In 1973 I made the first Title 9 complaint against the University of California regarding its discriminatory admissions policies. At that time there was a quota on female admissions of about 35% and less in some majors. Admission was pretty subjective and knowing someone personally shot you to the top. 20 years later I went back to CAL and took a bunch of courses. Perusing the EdPsyc library, I came across test scores by racial group dividing male and female scores. That testing showed, in many groups, a 15 point difference in IQ, with women having the higher scores. That said, we know that top scorers are often men, who have a greater divergence. Now we have the internet and social media; porn, gambling, nonsense. Men are drawn to these destructive time-wasters. Women are not. The result is more time for brain development by girls. Having raised both a boy and girl, and thought about this a lot, I wonder if now our admissions criteria fail to take into account the diverse spectrum of talent and intelligence of boys. Yes they had a benefit before Title 9. But did they need it? When I went to school, men and women were friends. We spent time together and did things: book groups, rock climbing, just hanging out. Now look at all of the hostile nuttiness taking place…some random thoughts.
No one under the age of 30 can begin to comprehend the impact of infinite porn one click away in your pocket starting at age 12 is having on a generation of men.
It’s all a tragedy; gaming, porn, gambling, bad ‘men’s’ spaces. Is it divorce and the loss of fathers? The loss of Boy Scouts and church and institutions that had some positive direction. Where is the positive direction now?
You give a strong argument that I largely agree with. One big exception: universities should have the right to be what they want to be as long as their policies comply with the law. If a private university for social or cultural reasons wants to be any ratio of men to women (from 100% to 50% to 0%) why shouldn’t that be their choice? You would be correct to argue that this is contrary to a meritocracy goal, and that admissions policies are hidden. Therefore the correct action is for some universities to just come clean and acknowledge that their desire for a particular gender mix may result different admission standards.
A basic problem in higher education is that it often claims to be something that it isn’t.
Almost every University is getting taxpayer dollars (Pell Grants, GI Bill etc). You propose an end to single sex colleges like Wellesley and Spelman Colleges. I’m not sure what the social purpose is of preventing kids from getting a college education maybe better to their individual needs.
I'm not proposing an end to anything. What I am saying is that I have a moral objection to universities getting taxpayer dollars and having political positions like specific gender policies. If you take the money, then you give up autonomy. I am not swayed by a, "what about the children?" argument.
Why is single gender education political? If a particular education framework has practical benefits I’m struggling to find the moral dimension here. Why exactly should government student loan and grant policies discriminate against single sex colleges?
You are not responding to what I said. If universities are getting taxpayer dollars, then they give up some autonomy. You pivoted to peg glands and student loans, which have to be paid back to the taxpayer. If you wanna talk about Paul grants and government-backed student loans, government intervention into paying for college education has been one of the worst things to happen to our country. Why do you think a college education has steadily risen since we created the department of education?
I think Yascha's point that a meritocratic university will have an EVEN MORE skewed proportion of women is interesting. Why should the honest guy pay a high price for the tomfoolery of everyone else?
“If they were to admit applicants without considering their sex, the best schools in the country would end up with incoming classes that have an even greater predominance of women than they already do.”
The above is almost certainly not true about truly elite institutions seeking the very top academic performers.
How can you write this entire article (a large chunk about elite admissions) and not note that men are overrepresented in top SAT scores compared to women by 3:2, driven largely by the top end math SAT gap? How does that not suggest that most truly elite schools (as you note, mostly a majority women) are actively NOT engaged in AA in favor of men? The argument that there is AA in favor of men is much stronger among lower ranked schools.
Not to mention that the SAT has a lot lower ceiling than it used to. A 760 V in the '80s was about twice as rare as a 1600 today. The SAT and GRE simply can't distinguish among levels of ability in the top 2%, and there is a bigger and more important spread of abilities in the top 2% than there is between 50% and 98%. The farther out the right tail you go, the bigger the gap between men and women. This is due not only to a slightly smaller standard deviation for women than men (1.15x women), but about a 0.2 s.d. gap in average scores. Even with the low ceiling, twice as many men as women scored 750+ on the SAT-M in 2007. (23,281 vs. 11, 852). Missing one question used to be a 760, skipping one was a 780. 23k+ is comparable to all the Ivy freshman classes put together, the SAT isn't hard enough to be useful for identifying the top-ability students for elite universities. It is also unreliable and less g-loaded than it used to be, screening out the best of the best; one mistake on any of the hundreds of easy questions counts the same as a real error on the literal handful of hard questions that are all that distinguish a 650 from an 800. The universities like it like that because that lets them admit based on BS subjective criteria favoring their political cadre.
