<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>
<p>Somehow I feel like that simply couldn’t have happened like that. Even if it were true, it would be an absolute PR horror story for Duke if that had, for instance, been recorded. I think the people there have a little more sense than to say that (again, that’s assuming it’s even true).</p>
<p>Yeah, well this one time I called Duke and they told me that my momma was fat and they were going to donate my application fee to the Taliban.</p>
<p>No they didn’t, but they might as well have rather than actually say / admit that they discriminate against men.</p>
<p>Let me just preface this by saying that I’m not the anti-social, women-hating archetype you’ll often come across. That being said, where does the long-ensconced idea that women perform better in high school arise from? Now, maybe the general trend is that they will outdo men in school and e.c.s, but there’s really no way for me to compare that, so I turned to the only standardized thing – the SAT:
<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/composite_CR_M_W_percentile_ranks.pdf</a>
Not only is the discrepancy between males and females obvious in the upper echelons of scores, even at the mean score of 1500, there is a large difference in the percentile that bears (as it is 47th percentile for men, and 51st for women). I know this is only taking into consideration one part of the application, but it’s the best I could do.
Anyways, I think that a private institution should be able to craft its student body in any way it pleases, while any public universities should be race-blind and gender-blind. But that’s just my naive high school opinion, I guess.</p>
<p>
Hmm…I’m inclined to disagree. You spend four years of your life attending college, and the vast majority of those four years is spent on college campuses. “Dating service” is a bit of a crude way to put it; love, many would agree, is an integral part of life at any stage of life, and college is one of the most crucial times because it is arguably where the strongest bonds of friendship are made. For this reason, a heavy imbalance would be dysfunctional to the natural cause of love.</p>
<p>On the other hand, we must consider whether any colleges (barring a few exceptions) truly need gender discrimination to maintain a reasonable m:f ratio, and whether some colleges need worry about it at all (not everyone will agree with my above argument for a m:f ratio, and not everyone will deem it necessary to attend a school with a near 1:1 m:f ratio). That is why I’m discouraged to hear, or even disinclined to believe, that this Duke ED applicant was deferred for his gender; I would not consider Duke a school that ought to even consider the practice.</p>
<p>And of course, perhaps the most powerful argument against myself is my own moral standing: I hate discrimination of any sort. But here we seem to have two things going at ends with each other.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Woah… if I wanted to go to school for a dating service, I’d GO to a school that was 60% female if you know what I mean. I’m not going to college just for the classes. There’s a whole lot of education that comes from the student body - if I wanted to learn only from other women, I’d simply attend a women’s college.</p>
<p>What they ought to be investigating is the blatant reverse discrimination (a la Bakke decision) in financial aid and scholarships awards. Many schools give full rides to URM’s with either lower stats, or even if they have the same stats…and give paultry and lesser scholarship dollars to middle class white kids. Yes, I know they are attempting to correct past wrongs and advance diversity and help out underprivileged kids, but we also know that lots of people can claim to be hispanic with well below 50% hispanic heritage. </p>
<p>I’m just saying, I wish that ALL financial aid and scholarships were race and gender blind. You get this score (e.g. a 1400/1600 SAT, or 33 ACT) and you get this money. Not, the white kids with a 1400 get a Dean’s scholarship of 8,000.00 and a Hispanic kid with a 1350 gets the full ride. (I know of cases where the white kid with a 1350 got ZIP. And a Hispanic kid with a 1250 got a full ride.)</p>
<p>It should be even all across the board…IF, the awards and scholarships are NEEDS BLIND. </p>
<p>The rich don’t care because they simply write the checks and shrug. The poor get wonderful aid…often full rides…IF they can get the grades and scores to be admitted…and the middle class gets hosed.</p>
<p>I would hope colleges are giving money to the kids of whatever race who need it and are from disadvantaged backgrounds.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from your anecdotal “white” and “Hispanic” kids while not knowing anything about them except for a single test score.</p>
<p>Well, I hate to inform you otherwise mom, but the record is precisely as I suggest it is…minorities get more aid and scholarships with lower scores…or even if they have the same scores as whites, they get more aid and scholarships for “affirmative action” (diversity) reasons alone, which is discrimination per se and de facto. The courts have shot down reverse discrimination on racial grounds for ADMISSIONS decisions, but have yet to reach a conclusion on financial aid preferences given by schools. Perhaps its because most scholarships and grants are given by the institutions themselves and don’t necessarily involve direct federal funding. But there are cases that say indirect federal funding can be affected and thus that would be illegal.</p>
<p>As Tomslawsky pointed out above:</p>
