Distraught that women are outpacing men in college enrollments, Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly took to WorldNetDaily this week to float the idea that colleges should enforce a gender quota to even out admissions to the benefit of men. Responding to a 2010 New York Times article, Schlafly wondered if colleges should set male admissions quotas to ensure that student bodies are “half women and half men.”
Another proposal Schlafly put in the mix is to “stop granting college loans, thereby forcing students to take jobs to pay for their tuition and eliminate time for parties, perhaps even wiping out time for fraternities and sororities.”
Schlafly also called for colleges to stop enforcing Title IX, which prevents sex discrimination in education, as a way to attract men, alleging that the anti-discrimination measure “removes a primary motivation for young men to go to college, many of whom want to try out for a sport even if they are not good enough to make the team.”
All of this, the right-wing activist insists, would actually benefit women because it would give them more available men to date.
The New York Times published a provocative news story called “The New Math on Campus.” No, it’s not about the failure of Common Core to teach arithmetic; it’s about the changing ratio of males to females on most college campuses.
Long ago when I went to college, campuses were about 70 percent male, and until 1970 it was still nearly 60 percent. Today, however, the male percentage has fallen to the low 40s on most campuses.
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Colleges claim they grant admissions based on academic merit, and girls come out of high school with better grades than boys. But that doesn’t always mean they are smarter or more capable of doing college work or succeeding after graduation.
Boys do far better on average than girls on the SAT test for mathematics, which means that boys are better prepared than girls for STEM majors in college. This has been true every year for more than 40 years.
Nearly twice as many boys as girls attain very high scores on the math SAT, with an immense difference at the high end. But the job market for STEM graduates is not as good as it should be, due to corporations’ preference for hiring lower-paid, easy-to-control foreigners on H-1B visas, so many American guys decide that the high cost of an engineering degree is not worth it.
A shocking 46 percent of recent college graduates work in jobs that do not require a college degree. Boys are more likely than girls to look at the cost-benefit tradeoff of going to college. The imbalance of far more women than men at colleges has been a factor in the various sex scandals that have made news in the last couple of years.
So, what’s the solution? One solution might be to impose the duty on admissions officers to arbitrarily admit only half women and half men. Another solution might be to stop granting college loans, thereby forcing students to take jobs to pay for their tuition and eliminate time for parties, perhaps even wiping out time for fraternities and sororities. I went through college while working a full-time manual-labor job, and I don’t regret a minute of it; it was a great learning experience.
Another solution would be to reinstate all the men’s sports that were canceled by an extremist feminist application of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination against female students. The feminists have misused that law to abolish many men’s sports in order to achieve a statistical equality between the percentage of men playing on college sports teams and the percentage of male enrollment in college.
The feminists have abolished more than 2,200 men’s college sports teams since 1981, such as wrestling, gymnastics, track, golf and even some football in order to limit the number of male players to Title IX guidelines. That removes a primary motivation for young men to go to college, many of whom want to try out for a sport even if they are not good enough to make the team.
The popularity of the new college football playoff system illustrates how successful men’s college sports can be for participants and fans alike. But when colleges eliminate men’s sports, women are hurt by the resulting gender imbalance in enrollment.
