Why is there a lack of attention given to male students to help them succeed?

Student Lounge
127

Isn’t that a question of which is more effective? According to this review, boys score about 13 points higher than girls (18 points higher on math, 5 points lower on ERW) on the SAT:

That’s really not much, and of course higher test scores already correlate with college admissions. So what else could they do with the SAT to use this to get more boys to apply?

Investing in new male-dominated sports at least seems more concrete. Add a football team, recruit players, now you have 100 more men. Apparently adding a varsity e-sports team is nearly as predictably beneficial in recruiting men, as that is around 92 percent men. I’m not sure what the SAT equivalent of that would really be.

By the way, the other thing that is clear from that article is that if you were just indiscriminately trying to get more of the sorts of people who score higher on the SAT, far more than boys you would be de facto increasing your share of certain ethnicities, kids from very high income families, and kids from independent privates.

The difference by gender is tiny compared to the differences in those dimensions–for example, white kids scored an average of 172 points more than black kids, highest quintile kids scored 143 points more than lowest quintile kids, and independent private kids scored 192 points more than public kids. Boys scoring an average of 13 points more than girls is just a rounding error compared to all that.

Of course sports, including e-sports, may also skew your applicant pool in other ways besides gender. But I think it is quite likely that the “signal to noise” ratio would be much higher.

2 Likes
128

It’s not about getting people to apply, but that the UCs going test blind (when they are already forbidden to discriminate on the basis of gender), led to a meaningful jump in the percentage of girls in the freshman class of 2021 (and beyond) at the selective UCs.

So this handwringing about boys not attending college has been accompanied by concrete actions to make it harder for them to get admitted.

The UCs compare students within a given high school. They never expected the same SAT scores from a poor Central Valley high school that they expected from a wealthy Bay Area high school. Considering SAT scores (in addition to all the other factors) would redistribute the gender of students admitted within a high school, not redistribute them by income or ethnicity (where the variation is across high schools and regions).

1 Like
129

It is for a lot of these colleges.

The article mentioned Brown has a much higher admit rate for men than women. Here are their actual numbers from their latest CDS:

Total:

Applied: 50649
Admitted: 2562
Enrolled: 1717

Women:

Applied: 31710 (62.6% of total applicants)
Admitted: 1287 (4.06% admit rate)
Enrolled: 889 (69.1% yield rate, 51.8% of total)

Men:

Applied: 18939 (37.4% of total applicants)
Admitted: 1275 (6.73% admit rate)
Enrolled: 828 (64.9% yield rate, 48.2% of total)

It would help Brown a bit if the yield rate among men were higher, but by far their biggest problem is that so many more women than men apply to Brown.

So I am very confident this is not in fact true at Brown. Meaning there is no way the male applicants to Brown are so much better qualified that the admittance rate is so much higher just naturally. Brown instead almost surely does have a policy of favoring marginal male applicants over marginal female applicants, in pursuit of going from an applicant pool that is only 37.4% male to an enrolled class that is nearly 50% male.

The discussion in the article is about how colleges like Brown really do not want to have to do that, or not to the degree that they do. But to really address that problem, they need more male applicants.

I’m not sure how you imagine a college like Brown implementing such a policy.

I do know in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision, many are going to implement all sorts of different proxies for socioeconomic disadvantage, and many are also asking applicants directly for such information.

In the course of doing all that, they could also implement a preference for male applicants, and control it for other factors such that their preference for male applicants did not distort their socioeconomic disadvantage goals.

But it would very likely make that harder, not easier, if they incorporated SAT scores as a proxy for being male. Again, the signal to noise ratio is too low.

The most obvious thing to do, in fact, is just use self-reported gender. As the article notes, though, some schools are worried about the next big lawsuit. But there are almost surely many other proxies for maleness that have a higher signal to noise ratio than SAT scores.

But again, all this is rather suboptimal from the perspective of a college like Brown. They don’t want to be having to try to find statistical proxies for maleness so they can implement a preference for male applicants without being sued over it.

But they really have no choice under the current circumstances, if they want close to 50% men, because they are getting so far away from 50% men in their application pool.