<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>I wish someone would bring a GIANT class action lawsuit and stop the madness. While I support diversity on general grounds and certainly to give appropriate NEED BASED financial aid on the case by case basis of demonstrated need…when it comes to institutional grants and non-athletic scholarships, (merit aid that is needs blind), I believe the CORRECT, MORAL and LAWFUL policy should be to give aid equally to those who qualify. If the school says 1400 is the cutoff for scholarships, fine. Then give it out EQUALLY (if needs blind) to everyone who qualifies. Not full rides to some and not to others (like white middle class kids from the suburbs.) That is unfair. </p>
<p>We should never raise the flag of diversity above the flag of fairness and equity.</p>
<p>
Completely agreed. I do think both can eventually be achieved though, just certainly not through affirmative action.</p>
<p>[Views:</a> The Soon-to-Be Open Secret - Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/12/22/whitmire]Views:”>http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/12/22/whitmire)</p>
<p>Maybe I’m strange, but at a private college, but I don’t see it as “discriminating” against men or women when the reason they accept one more than the other is because they want to keep the gender balance equal among the student body. Primary word there…EQUAL. Because it’s a privately funded institution, they have the right to admit whatever student body they want. Whoever disagreed with this statement previously is wrong. That’s the key to this whole argument - this study is about PRIVATE schools, not public schools, because if public schools did this it would be in violation of the law.</p>
<p>And yes, my school is one being investigated. But if there was a 70/30 women to men ratio in the student body, rather than the near equal one we actually have, I doubt I would have applied.</p>
<p>[Simpson’s</a> paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson’s_paradox]Simpson’s”>Simpson's paradox - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>remember what happened at berkeley</p>
<p>Boys are discriminated against from the very day that they enter a classroom. It has always been true, in part perhaps because the teaching profession has historically been dominated by the female gender. </p>
<p>The classroom culture is certainly a place where typical female attributes are an advantage. With the American educational system increasingly dominated by liberal elite ideas of what is politically correct and good, the male gender is even more at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>Women have dominated classroom education? Really? Your response is similar to what idiots like Rush Limbaugh promote to their less the brilliant, mostly male audience, that the reason women are starting to predominate on college campuses is because boys don’t have a fair time,that schools have emasculated boys, that the curricula is anti male and so forth, and that is just whining, not facts. </p>
<p>For many years, girls did not have an even time in school settings, boys were favored and girls actively discouraged, intentionally or not, by even female teachers. Studies are out there, that have been checked and double checked, that showed that in classroom situations boys were routinely called on more, that especially in math and science classrooms boys were given more attention and encouraged more, and girls were often steered into taking less academically challenging classes (I am sure the Limbaughites would be pretty happy with that, as they tend to be women should be subservient to men, at home barefoot and pregnant). </p>
<p>They also claim that boys are denied “boyness”, which among other things were, for example, boys sports programs taking most of the school budget and schools making environments where the old ‘boys will be boys’ rules, and if boys made the learning environment rough for girls, well, that is the way it is supposed to be…I have read all of it, I have heard it from Laura Schlessinger and the rest of the right wing radio chorus, and it doesn’t hold up.</p>
<p>And they leave out that up until the last 20-25 years women, more then half the population, were severely under represented in higher education (they leave out that several ivies were male only until the late 60’s, and were slow to admit women to their professional programs in any kinds of numbers). They leave out that in the higher levels of management, men still dominate to this day, which among other things is because women at the age of most upper level managers in their day didn’t have the opportunities men did to get to those positions.If the education system were so dominated by women as the poster claimed, then what you see in the workplace wouldn’t exist. And if you really want to get a shot in the arm, look at engineering and math and science fields; women only now are making inroads there, and it isn’t because they couldn’t do it, it was because women were actively discouraged into going into those fields, and it was not all that long ago that female engineers and scientists would have little chance of getting jobs. </p>
<p>I think the other half that this post leaves out is success in colleges, that one of the worrying factors isn’t just admissions, but what happens to men at colleges.From what I have read once admitted that women have better chances of graduating within a certain period of time and are doing better then men…</p>
<p>I don’t think this is discrimination in case of females getting easier admittance, I think that a lot of this is sour grapes, that men who not men years ago would get admitted to a college over a female candidate who might have been equally or better qualified aren’t getting in there that easily and they are ****ed.</p>
