I don’t support affirmative action of any variety. Why should balance be a desired end in itself?
Men are more likely to go into the trades, and we need people to do that. The average age of people in the trades is very high. Who are you going to call when they retire?
Let the market sort it out, distorting markets often produces a worse outcome.
Dating, for one thing. When my daughters apply to college, I imagine they won't want to go to a school that's 65/35, since that would create a very skewed dating dynamic (to the benefit of boys and the detriment of girls).
Obviously one is not restricted to dating inside the same college. Typically the dating environment is the entire community. It can be a good place to meet people of the same age though. Young women tend (at peak physical beauty) to have an edge in the dating market over young men (at lowest status), so it’s not even guaranteed that it would make things worse.
There is nothing forbidding dating outside the same college in most cases, but it can be very impractical. At my school for example, Caltech, the work load was very high leaving limited time for social activities, only a small fraction of students had cars, public transit was not very good, and there weren't many places within walking distance of campus you'd be likely to meet potential dates.
At the time (~1980) among undergraduates Caltech was about 15% female, 85% male. There were probably some who did make off campus dating work but I never heard about it.
Even if a significant fraction could make off campus dating work, with that much of an on campus imbalance the ratio of the remaining males looking for an on campus date to on campus females would still likely be large and that's pretty annoying for everyone, but especially so for the women who if they were not currently dating were being constantly hit on.
It's not a matter of valuing dating above all else. It's a matter of realizing that your students are going to live at your school for 4 years and have limited opportunities to socialize off campus, and that if campus can not provide a somewhat normal social life academic performance will suffer.
This is more true at some schools than others. Many schools are pretty insular and dating outside of the school is quite uncommon. This was true for the liberal arts college where I went to school, even though it was not geographically isolated. It is definitely true for isolated schools (Williams).
You want to limit access to education because of dating? In the 21st century where you can meet people from thousands of miles away within minutes?
I heavily doubt this is a justified incentive to prescribe quotas. If university was for dating, I probably wouldn't have picked computer science and electrical engineering.
Even if it may feel different some times, universities aren't a breeding ground where dads can put their daughters to get engaged.
I didn't say I want to limit access to education because of dating. I said that it's one possible consideration.
> If university was for dating, I probably wouldn't have picked computer science and electrical engineering.
I also never suggested people choose a major in order to date (that would seem extreme — though I definitely knew people who signed up for specific classes for this purpose!).
And I also didn't suggest that I would send my daughters to university to get engaged — that's a straw man. Instead, I pointed out that my daughters themselves probably wouldn't want to go to a school where the dating prospects are dismal. My guess is that most people would feel the same way!
Most importantly, I was not in any way indicating that this should be required (which would "limit access to education," as you refer to it). I'm just pointing out that schools could have rational reasons for not admitting students on a sex-blind basis, and that perhaps it shouldn't be knee-jerkingly rejected.
> In the 21st century where you can meet people from thousands of miles away within minutes?
This is not how college students want to date, FYI. I say this as someone who has been in multiple long-distance relationships, and eventually a long-distance marriage (but met these girlfriends locally, like most people do).
Male enrollment numbers are a huge issue and it's disappointing reading some of the quotes in the article.
Double standards go both ways - if men are demonstrably struggling I don't think it's unreasonable to give them a bit of a push. I would expect the same consideration for women.
Ultimately, let the person choose whether or not they want to apply or go into a profession that doesn't require post secondary education and apply supports where needed.
A pure "meritocracy" has problems, but it's the only morally pure starting move. Anything else is injustice with varying alibis (whether they're racism or social engineering experiments).
We are ultimately talking about wanting the best outcome for all young people and sons and daughters. If you have an axe to grind take it elsewhere. It might be hard to accept, but some people really want to see everyone succeed.
We should always go to data but the education system should strive to give people a chance. Maybe the problem is way earlier in this case but it's worth trying.
The reply was condescending and the poster can get lost. I won't apologize for a thing. They can post a top level comment if they want to kick up sand.
Bit of incel energy from you here. Girls have been outperforming boys in education for a good 30 years, longer than a decent portion of us have been alive.
If this were true, SAT math scores for girls would be higher than boys. Math is the only portion of the test that can be scored objectively. The reality is, there are systemic biases in every component of education today that favor girls.
In the UK, girls overtook boys in maths results in 2021 (at least, when looking at top grades). This was the first time girls had got more top grades in maths, and just so happened to be a year when exams were cancelled due to COVID and grades were "estimated" by teachers instead. When exams resumed the next year:
> Boys also retook the lead over girls at the top grade for maths in 2022 after girls out-performed boys at the A* grade for the first time in 2021. Last year, 29.1 per cent of girls were awarded A*, compared with 28.5 per cent of boys.
Not surprising at all. What is surprising is that boys are still good at math, despite being beaten down year after year by a girl focused environment.
Are you saying that SAT scores in math are about equal but scores for other sections heavily diverge?
Having never written them I genuinely have no frame of reference but would be interested to find data to back this up since it's quite the lofty assertion.
I would more likely have guessed that aptitude in these areas was not as strong for some other reason.
> Title IX legislation, passed in 1972, says that no one should be excluded on the basis of gender from participation in any education program receiving federal financial assistance. But private institutions have an exemption that allows them to use gender as a factor in admissions.
I was interested to see this legal explanation because I had read in a prior HN thread that schools could choose to be single-sex, but once they decided to admit both sexes they were forbidden from discriminating. The HN comment linked to an authoritative-looking website (Dept of Education?), but this seems to pretty clearly indicate that private schools are exempt.
EDIT:
Here's a link to a page on the Dept of Education's Office of Civil Rights website, which gives the impression that schools that receive federal funding (which is basically all of them) cannot discriminate on the basis of sex or gender in admissions. It mentions no exception for private institutions. [1]
But this other page on the same website shows the exemption for private institutions. Very strange that the first page, which has a section on the "scope of Title IX" would not mention that this rule does not apply to the thousands of private universities and colleges. [2]
That's one way to affect the gender ratio of your student body.
There's also a way to do it that doesn't involve giving one gender a boost in admission. Instead (1) try to get more people of the desired gender who are qualified to make it without a boost to apply, and (2) try to get more people of the desired gender that are accepted by multiple schools to decide to go to yours.
That's the approach Caltech took. When I was there in the '80s it was 85% male (it is 54% male nowadays). That was annoying and distracting for everybody. They made it a priority to get more balanced, and the approach was to work on the pipeline.
When I, a pretty average for Caltech male, was offered admission they sent me a letter and told me the deadline to accept and how to do so, and that was pretty much it. If I had picked another school Caltech wouldn't have tried to get me to change my mind. It would have just been "tzs didn't accept...offer that spot to the next kid on the waitlist".
If I had been a female, they probably would have sent a faculty member to visit me and my parents at home and try to convince us that Caltech was the place to be.
Same on the pre-application side of things. They'd send people out to meet top female high school STEM students and try and convince them to apply. For males you had to be really special to get that kind of recruitment.
IIRC girls have higher GPA than boys, on average, and boys have higher SATs than girls, on average. It will be interesting to see how the trend to do away with standardized test considerations in admissions will play out.
Public institutions (which cannot legally discriminate on sex because of Title IX), and institutions in states where sex-based discrimination is disallowed, may see their student body shift even more female if they no longer consider standardized test scores.
Men are more likely to go into the trades, and we need people to do that. The average age of people in the trades is very high. Who are you going to call when they retire?
Let the market sort it out, distorting markets often produces a worse outcome.