130

This has been a very hot topic of conversation at my kids’ public high school in the Bay Area. In my D22’s class, 18 kids went to UCLA—15 girls and just 3 boys. A closer look at the UC admissions data for our school showed that only slightly more girls than boys applied—122 girls and 107 boys. However, 19 girls were accepted and just 5 boys. At Berkeley, more boys applied than girls (86 girls vs 101 boys) and 16 girls were accepted vs 10 boys (9 girls and 7 boys enrolled).

For my S26, I will probably look more closely into schools where his gender might be an asset to him. He’ll certainly apply to UCs, especially because they are terrific in-state options that have great programs for his interests, but we will have to temper expectations

3 Likes
131

Yes this is exactly what we see in the Bay Area. It’s in contrast to 2018 when we had more boys than girls accepted to UCLA and equal numbers to Berkeley. And it’s mostly down to being test blind, I knew several girls who were simply not capable of getting the ~1500+ SAT score needed to be admitted back in 2018, despite having a 4.0, rigorous course load and decent ECs. The boys who had the same GPA, courseload and ECs were much more rarely disqualified by their SAT score.

The figures which quote a modest difference in median SAT score omit that the high end difference is much greater, 1400 is the 92nd percentile for boys but 95th for girls:

132

You misunderstand my point, I’m very much opposed to directly selecting by gender or attempting to balance the class. I think it is the right decision to not select by gender, just as colleges now cannot select by race.

But taking actions which discriminate against boys’ academic qualifications (like dropping consideration of SAT) is foolish and a lesson in unintended consequences.

5 Likes
133

How is the decision not to use your preferred admissions criteria discrimination against boys?

134

The policy change to remove consideration of SAT has disadvantaged boys relative to the pre-pandemic situation. Making a change in policy which has a disparate impact on one (protected) group, is prohibited in many settings as a form of discrimination. Gender is not a protected characteristic at private colleges, but that doesn’t mean such a policy change is not discriminatory.

3 Likes
135

Your understanding of what constitutes “discrimination” is much different than mine, and much different that what the law currently requires. There is no legal obligation for schools (public or private) to adopt (or keep) your preferred qualifiers. There is nothing magical about standardized tests so as to justify forcing schools to require them.

136

I didn’t use the term in a legal sense. I very much doubt anyone is going to mount a legal challenge to the UC test blind policy on the basis of gender discrimination.

My point was that this action has been a lesson in unintended consequences, because it disadvantages boys and runs counter to the desire expressed in the article for more boys to attend college.

But the alternative proposal for active discrimination in favor of boys to achieve gender balance is even worse.

1 Like
137

I note 1500 is 98th for both.

2 Likes
138

So I think the disconnect is you have an issue which concerns you personally, but that is not the issue that was concerning these colleges as discussed in the linked article.

So while your preferred policies as to SAT scores might address your issue, it won’t effectively address the issues these colleges are trying to address. Which is precisely that they do want to get close to balance, for the reasons discussed in the article.

Typically that is only one of two required elements. If a facially-neutral policy has a disparate impact on a protected class, then the entity using the policy typically has to show it has a legitimate, non-discriminatory purpose.

In education, there is a specific regulation governing all this for recipients of federal funding:

The relevant clause states:

A recipient shall not administer or operate any test or other criterion for admission which has a disproportionately adverse effect on persons on the basis of sex unless the use of such test or criterion is shown to predict validly success in the education program or activity in question and alternative tests or criteria which do not have such a disproportionately adverse effect are shown to be unavailable.

It is going to be very difficult to argue colleges MUST use the SAT for admissions under this clause. The clause is about NOT using tests/criterion that are disproportionately adverse, not about having to use alternatives–and in fact, the SAT doesn’t pass the test itself, precisely because it DOES have a disproportionately adverse impact–on girls.

Of course you could try to challenge using normalized grades under this clause, but that is almost surely going to pass the “the use of such test or criterion is shown to predict validly success in the education program or activity in question”.

So the last hope for such a lawsuit would be that you could show an alternative existed that would not have the disparate impact. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest there really is no notable alternative to using normalized grades that would have a similar predictive effect with respect to predicting success in college programs.

