Affirmative Action For Men

Below is a a very poignant blog post that appeared on the web site insidehighered.com in 2006 following a New York Times article about the widening gender gap in American colleges.

Affirmative Action For Men

Many institutions of secondary education are now starting to consider affirmative action as a way to level out the playing field by bringing in more male students.

The legality of it is a bit tricky, though: Under Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972, institutions that are receiving federal funds cannot discriminate applicants based on their gender bars. But Title IX has a loophole: it does not cover private institutions, such as Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, which embraced affirmative action. According to the latest data, 56 percent of Kenyon students are female.

But that's not the end of the story. It gets more complicated once you consider possible ulterior motives that colleges may have when instituting a policy of affirmative action that favors men: the possibility to beef up male athletics programs, which typically bring in more revenue than their female counterparts. Title IX, however, is very clear on that: athletics participation has to demonstrate “proportionality”of male to female athletes, and this rule applies to private institutions as well. This statute poses a challenge to colleges that are majority female.