The whole thing is a shell game. Imagine if PE class grades carried more weight in admissions than English. Then women would see affirmative action programs akin to Ladies' Night. Girls' high school academic performance is only better than boys because of the way high school curricula have been feminized over time. More hard science and math and shop and PE... and less essay writing and opinion based topics and red-washed history and then see how the dust settles.
Having recently gone through the process with my daughter, the affirmative action for men was real and obvious, the boys had a much lower hurdle to clear to get into the equivalent schools.
But I’ll say that while my daughter found that annoying, she also specifically refused to go to schools with a massive male-female disparity because she wants to be on a campus with at least semi-parity.
“Applicants who are turned down from their dream school are always going to be sad. But if the college can truthfully tell them that they were rejected because other applicants had higher GPAs or better SAT scores, they should be able to see that the decision was made on fair criteria”
This is just not true. Few people believe that there is a pure meritocratic algorithm with no human making decisions somewhere. Once you reach a certain level of competence and intelligence to get to consideration, your college application or job application will always be examined by an HR or admissions person who gets some mental image of you and decides they like that projection more or less than other candidates.
Colleges are socializing institutions. If a school decides that they want to be a booster of Jehovahs witnesses or African-Americans into the middle and upper class, but don’t have the same responsibility towards Asian students whose parents came very recently, they can do that. The “merit” in this case, is not only measured by SATs, but by athletics, social interest, etc.
Co-ed colleges should have roughly equal numbers of each gender so as to make dating easy and they should consider metrics other than high school grades.
I like the idea of creating bigger departments for the majors that young men take- Engineering, Naval and War studies, etc. and shrinking the “grievance studies” departments.
The pipeline problem is serious. Even bright boys are being failed by high schools which don’t work with their ambition and nature, but against it. Remember that most designers of curriculum and most teachers are women. It is not their fault that they don’t understand young men, but it is their fault if they persist in believing that they can “improve” boys by reforming them. Only older men know what bejng a boy is like and there should be more boys-only boarding schools available for boys without a father, not just the rich. Making boy scouts a co-ed institution (while keeping a separate “Girls scouts” division) was a low point in this attempt to prohibit boys only spaces.
Affirmative action for generations has prioritized women and given them advantages in admissions, scholarships, internship/job placements, and campus cultures and initiatives. Any recent/current STEM student can plainly see as such to this day. Women are still the minority in those fields and thus have massive access to structural advantages allotted to them by campus administration.
Meanwhile, in the majors and schools where girls have become a majority, affirmative action as it is written now swings in favor of men as the new minority. The moment this happens; the story goes from women being underrepresented and therefore discriminated against to women being discriminated against due to their overrepresentation, because of affirmative action now deprioritizing them. Meanwhile, affirmative action is what accelerated this dynamic in the first place!
This includes systematic admissions bias in "soft measures" such as essays, extracurriculars and GPA (a metric that has inflated to meaninglessness and measures functionally nothing) and the deemphasis on nationwide standardized tests like the SAT that are better predictors of success. Before you even get to college women have been selected for and men have been selected against.
When the example is Black people facing structural inequality and bias against them since birth in school access and financial advantages the solution is affirmative action. I don't disagree with this premise. But when men face the same structural challenges (as your own article admits), the solution becomes a "Quiet Scandal". You make appeals to meritocracy, but the dismantling of meritocracy is what brought about this dynamic in the first place.
Out of curiosity, what do we know about the post-graduation prospects of men vs women recruited under this system? After college, do men tend to do the same, better, or worse than comparable women?
Likewise, what if colleges just picked the 10 departments that are most heavily male dominated, such as engineering and computer programming, and just expanded the size of only those departments?
