated Perez in a New York Times article released last year. The article reported that Tulane University has reached a class size of two-thirds women.
According to Douglas Shapiro, the executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, if these trends were to persist, within the next few years, two women will have a college diploma for every one man. As a result of these numbers, the public is trying to explain the inability of the average man to have college applications on par with that of the average woman, or even to explain why men simply are not applying at all.
Today, women score higher on standardized tests such as the ACT and make up two-thirds of the top 10% of graduating classes nationwide.
The mainstream explanation for these stark statistics is that boys develop psychologically, on average, at a slower rate than girls because of their sex. However, neuroscientific evidence of this is unconvincing. The popular solution to the problem, then, has been advocacy for starting boys a year or two later than girls in school. It is argued that, because the education system rewards order, discipline, politeness and punctuality, boys are at an inherent disadvantage.
The idea that young men face greater hardships in early education, leading to their mass absence in universities, is only one piece of the puzzle.
In a recent New Yorker article “What’s the matter with men?”, Idrees Kahloon claims that the majority of people believe that boys’ recent fall from grace is due to a “crisis of masculinity.”
In his book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling,” Richard V. Reeves goes on to say that “. . . the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft.”
In other words, the general public has been led to believe that men are at a biological disadvantage to women and that their success and confidence is contingent upon upholding the mainstream idea that they, as French feminist Simone de Beauvoir put it so many years ago, are “demigods” in comparison to women. The pervasive narrative is that, without having domination over women or beliefs regarding male superiority reinforced in society, men have no reason to work, learn, or engage in community.
In light of these claims, which name men as the new disadvantaged gender minority, higher education has been able to justify giving unabashed privilege toward male candidates.
“There was definitely a thumb on the scale to get boys,” said the former dean of admissions at Wesleyan University, Sourav Guha, in the same New York Times piece. “We were just a little more forgiving and lenient when they were boys than when they were girls.”
There is no question that boys have an extreme advantage in the college admissions game, but is that a bad thing? Ifaffirmative action based on race is justifiable because it provides opportunity to those that did not grow up with societal advantages, why should the case be different on the basis of gender? I argue that race and gender-based affirmative actions are not only entirely different, but that the argument in defense of these gender-favoring admissions methods is altogether offensive.
For one, race-based affirmative action was set in place to help those of historically oppressed ethnic backgrounds succeed within an oppressive status quo that favors the white, wealthy and patriarchal individual. Higher education in the U.S. was created by white men, for white men; the case for race-based affirmative action is a compromise.
If we keep the problematic system in place, it must provide everyone the chance to participate within it. To do so, admissions to those systems must agree to proportionally scale credentials for those that have faced challenges based on racial identity.
When people from backgrounds that experienced physical and fiscal violence based on their historically oppressed racial category fail to achieve greatness within the current structure, we call that a failure to conform to a system that was created to subjugate them; but what should we call it when the failures are the people whom the system was made by and for?
We aim to give racial minorities special consideration in the admissions process because we believe that their applications would be just as good as white applicants given the same early childhood opportunities. We simultaneously want to give similar admissions privileges to men because they, despite having all of the opportunity, could not succeed by conventional standards. This is the most important avenue by which gender-based affirmative action favoring white men cannot be justified, as it is predicated on the idea that their disadvantage is due to women being given equal opportunity in the same exact classroom.
Not only is privileging men in college admissions unjustifiable according to the original philosophy and purpose of affirmative action, but the two dominant narratives that try to explain men’s recent societal demise are offensive and commonly placed in conjunction with each other when they are plainly hypocritical.
While one side of the argument is that women are fundamentally more capable than men in educational pursuits and behavioral decency, the other claims that men should be superior in these virtues. Not only is it offensive to deem boys inherently less capable than girls, it is even more ridiculous to unfairly promote them in a pathetic attempt to help them maintain their dominant societal role, suggesting that women are rightfully inferior. When we advocate giving men leeway in a system that is supposed to be based on capability and meritocracy, we do so by diminishing theaccomplishments of women. If these claims and their hypocrisy are not offensive, unfair and completely ironic, I do not know what is.
My argument here is not that boys and men are not going through some wildly pathological crisis that is leading them to not make up their fair share of higher educational institutions. Rather, my point is that dated narratives about the male constitution and the man’s socially prescribed entitlement to receive special treatment over women are causing colleges and universities to accept less deserving male applicants based on sexist presumptions and the nonsensical misogynistic value systems that somehow came from them. Gender-based affirmative action is only similar to ideal race and class-based affirmative action in that it seems to try to be righting a historical wrong. In the case of men getting preferential treatment, according to experts in the field and male rights advocates, it is penance for giving women equal rights.