Indeed, so many colleges are going test optional not because they want to disadvantage men–just the opposite in most cases. But they are going test optional because their own data shows that test scores are not adding much if anything to grade when predicting success at their college.

And in situations like that, you almost surely cannot force them to use a test which itself has a disparate impact. Because if there is no best predictor which has no disparate impact by gender, then colleges likely can just use whatever they have a good reason to believe is the best set of predictors, as long as they are not intentionally disadvantaging any gender.

3 Likes
139

The unintended consequences stem from the passage of a Proposition that ignored that sometimes there are valid educational reasons to consider gender (among other things) in admission.

Why? If gender balance is so important that you would characterize not using the tests as “discrimination” against male students, then why shouldn’t some semblance of gender balance be considered in admissions? If it advances the educational mission of the system, then why shouldn’t it be considered?

1 Like
140

I will say that I sent my boys to a relatively unusual private school from grades 3 to 8. It was one that we had never heard of, but my oldest son has ADHD and the school that worked for his older sister did not work for him. It is a boys school with a classical liberal curriculum, and strongly discourages all electronics. Phones are not permitted on campus at all. All coursework is done on paper with physical books. Music is required for 3 years and Latin every year. The faculty is all male and class sizes are small (14 to maybe 20 in middle school), but the big differentiator was the fact that there is no single school building; every grade is in a separate house, and they have chickens and other animals to care for and they have extended recess every day where they are literally encouraged to climb trees and explore. The point is that freedom is granted liberally, because that is how one learns to make good choices. It was literally a school built for boys. The all male faculty was actually quite diverse, in that the point was to show boys how there are many different ways to be a happy and successful man. For discipline, it is the kind of place where a boy who is being disruptive would be asked to drop and do push ups or sent outside to do bear crawls, which is a turn off for some people, but it worked for my ADHD kid.

It was particularly wonderful during Covid, because the boys had their books, so their teachers taught the same lessons with a white board on YouTube and then you would just scan or photo the work for grading and the teacher would call you every other week to let you know how they are doing. The school was a labor of love and families gave generously so that scholarships were available for anyone who needed financial assistance.

We were very, very fortunate to find this little gem of a school that only has about 200 students. We opted for single sex schools for high school for both our daughter and sons, because we felt that those learning environments would work best for them.

7 Likes
141

Yeah, my personal feeling is it is better to do it openly than do it through back door means. But then that might be illegal. So, this could get messy.

Of course you could also do nothing. But then likely boys are indefinitely outnumbered sharply by girls.

142

We discussed this a bit above too, but this to me is really underscoring that by the time you are talking about college admissions policy, it is really way too late. Any solution at that point is bound to be unsatisfying in all sorts of ways.

Rethinking how we do early childhood and K-12 education is a very heavy lift, of course. But if we are going to be serious about sustainable, just, systematic solutions, that’s obviously what it will take.

3 Likes
143

Unfortunately, it would probably be illegal in California. In my opinion it is a shortsighted law. There are very good reasons for universities to try to create some semblance of gender balance, and IMO they ought to be allowed to do it openly.

The trouble is, programs like the one described above potentially run into the same claims of “discrimination” faced by colleges and universities, especially if they receive state support.

144

That, unfortunately, is a very good point.

The challenge is always how do you address the different needs of different individual kids without unfairly advantaging kids who don’t really have those needs. In practice it is impossible to do that perfectly, and very hard (and usually costly) to do it even reasonably well. And we have a tendency of not really trying very hard and then using the imperfect results as a rationale for trying even less.

Of course I could be talking about a lot of things, not just boys. And while I wish I could be optimistic, our early childhood, primary, and secondary education systems do not exactly have a great track record overall when it comes to dealing with these sorts of issues. In pockets, sure. Systematically? Typically progress is glacial, if even that.

145

To me it seems we’ve turned the entire concept of “discrimination” on its head. People are so worried about unfairly advantaging anyone who might not need it that we end up disadvantaging those who really do need it.

1 Like
146

Wouldn’t adding 100 more male athletes also mean adding 100 more female athletes for Title IX purposes?