Is it a violation of the law if a college or university admits a higher percentage of male applicants than female applicants? To the writer of this Washington Post piece, apparently so. Brown alum Jon Birger laments the fact that in 2014 his alma mater accepted 11 percent of the men who applied but only 7 percent of the women. He points to similar statistics at other colleges and universities.
Evidently, quite a few schools are trying to avoid having a ratio of women to men above 60/40 and are admitting academically less qualified men in order to keep from going past that “tipping point.”
On Instapundit, law professor Elizabeth Price Foley has fun with this:
“So suddenly liberals/progressives are in love with merit-based admissions? That’s mighty funny.
This argument for admitting more women to elite colleges–based on their higher objective academic credentials (GPA, SAT/ACT score) is more than a little ironic, given the liberal/progressive argument for race-based affirmative action is exactly the opposite. In race-based admissions, the liberal/progressives assert that white and Asian applicants’ objective academic credentials, although higher than Hispanic or black applicants, should not earn white applicants any admissions preferences. When it comes to race, in other words, academic merit shouldn’t drive admissions.”
To all of America’s egalitarian and “diversity” worrywarts, I say, forget about it. Fretting about percentages this group and that group in our colleges and universities is a sheer waste of time. Nothing bad happens if schools just admit the students who are the best academic fit no matter what their race or sex. And nothing good happens when people obsessed with eliminating statistical “gaps” whenever they spot them use admission preferences to shuffle a few students around to suit their desire for social engineering.