Interesting. For two generations now the feminists have been attempting to crush men and it seems they have succeeded. But administrations are overwhelmingly staffed by woke radfems, and yet they are favoring males? It's a stretch, tho perhaps the economic vector is sufficient to explain it.
I don't think many would agree with your very narrow use of the term, still I agree that there's a big difference. But the hatred of men is common to both.
I was just thinking about this myself. I fully agree. In addition to everything you've stated, the practice also harms men as a class, because it hides just how bad the problem has become. If men were admitted purely on merit, then the depths of the crisis would become obvious.
If making the problem plainer would lead to broader recognition of the crisis (presumably, how poorly young men and boys are faring) by restoring merit-based admissions, I wonder how actionable and addressable it would appear.
Zero-sum thinking still persists in institutional leadership and mainstream U.S. culture so that lamentations of "men are falling behind" and "male deaths of despair" are likely to induce eye-rolling and nose-thumbing rather than the comprehensive analysis and good faith discussion to which the author appeals.
It's also likely harmful to men as individuals, inasmuch as it results in mismatch. Men are not served by being given a leg up to enter universities they are unprepared for. Better to succeed at a mid-tier university than to flail at a top university.
Ugggg. I have such an instant, visceral, angry reaction to this. The male garden has been salted and laid bare for so long now while the female garden has been tended, watered, fertilized, and doted upon. We wonder why we have only weeds and frustration in the male patch while the flowers and sweet fruit bloom on the other side of the road. Progressives decided long ago to do this and it’s the obvious reason we men are sick of it all. No rational arguments matter.
The research shows that male brains develop slower than female brains. That means that girls race ahead of boys starting in middle school and the boys never catch up again. However, many on the right do not want to discuss this because it does not fit their priors.
I don’t think we’re talking “Nature” (brain development) here, but “Nurture” (societal development). Clearly nature must be examined. But - I speak of a half century of systematic male suppression and female exaltation in our social ecosystem. Where men must be portrayed as either predatory or foolish while women are ennobled and fawned. You know it’s true by the simple TV commercial test: men may be portrayed as silly, pompous, or ignorant while it is strictly forbidden to do this to women. It is the iron grip of the unseen hand of culture - as delivered by the Progressive creatives who lead our cultural institutions. I’m 60, so I can handle it. I grew up in an era of real men. But if this is ALL YOU KNOW as a young man - you’re sick of it.
And you know it’s not right or fair. Women wouldn’t put up with this FOR ONE SECOND - and neither should we. The days of taking this slap must be over. We’ve had enough. It’s well past “equality” (that long-dead trope progressives keep getting mileage out of at our expense).
The problem is that colleges still actively discriminate against conservative leaning men via the college application letters. A justice warrior victim dripping letter by an low SAT man will get him in, but a pull yourself up by your bootstraps letter written by a high SAT man will have his application on the rejection heap immediately.
Both men and women benefit from this discrimination. Women benefit significantly because college is one of the best places to find a suitable mate. Women, not only men, want to attend a college where the numbers are roughly equal. For many colleges, this is an existential problem of long standing. Rejecting this form of discrimination likely would threaten the economics of many colleges--perhaps randomly. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I agree with the general concern he’s raising, but this feels like a shallow and somewhat distorted take on an extremely complex issue.
First, grouping community colleges with the Ivy League under one narrative makes very little sense. Community colleges overwhelmingly serve students on economic trajectories similar to non-college pathways, and women’s overrepresentation there tells us almost nothing about elite admissions. It’s also well-established that women disproportionately enter fields that require a BA for solidly middle-income work, while men have, culturally, a far wider set of reasonably paid, non-degree pathways (trades, trucking, energy, public safety, etc.). Given that structural landscape, it is not surprising that women outnumber men at less selective institutions. That’s a labor-market story more than an admissions story.
The article also avoids grappling with the well established gender variance issue in SAT distributions. Average scores are similar by gender, but the distribution isn’t: men are more common at both the very bottom and the very top. At the high end (1500+, the 99th percentile), the pool is 60–70% male. Elite admissions—especially in STEM—draw from this extreme-right tail. Ignoring this pattern and then invoking aggregate GPA or national averages is misleading. Ability distributions matter at the level where Ivy League decisions are actually made.