<p>BTW, in my generation (college in the early 80’s), I saw exactly what I am talking about in the schools I went to, the bias was there (and I am writing this as a white male,who has a son not too long in the future going to be going to college, so I would have reason to write the other side of this if I believed it was true). There is a big difference between now and when I went to college, I think girls have caught up to the boys, I think boys can no longer assume things they did in the past,and that is why you see what you do. Based on the young women I see coming out of college that I hire and work with, I suspect it is because young women today are focused on what they want to do and have the confidence to go after their dreams and are more supported then they were in the past, and I think those who are complaining are the ones with sour grapes, who can’t stand the fact that they can’t ho hum along and assume they will get admittance to the college they wish to get into.</p>
<p>^^^ The explanation of Simpson’s paradox just blew my mind. Love it.</p>
<p>Unless their is some scientific reason for women to be more competitive in school admission settings, then there is some sort of discrimination somewhere along the line against men.</p>
<p>There’s no reason men should be weaker applicants.</p>
<p>(Though some Possible Factors: IQ scores are nearly identical between genders, however there is more variance in the men’s scores. Women have more people in the middle of the IQ curve and men have more people on the two ends of the curve. Compounding this with the slight population advantage women have against men, this would make one assume women would have higher acceptance rates at college in general and have lower rates at the top tier of schools.)</p>
<p>(In Response to tomslawsky)</p>
<p>This is a very ignorant view of the situation.</p>
<p>WHY would men be weaker applicants?</p>
<p>Unless there was some sort of discrimination against them along the road to college, there is no reason they should be.</p>
<p>Your argument doesn’t take perspective into consideration.</p>
<p>Let’s play “Who’s the better applicant?”</p>
<p>The white boy that scored a 21 on his ACT, who comes from a family that makes $200k a year, has a very stable and loving family life, and goes to a nationally ranked high school.</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>The black boy who scored a 21 on his ACT, who comes from a family that makes $30k a year, lives only with his mother and lives in a community riddled with drugs and crime, and goes to a high school where the rate of graduation is less than 50%.</p>
<p>Sure, they BOTH have a 21 on the ACT, but I’m in the opinion that the black boy’s ACT score is worth more.</p>
<p>Another way of looking at it:</p>
<p>Girls tend to follow the rules, do the homework, get the grades. Boys tend to mature later, don’t see the reason to do the homework, don’t get the grades. They might be just as smart, or smarter, but they don’t have the GPA and don’t reap the results. </p>
<p>Or they may get lucky and be admitted to colleges that view them more holistically. Some of the boys who didn’t seem to be “academically” inclined in HS actually turn out to have a great business or leadership sense, major in business, and have great success. (Or some other subject that they didn’t even know about in HS.)</p>
<p>There are all kinds of ways to be intelligent, as has been pointed out. Sometimes being creative and ambitious (and hardworking) are just as good as being “smart.” Or better.</p>
<p>Re: Simpson’s paradox</p>
<p>One example that just screams at me has to do with average income of various groups with similiar education. If I were to look only at folks with PHD, I can probably conclude that racism and sexism must be the cause for the differences in average income of the groups. I am sure male PHD earn more than female PHD as a group, and white PHD earn more than black PHD as a group.</p>
<p>If I were to bring fields of study into the equation, the argument would collapse. I am sure if we were to compare income of male communication PHD with their female and black counterparts, much if not all of the differences would disappear.</p>
<p>I would be surprised if Asian PHD do not earn the most as a group. Is it because the white world love them more than they themselves? Or it because a higher %tage of Asians earn their PHD in technical and thus higher paying disciplines such as computer science, physical sciences and engineering?</p>
<p>I used to tell kids that if they really want to make good money, study theoretical physics and go and work for a hedge fund. Unfortunately, most mere mortals like us can not do theoretical physics.</p>
<p>Oh,well…</p>
<p>Musicprnt
</p>
<p>I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh, so I really cannot vouch for whether or not his male audience is “less the brilliant”. Since you are both male and a listener, I will have to trust your rendition of his view on this matter. What Rush Limbaugh has to do with my post remains an enigma.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I believe the topic at hand covers education today, not education in the past (environments that contributed to the current crop of college admits).</p>
<p>If you want to bring up the past, I can vouch for the fact that even back in the day, I saw boys being hugely discriminated against, throughout eight years of elementary school where every single teacher was female. I saw them being screamed at, I saw them being hit with METAL rulers, I saw them being humiliated at the chalkboard in front of the whole class. I have no memories of this happening to girls. Of course there has been, and continues to be, discrimination against women in the professions. It may be true that boys were called on more frequently by teachers. However, in general, male children are much more discriminated against in classrooms (perhaps mainly in disciplinary action). Among males, children of color get it the worst. </p>
<p>As far as the slur against women who choose to stay home to raise children, I can only take solace in laws which can be used to litigate against such bigotry when hiring decisions are made.</p>
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<p>I think that if you disagree with these folks so much, you should stop contributing to their coffers.</p>