<p>"Civil rights investigators will soon begin reviewing admissions data from a sampling of colleges in the Washington region to determine whether, after decades of progress toward sexual equity, female students have become so plentiful in higher education that institutions have entered a new era of discrimination against them."</p>
<p>hold up, what about asians?</p>
<p>And whites?</p>
<p>@QwertyKey and Alex7592 I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting. This is more about political correctness than fairness.</p>
<p>Complete BS. Schools want balanced male:female ratios. That may require being more selective with females. So what? In engineering they’re less selective.</p>
<p>"@QwertyKey and Alex7592 I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting. This is more about political correctness than fairness. "</p>
<p>Are you talking about AA or this investigation. </p>
<p>I doubt a meritocracy (gender-wise) would really cause problems. The article exaggerates facts.</p>
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<p>There’s a different thread for that </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/809185-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-6-a.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/809185-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-6-a.html</a> </p>
<p>here on College Confidential. But as a matter of broad principle, the same law would apply: discrimination is against the law. See that thread </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/809185-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-6-a.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/809185-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-6-a.html</a> </p>
<p>for more on that ever controversial subject. </p>
<p>On the subject of this thread, I find it interesting that the United States has finally “caught up” with a lot of other countries in which women make up the majority of university students. That is actually by far the worldwide pattern. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.uis.unesco.org/template/pdf/ged/2009/GED_2009_EN.pdf[/url]”>UNESCO UIS;
<p>^Hmmm… Any idea why?</p>
<p>And to save others the trouble, it’s page 17.</p>
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<p>The “elephant in the room” in the Espenshade et al statistical studies is that their clearest and most important finding as to how admissions works (though they may not have fully understood it, or didn’t want to talk about it) was that gender, not race, is the key factor driving the manipulated admissions standards, especially as they concern whites and Asians, and that the discrimination is performed in favor of women. The evidence for the Asian discrimination was a lot weaker, in part because the non-discriminatory interpretations of the Asian effect don’t exist in the case of females.</p>
<p>It is only below the upper percentiles (roughly 95-90th and under on the SAT charts, for example) that women catch up to men and lower than that where women predominate. At the top percentiles men outnumber women. Unlike the race distribution, there is no way to influence this by adjusting for geography, socioeconomics, quality of high school, or by awarding legacy/athlete/donor preferences. Giving higher weight to female-friendly measures of compliance such as class rank and unweighted GPA can only be done to a limited extent at the top universities because those measures are too crude at that tier of selectivity (a high proportion of valedictorians are rejected). The most selective universities must resort to criteria like “maturity” or “passion”, or simply compare women against women (“that is one awesome set of math competition results… for a girl”). </p>
<p>Big beneficiaries of the male/female SAT gap are Asian females, by the way. Their statistical profile is closer to that of high-performing males, with high math and verbal SAT and enrollment in science and engineering 2-4 times higher than that of white females. To the extent that high objective performance by women is given extra weight (and it has to be, as Espenshade and his collaborators found but did not dare emphasize), a far higher number of Asian females are in a position to receive the benefit. This would all have shown up had they run a Race x Gender interaction in the statistical regressions, and that they didn’t do so suggests that they hoped to avoid the whole question of gender discrimination even more so than anti-Asian discrimination.</p>
<p>Hmmm…seems odd. I know this is a very simplistic way to look at it, but…there are slightly more females in the population overall. And, with EVERY college I’ve looked at, there are slightly more females in THEIR overall population as well. </p>
<p>I’m VERY anti-discrimation of all types (including what some would call “reverse discrimation” - though I think that term is ridiculous), and affirmative action. I’m a female…by the way. And with a high performing daughter. I do NOT think females need to be given any special consideration, though they sometimes are…in fields such as math & sciences. I do not think low income should be a factor either, or the color of one’s skin, their religion, or their nationality. Period. So…if women overall perform at lower levels in these areas, then there SHOULD be fewer females accepted into theses majors. But most schools don’t accept based on major. </p>
<p>However, private schools have the right to admit whomever they want. It’s STATE schools, who have a greater responsibility to citizens based on our educational tax dollar, who must hold themselves to a fairer set of rules, and where anti-discrimination must be enforced. </p>
<p>So…if the ratio of male versus female accepted students is the same as the numbers of male versus female applicants (and population)…should anyone have their panties in a bunch?</p>
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<p>Private schools are heavily tax supported, and many would close or shrink without the government help. Tax exemptions and research grants are money. Student loans allow universities to raise tuition and mitigate price competition.</p>
<p>Admissions should be gender and race blind. That way there is no way to discriminate. Assign the students a number such that their name does not show either so there is no way to deduce potential race or gender from the application. There is your fix.</p>
<p>I would LOVE for the conclusion of the investigation to sum that admissions decisions are made “gender blind”, as well as “race blind”.</p>
<p>I disagree that admissions should be gender-blind. Men and women ARE different. Saying that their different is different than saying one is better than the other. Women are sometimes more competitive applicants - and of greater supply. So, many colleges would have a high percentage of female admits. That’s fine for some people, but I don’t want to go to a school that’s 60% female OR 60% male. Just like I don’t want to go to a school that’s 60% clarinet player, 60% athletic, 60% rich (although I pretty much am), etc.</p>