The piece also never touches the massive gender stratification by major. Education programs are something like 20–80 M/F, while computer science and engineering reverse that almost exactly. Admissions committees do not evaluate applicants in one undifferentiated blob; they evaluate within academic tracks. A STEM-gifted student with a perfect Math score and a merely adequate reading/writing score (a very common profile among top STEM admits) is competing against other STEM applicants, not against education majors. And these STEM-heavy pools skew male. Institution-wide averages by gender obscure this reality completely.
None of this is to say that gender balancing doesn’t happen. It clearly does to some extent, as schools try to ensure they remain Co-ed. The Richard Reeves material on boys falling behind is pointing to something real. But sweeping claims that elite schools are simply choosing less-qualified men over more-qualified women skip over the actual pipeline dynamics: who applies, to what majors, with what score distributions, and with what labor-market incentives. Without accounting for any of that, the argument ends up flattening a highly stratified system into a kind of moral parable.
I admire the principle he’s trying to defend, but the analysis feels incomplete. It identifies a real tension but doesn’t engage with the underlying structural forces that actually produce the gender patterns we see. The conclusions end up sounding more provocative than accurate.
In 1973 I made the first Title 9 complaint against the University of California regarding its discriminatory admissions policies. At that time there was a quota on female admissions of about 35% and less in some majors. Admission was pretty subjective and knowing someone personally shot you to the top. 20 years later I went back to CAL and took a bunch of courses. Perusing the EdPsyc library, I came across test scores by racial group dividing male and female scores. That testing showed, in many groups, a 15 point difference in IQ, with women having the higher scores. That said, we know that top scorers are often men, who have a greater divergence. Now we have the internet and social media; porn, gambling, nonsense. Men are drawn to these destructive time-wasters. Women are not. The result is more time for brain development by girls. Having raised both a boy and girl, and thought about this a lot, I wonder if now our admissions criteria fail to take into account the diverse spectrum of talent and intelligence of boys. Yes they had a benefit before Title 9. But did they need it? When I went to school, men and women were friends. We spent time together and did things: book groups, rock climbing, just hanging out. Now look at all of the hostile nuttiness taking place…some random thoughts.
No one under the age of 30 can begin to comprehend the impact of infinite porn one click away in your pocket starting at age 12 is having on a generation of men.
It’s all a tragedy; gaming, porn, gambling, bad ‘men’s’ spaces. Is it divorce and the loss of fathers? The loss of Boy Scouts and church and institutions that had some positive direction. Where is the positive direction now?
You give a strong argument that I largely agree with. One big exception: universities should have the right to be what they want to be as long as their policies comply with the law. If a private university for social or cultural reasons wants to be any ratio of men to women (from 100% to 50% to 0%) why shouldn’t that be their choice? You would be correct to argue that this is contrary to a meritocracy goal, and that admissions policies are hidden. Therefore the correct action is for some universities to just come clean and acknowledge that their desire for a particular gender mix may result different admission standards.
A basic problem in higher education is that it often claims to be something that it isn’t.
Alex, I agree with you as long as the university is not getting taxpayer dollars
Almost every University is getting taxpayer dollars (Pell Grants, GI Bill etc). You propose an end to single sex colleges like Wellesley and Spelman Colleges. I’m not sure what the social purpose is of preventing kids from getting a college education maybe better to their individual needs.
I'm not proposing an end to anything. What I am saying is that I have a moral objection to universities getting taxpayer dollars and having political positions like specific gender policies. If you take the money, then you give up autonomy. I am not swayed by a, "what about the children?" argument.
Why is single gender education political? If a particular education framework has practical benefits I’m struggling to find the moral dimension here. Why exactly should government student loan and grant policies discriminate against single sex colleges?
You are not responding to what I said. If universities are getting taxpayer dollars, then they give up some autonomy. You pivoted to peg glands and student loans, which have to be paid back to the taxpayer. If you wanna talk about Paul grants and government-backed student loans, government intervention into paying for college education has been one of the worst things to happen to our country. Why do you think a college education has steadily risen since we created the department of education?
