Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Fear for Your Daughter's Virtue
"Boys crisis" promoter Richard Whitmire has a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed offering a new reason to be upset about the higher education gender imbalance: it's turning college girls into, um, women of easy virtue, allegedly because of "what biologists refer to as the operational sex ratio, which in the animal kingdom refers to the changes in mating habits that occur when one sex outnumbers the other." Sherman Dorn does a good job of pointing out the numerous flaws in this argument here (see also Sara Mead from a couple of years ago on the same topic here). I'll just note that this once again raises the issue of affirmative action for men, a terrible discriminatory practice that colleges and universities should abandon.
Race-based affirmative action is a complex issue; on balance I support it for reasons explained here. But whether you're pro or con, I think everyone would agree that it evens out the racial distribution of students among colleges. Because minority students are less likely to attend well-funded schools and less likely to get strong college prep curricula in high school, on average they enter the college admissions pool with weaker credentials than white students, and thus end up disproportionately attending less selective colleges. Affirmative action counteracts this, with the result being within-college racial/ethnic makeups that are more representative of the college student body as a whole. Crucially, race-based affirmative action as practiced by selective colleges doesn't hurt non-selective colleges, because it simply brings the racial/ethnic mix into more of a balance.
This isn't true for gender-based affirmative action, because the underlying rationale is very different. Race-based affirmative action makes up for numerous historical and contemporary inequities that obviously don't apply to men. When it comes to gender, however, balance is everything and the only thing, with colleges scrambling to avoid an allegedly catastrophic 60/40 female-to-male ratio which somehow causes previously chaste female collegians to behave like extras in a Motley Crue video.
But gender preferences at a given selective college do nothing to fix the overall problem of more women in college than men. Instead, they merely push that problem down the higher education food chain, from the selective colleges to the non-selectives. If a selective college rejects a more qualified woman in favor of a less qualified man, she's still going to college somewhere. So the net result is that that less selective institutions that by definition don't have as much leverage to shape their class makeup end up having to deal with the problem of bacchanals in the dorm rooms or what have you. In other words, gender-based affirmative action isn't just immoral and possibly illegal under Title IX, it's also selfish.
Plus, I really don't get the logic: colleges are essentially saying they have to not admit women because otherwise women won't want to go there. Isn't this problem inherently self-correcting? If high female/male ratios are a turn-off for women, won't fewer women apply to colleges where the ratio is out of whack? It's kind of like what Yogi Berra said about the restaurant that nobody goes to anymore because it's too crowded. -- |
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