<p>From what I’ve seen/heard, LACs discriminate in favor of men because there are fewer men going into liberal arts, and Engineering schools discriminate in favor of women because there are fewer women going into that field.</p>
<p>So what? We are not all equal or all the same. If you are fortunate to be going against the tide and have talent in a field that is an anomaly for your sex, that’s life. You’ll probably pay for your talent and interest after you graduate and nobody wants to hire you because you’re a female and it’s an “old boys” network, or you’re a male and the women in the field think you couldn’t possibly be qualified.</p>
<p>My son is at a selective LAC. I don’t know if being male gave him somewhat better odds, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it did. The college does seem to try to preserve some sort of gender balance. I think that’s probably a good thing overall, but it would disadvantage female applicants. </p>
<p>I think students have to work with the what they have in this regard, as there are advantages and disadvantages in whatever direction you look.</p>
<p>I also have a high-achieving daughter who is at the honors college of the flagship state univ. I knew and she knew it that it might well have been harder for her to get accepted to an elite LAC than it was for her brother. After weighing how much value a choice like that held for her, she decided to attend her current school. She wasn’t as drawn to the small private environment as my son was, but did consider it carefully.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, in her honors college it is very gender imbalanced. Well over 60% female, maybe close to 70%. They do not strive for gender balance and admit on merit only, however the honors college is in the setting of the larger university so that basic feeling of both genders being amply represented is covered. I do not think my daughter would want to attend an overwhelmingly female school in any case.</p>
<p>Gender discrimination is a trickier subject than racial discrimination IMO. There are more factors that seem to inevitably foster a non-gender-blind admission process, most obviously the 1:1 m:f ratio that is arguably an integral part of a functioning society. Now, exactly how closely a school ought to adhere to that ratio is up in the air, and whether gender-blind admissions would severely change the perfect ratio at most schools is unclear as well.</p>
<p>Thoughts? When does the imbalance become detrimental to the college experience? 60:40? 65:35? What schools would possibly, if gender biases were removed, see ratios like these? A few, namely engineering schools and extremely liberal LACs, might already be severely disproportionate even with biases. Another question: should the applicant accept and perhaps even embrace a gender imbalance as a factor in considering schools, or should all schools avoid having that as a factor and try for 1:1 as much as possible?</p>
<p>“I disagree that admissions should be gender-blind.”</p>
<p>Look, you’re going to Stanford, so I am assuming that you’re bright. I also am assuming that you’re young, so you may not have been yet exposed to a lot. Before you solidify your position, I implore you to weigh your position against the litmus test of the 14th amendment of the US Constitution, or the “equal protection clause”:</p>
<p>“No state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” </p>
<p>[Equal</a> Protection Clause - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause]Equal”>Equal Protection Clause - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Hopefully your years at Stanford will expose you to a lot of views that will challenge your beliefs. Some, you will dismiss, while others, hopefully will challenge and possibly bend your view on critical societal issues. Best of luck :). </p>
<h2>Take the following case law and supplant the words dealing with “race” with words dealing with “gender”, and it is clear that discrimination based on gender, whether right or wrong from a moral, or diversity point of view is just illegal. </h2>
<p>"Since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy has been vindicated as a matter of legal doctrine, and the clause has been interpreted as imposing a general restraint on the government’s power to discriminate against people based on their membership in certain classes, including those based on race and sex (see below).</p>
<p>It was also in the post-Civil-War era that the Supreme Court first decided that corporations were “persons” within the meaning of the equal protection clause.[9] However, the legal concept of corporate personhood predates the Fourteenth Amendment.[10] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Clause was used to strike down numerous statutes applying to corporations. Since the New Deal, however, such invalidations have been rare.[11]
[edit] Between Plessy and Brown</p>
<p>While the Plessy majority’s interpretation of the clause stood until Brown, the holding of Brown was prefigured, to some extent, by several earlier cases.</p>
<h2>The first of these was Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938). Lloyd Gaines was a black student at Lincoln University of Missouri, one of the historically black colleges in Missouri. He applied for admission to the law school at the all-white University of Missouri, since Lincoln did not have a law school, but was denied admission due solely to his race. The Supreme Court, applying the separate-but-equal principle of Plessy, held that a State offering a legal education to whites but not to blacks violated the Equal Protection Clause.</h2>
<p>“Carolene Products and the various levels of Equal Protection scrutiny”:
Intermediate scrutiny (if the law categorizes on the basis of sex): the law is unconstitutional unless it is “substantially related” to an “important” government interest"</p>
<p>I know of a white male high school senior who was recently deferred ED from Duke. He called admissions and was told the primary reason was because he was a male and not a female.</p>
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<p>Colleges don’t receive government funds to operate a dating service. There is no compelling social interest in having students mate primarily within the college campus, and not the surrounding (generally 50-50 M/F) towns. Quite the opposite, setting up a cozy intra-college dating pool is a government subsidy for eugenics of the kind the parents are hoping for (send kid to college to avoid having inlaws with HS or below educations). Do you support that as a public policy?</p>