Two different issues here:
1/ does your definition of “universities getting taxpayer $” include student loans and “Pell grants”?
2/ you haven’t answered my question as to why there’s a moral imperative for government to discriminate against single sex schools.
Agreed that federal support of higher ed in general has been poorly designed and led to massive cost escalation and waste.
I think Yascha's point that a meritocratic university will have an EVEN MORE skewed proportion of women is interesting. Why should the honest guy pay a high price for the tomfoolery of everyone else?
“If they were to admit applicants without considering their sex, the best schools in the country would end up with incoming classes that have an even greater predominance of women than they already do.”
The above is almost certainly not true about truly elite institutions seeking the very top academic performers.
How can you write this entire article (a large chunk about elite admissions) and not note that men are overrepresented in top SAT scores compared to women by 3:2, driven largely by the top end math SAT gap? How does that not suggest that most truly elite schools (as you note, mostly a majority women) are actively NOT engaged in AA in favor of men? The argument that there is AA in favor of men is much stronger among lower ranked schools.
Not to mention that the SAT has a lot lower ceiling than it used to. A 760 V in the '80s was about twice as rare as a 1600 today. The SAT and GRE simply can't distinguish among levels of ability in the top 2%, and there is a bigger and more important spread of abilities in the top 2% than there is between 50% and 98%. The farther out the right tail you go, the bigger the gap between men and women. This is due not only to a slightly smaller standard deviation for women than men (1.15x women), but about a 0.2 s.d. gap in average scores. Even with the low ceiling, twice as many men as women scored 750+ on the SAT-M in 2007. (23,281 vs. 11, 852). Missing one question used to be a 760, skipping one was a 780. 23k+ is comparable to all the Ivy freshman classes put together, the SAT isn't hard enough to be useful for identifying the top-ability students for elite universities. It is also unreliable and less g-loaded than it used to be, screening out the best of the best; one mistake on any of the hundreds of easy questions counts the same as a real error on the literal handful of hard questions that are all that distinguish a 650 from an 800. The universities like it like that because that lets them admit based on BS subjective criteria favoring their political cadre.
Correct. Compare that with the LSAT, which does a very good job of differentiation in the top tail. Here are the percentiles for the top scores.
LSAT
180: 99.97% (1 in 3000)
179: 99.95%
178: 99.9%
177: 99.8%
176: 99.6%
175: 99.4%
Compare to SAT Math:
800: 99%+ (top 1%, roughly 1 in 100)
790: 99%
780: 98%
770: 97%
760: 96%
750: 95%
GPA is also very important for admissions to elite schools and I believe women beat men on this metric.
GPA is becoming increasingly worthless as a metric as schools game them. I wonder if there is a correlation there.
The whole thing is a shell game. Imagine if PE class grades carried more weight in admissions than English. Then women would see affirmative action programs akin to Ladies' Night. Girls' high school academic performance is only better than boys because of the way high school curricula have been feminized over time. More hard science and math and shop and PE... and less essay writing and opinion based topics and red-washed history and then see how the dust settles.
So affirmative action is only problematic when women stop receiving it. 🤣
Read all the way to the end or ask a question as someone did above. That way you won't need to make any guesses about the author's meaning
I didn't need to "guess" to understand her meaning. It's quite obvious.
Why are you pretending affirmative action is only problematic when applied to men?
"Her"? Yascha is not a woman.
Idc. The point remains
Having recently gone through the process with my daughter, the affirmative action for men was real and obvious, the boys had a much lower hurdle to clear to get into the equivalent schools.
But I’ll say that while my daughter found that annoying, she also specifically refused to go to schools with a massive male-female disparity because she wants to be on a campus with at least semi-parity.
“Applicants who are turned down from their dream school are always going to be sad. But if the college can truthfully tell them that they were rejected because other applicants had higher GPAs or better SAT scores, they should be able to see that the decision was made on fair criteria”
This is just not true. Few people believe that there is a pure meritocratic algorithm with no human making decisions somewhere. Once you reach a certain level of competence and intelligence to get to consideration, your college application or job application will always be examined by an HR or admissions person who gets some mental image of you and decides they like that projection more or less than other candidates.
