Or they simply matured later than girls and had the intelligence to succeed in college despite being immature and unfocused early in high school.
But if colleges don’t even consider these kids’ SAT scores (as one component of an application) how are admissions going to know that?
I think college admissions is just one symptom of a larger societal problem that needs research and attention.
Boys are unhappy. They are more likely to commit suicide, abuse drugs, and be unemployed and not looking for a job. Unemployed angry men lead to violence, social problems, fewer potential mates for smart women, and a drag on our country’s economy. Somewhere between kindergarten and high school we lose a lot of them and I think we need to approach it as a serious challenge.
Of course.
But the issue in this case is whether boys are being encouraged to pack into relatively narrow career, and even narrower academic, paths due to stereotypes about what boys should like. Obviously it would be wrong to argue that no boys should like those things. The question is why more are not expanding out to alternatives.
And in that context, a boy who is more open-minded than many of his peers might well get a very concrete advantage in college admissions. But the point is not that every single boy should want the same things, actually just the opposite.
Anything is possible in individual cases, but the observed grade gap between girls and boys persists into college.
So if you admit a bunch of lower-grade boys over higher-grade girls, assuming appropriate normalization of grades, you will likely end up with lower college grades on average.
And then how do you explain to those girls that their hard work now or in the future doesn’t matter, because boys need to be given every chance to eventually decide to work harder, or not, as they see fit.
You were suggesting giving boys admission to balance the class not me. It hardly seems rational to admit more boys because they play football or esports (as in the article) rather than because they have the intelligence to benefit from college but did not have the maturity to demonstrate it in high school.
Again if you admit football or esports players, you get mostly more men.
If you admit higher SAT people, you get mostly more rich white kids, and slightly more men. That’s inefficient in unfortunate ways.
But to be sure, the most efficient thing is just admit more men. But that might be illegal.
Edit:
Just some quick semi-hypothetical math to illustrate the point about efficiency.
So say your baseline using your best predictor of college grades, namely HS grades plus optional test scores, would lead to a 60:40 female:male ratio for unhooked admits.
OK, so you then replace 100 of those unhooked admits with recruited varsity e-sports admits. It turns out that is at a 10:90 ratio. So, you changed your preferred admission policy for 100 people, and got 50 more men.
The proposed alternative is to tweak your formula for unhooked admits to include a required SAT. Charitably, let’s say if you did this for 100 unhooked admits, you would get a 55:45 ratio. That’s only 5 more men.
So because this is so inefficient, you have to do it for 1000 people, not 100 people, to get 50 more men.
Meanwhile, this policy as applied to 1000 people is likely shifting more than 50 admits, probably a lot more, toward rich white people (male and female).
So yes, the 100 e-sports admits thing may not be great. But the proposed alternative may need to affect many more people, with a lot more unintended and unwanted consequences, just to achieve the same gender effect.
These students went to college - just not as selective a college as they might have if they had taken school more seriously.
Unless a person is working at admissions at UCLA, there is simply no way that they write this as a statement of fact. It is your assumption or an opinion, and should be written that way.
Providing opinions as though they are facts does not make them into facts.
While at my kid’s school, there were more boys among the NMFs, girls outnumber boys among the National Merit Commended.
Also, my kid had a course set heavy with art classes, did not take either chem or physics APs, was not part of robotics, math club, or any olympiads, but was part of the art shows, creative writing, etc. I’m sure that parents who knew my kid only from high school would have assumed that she was “not capable of getting the ~1500+ SAT”.
But 1500 is the 98th percentile for both. So just as many girls seem to have been capable of getting that coveted 1500 as boys.
Also, in 2018/2019, the mid 50% of SAT for admitted students to UCLA was 1280-1510. So, I’m sorry, but no, a 1500+ ws very definitely not “needed to be admitted back in 2018”. For Berkeley in 2019/2020, the mid 50% range was 1330-1520.
So those “girls who were simply not capable of getting the ~1500+ SAT score” did not need to do so in order to be accepted to UCLA.
In 2019, admissions to UCLA required SAT scores. In 2019, admission rates for men to UCLA was 11.58%, while for women it was 12.99%. Women had a 12% higher acceptance rate than men.
In 2022, admission rates for men to UCLA were 8.48%, while for women they were 9.69. Women had a 14% higher acceptance rate than men.
Not much a disadvantage, really.
Moreover, it seems like allowing SAT scores did not actually provide any advantage for men, since, in 2019, when SAT scores were required, men were being accepted at a lower rate than women.
They could succeed at a less selective college.
They could succeed at an open admission community college and use that college record to transfer to a more selective college than they could have gotten admitted to as frosh (this is a common pathway in California).
Note that some who are not academically mature enough to do well in high school may not be academically mature enough for college when they leave high school, but may gain that academic maturity later in life, perhaps after a few years working or in military service, etc., when they enter college as non-traditional students.
Even before COVID-19, many colleges did not weight SAT/ACT scores that heavily relative to HS GPA, since (as even the College Board says) HS GPA is a better predictor of college grades than SAT. So the SAT/ACT score biased applicant is still likely to be less favorably viewed in college admissions than a HS GPA biased applicant.
This, 1000 percent. This is a problem rooted in our primary education system. Teachers are poorly compensated. Public schools are underfunded. Bigger class sizes with fewer resources leads to frustrated, burned out adults who reward obedience/compliance as a matter of survival. Girls may biologically mature faster and also be conditioned toward obedience from birth.
It would take an enormous pivot in the way the US compensates educators and in the value we place on education funding to create an environment for teachers who have enough resources, salary, autonomy, and respect to create an environment where students and teachers can be their best selves.
My S26 wants to be a middle school or high school physics or history teacher—mainly because he had two male teachers in middle school who made an enormous impression on him. I hope—if he continues this path—that the environment is a lot better for him and his students.
While agree that primary education is the long term solution, I do not think that having a public school only approach will work. I’ve heard the “teachers are poorly compensated. Public schools are underfunded. Bigger class sizes…” excuse for as long as I can remember (and that’s along time).
We need to embrace other options like charter schools and break the union monopoly that benefits from the status quo.
As I’m writing this, Ken Griffin (founder of Citadel, an investment firm) was being interviewed on CNBC on just this topic. A few things stood out from the interview:
Griffin is passionate about educations ability to lift kids out of poverty and is equally critical of the public schools and teachers union.
He recently donated $25M to New York’s Success Academy Schools.
College interns at Citadel earn pay and benefits comes out to $19,000 per month
Charter schools are not inherently better than the old public schools. The difference that matters is that they offer a place for parents that care about their kids’ education to go to get away from those who don’t care. We’ve done home schooling, charters and privates, and only thing that stands out at the charter was the active and passionate parents who took the time to pull their kids from public schools, research alternatives and get them into a charter. Dropping a kid without parental support into any school is not going to make them a better student. There has to be support at home from the very beginning to demonstrate reading, to make sure homework is done, to follow up on requests from teachers, to provide a space where learning is valued, or there won’t be progress at school. It takes a remarkable child to value school more than his or her parents do.
Parents who care should have options. Public, private, charter, or home. Education funds should follow the student.