My colleague John Hood writes today about the new campus discrimination—namely favoring men over women in the name of “balance.” He shows that this is yet another instance of egalitarianism trumping merit. The reason why most schools have a smaller pool of competent male applicants is that, for a variety of reasons, females are more likely to apply themselves in school these days and therefore considerably outnumber males who are really capable of doing college work.

Unfortunately, it’s like expecting cats to bark to think that college administrators who fly off the handle when they find that certain racial and ethnic groups are “underrepresented” won’t react similarly to the trend of decreasing percentages of men in college. They should, however, just accept the spontaneous order of society and admit the most competent students they can, ignoring race, sex, ethnic background and all other educationally irrelevant criteria.