Colleges are socializing institutions. If a school decides that they want to be a booster of Jehovahs witnesses or African-Americans into the middle and upper class, but don’t have the same responsibility towards Asian students whose parents came very recently, they can do that. The “merit” in this case, is not only measured by SATs, but by athletics, social interest, etc.
Co-ed colleges should have roughly equal numbers of each gender so as to make dating easy and they should consider metrics other than high school grades.
I like the idea of creating bigger departments for the majors that young men take- Engineering, Naval and War studies, etc. and shrinking the “grievance studies” departments.
The pipeline problem is serious. Even bright boys are being failed by high schools which don’t work with their ambition and nature, but against it. Remember that most designers of curriculum and most teachers are women. It is not their fault that they don’t understand young men, but it is their fault if they persist in believing that they can “improve” boys by reforming them. Only older men know what bejng a boy is like and there should be more boys-only boarding schools available for boys without a father, not just the rich. Making boy scouts a co-ed institution (while keeping a separate “Girls scouts” division) was a low point in this attempt to prohibit boys only spaces.
Affirmative action for generations has prioritized women and given them advantages in admissions, scholarships, internship/job placements, and campus cultures and initiatives. Any recent/current STEM student can plainly see as such to this day. Women are still the minority in those fields and thus have massive access to structural advantages allotted to them by campus administration.
Meanwhile, in the majors and schools where girls have become a majority, affirmative action as it is written now swings in favor of men as the new minority. The moment this happens; the story goes from women being underrepresented and therefore discriminated against to women being discriminated against due to their overrepresentation, because of affirmative action now deprioritizing them. Meanwhile, affirmative action is what accelerated this dynamic in the first place!
This includes systematic admissions bias in "soft measures" such as essays, extracurriculars and GPA (a metric that has inflated to meaninglessness and measures functionally nothing) and the deemphasis on nationwide standardized tests like the SAT that are better predictors of success. Before you even get to college women have been selected for and men have been selected against.
When the example is Black people facing structural inequality and bias against them since birth in school access and financial advantages the solution is affirmative action. I don't disagree with this premise. But when men face the same structural challenges (as your own article admits), the solution becomes a "Quiet Scandal". You make appeals to meritocracy, but the dismantling of meritocracy is what brought about this dynamic in the first place.
Out of curiosity, what do we know about the post-graduation prospects of men vs women recruited under this system? After college, do men tend to do the same, better, or worse than comparable women?
Likewise, what if colleges just picked the 10 departments that are most heavily male dominated, such as engineering and computer programming, and just expanded the size of only those departments?
Interesting. For two generations now the feminists have been attempting to crush men and it seems they have succeeded. But administrations are overwhelmingly staffed by woke radfems, and yet they are favoring males? It's a stretch, tho perhaps the economic vector is sufficient to explain it.
There is no such thing as a woke radfem. Rad fems are 2nd wave feminists. Wokesters are 3rd wave. There is a huge difference between the two.
I don't think many would agree with your very narrow use of the term, still I agree that there's a big difference. But the hatred of men is common to both.
I was just thinking about this myself. I fully agree. In addition to everything you've stated, the practice also harms men as a class, because it hides just how bad the problem has become. If men were admitted purely on merit, then the depths of the crisis would become obvious.
If making the problem plainer would lead to broader recognition of the crisis (presumably, how poorly young men and boys are faring) by restoring merit-based admissions, I wonder how actionable and addressable it would appear.
Zero-sum thinking still persists in institutional leadership and mainstream U.S. culture so that lamentations of "men are falling behind" and "male deaths of despair" are likely to induce eye-rolling and nose-thumbing rather than the comprehensive analysis and good faith discussion to which the author appeals.
It's also likely harmful to men as individuals, inasmuch as it results in mismatch. Men are not served by being given a leg up to enter universities they are unprepared for. Better to succeed at a mid-tier university than to flail at a top university.
Ugggg. I have such an instant, visceral, angry reaction to this. The male garden has been salted and laid bare for so long now while the female garden has been tended, watered, fertilized, and doted upon. We wonder why we have only weeds and frustration in the male patch while the flowers and sweet fruit bloom on the other side of the road. Progressives decided long ago to do this and it’s the obvious reason we men are sick of it all. No rational arguments matter.
The research shows that male brains develop slower than female brains. That means that girls race ahead of boys starting in middle school and the boys never catch up again. However, many on the right do not want to discuss this because it does not fit their priors.
I don’t think we’re talking “Nature” (brain development) here, but “Nurture” (societal development). Clearly nature must be examined. But - I speak of a half century of systematic male suppression and female exaltation in our social ecosystem. Where men must be portrayed as either predatory or foolish while women are ennobled and fawned. You know it’s true by the simple TV commercial test: men may be portrayed as silly, pompous, or ignorant while it is strictly forbidden to do this to women. It is the iron grip of the unseen hand of culture - as delivered by the Progressive creatives who lead our cultural institutions. I’m 60, so I can handle it. I grew up in an era of real men. But if this is ALL YOU KNOW as a young man - you’re sick of it.
And you know it’s not right or fair. Women wouldn’t put up with this FOR ONE SECOND - and neither should we. The days of taking this slap must be over. We’ve had enough. It’s well past “equality” (that long-dead trope progressives keep getting mileage out of at our expense).
No more. Women have taken enough.
A lot of students (customers) view college primarily as a social experience, and therefore want a pretty even gender ratio.
The problem is that colleges still actively discriminate against conservative leaning men via the college application letters. A justice warrior victim dripping letter by an low SAT man will get him in, but a pull yourself up by your bootstraps letter written by a high SAT man will have his application on the rejection heap immediately.
Both men and women benefit from this discrimination. Women benefit significantly because college is one of the best places to find a suitable mate. Women, not only men, want to attend a college where the numbers are roughly equal. For many colleges, this is an existential problem of long standing. Rejecting this form of discrimination likely would threaten the economics of many colleges--perhaps randomly. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I agree with the general concern he’s raising, but this feels like a shallow and somewhat distorted take on an extremely complex issue.
First, grouping community colleges with the Ivy League under one narrative makes very little sense. Community colleges overwhelmingly serve students on economic trajectories similar to non-college pathways, and women’s overrepresentation there tells us almost nothing about elite admissions. It’s also well-established that women disproportionately enter fields that require a BA for solidly middle-income work, while men have, culturally, a far wider set of reasonably paid, non-degree pathways (trades, trucking, energy, public safety, etc.). Given that structural landscape, it is not surprising that women outnumber men at less selective institutions. That’s a labor-market story more than an admissions story.
The article also avoids grappling with the well established gender variance issue in SAT distributions. Average scores are similar by gender, but the distribution isn’t: men are more common at both the very bottom and the very top. At the high end (1500+, the 99th percentile), the pool is 60–70% male. Elite admissions—especially in STEM—draw from this extreme-right tail. Ignoring this pattern and then invoking aggregate GPA or national averages is misleading. Ability distributions matter at the level where Ivy League decisions are actually made.
The piece also never touches the massive gender stratification by major. Education programs are something like 20–80 M/F, while computer science and engineering reverse that almost exactly. Admissions committees do not evaluate applicants in one undifferentiated blob; they evaluate within academic tracks. A STEM-gifted student with a perfect Math score and a merely adequate reading/writing score (a very common profile among top STEM admits) is competing against other STEM applicants, not against education majors. And these STEM-heavy pools skew male. Institution-wide averages by gender obscure this reality completely.
None of this is to say that gender balancing doesn’t happen. It clearly does to some extent, as schools try to ensure they remain Co-ed. The Richard Reeves material on boys falling behind is pointing to something real. But sweeping claims that elite schools are simply choosing less-qualified men over more-qualified women skip over the actual pipeline dynamics: who applies, to what majors, with what score distributions, and with what labor-market incentives. Without accounting for any of that, the argument ends up flattening a highly stratified system into a kind of moral parable.
I admire the principle he’s trying to defend, but the analysis feels incomplete. It identifies a real tension but doesn’t engage with the underlying structural forces that actually produce the gender patterns we see. The conclusions end up sounding more provocative than accurate.