In desperate attempts to keep their campuses from swinging hugely female, as far more women than men apply to college these days, straight-A girls are told to look elsewhere, while B-average boys get the fat envelope.
As a typical example, Whitmire notes that "the admittance rate for men at the College of William and Mary was an average of 12 percentage points higher than the rate for women from 1997 to 2006." To which the dean of admissions there responds, "Even women who enroll ... expect to see men on campus. It's not the College of Mary and Mary."
Whitmire wants to know why nobody is filing a big splashy lawsuit about this. The main reason seems to be the phenomenon that the William and Mary guy alludes to--compared to other admissions preferences, the student/group interests here are conflicted.
A given minority student applying to college presumably has two congruent interests: (1) to increase their chances of admission, and (2) to increase the chances that other minorities will be admitted. Both interests lead to the same policy: affirmative action.
Men and women, by contrast, have two opposing interests: (1) to increase their chances of admission, and (2) to decrease the chances that other members of their gender will be admitted. In other words, give admissions preference to me (or in the case of women, don't discriminate against me), but once you've done that, don't apply the same policy to anyone else, because I'd rather have more of the other gender and not too many of my own.
That said, admissions preferences for men are clearly a terrible, selfish policy. The original (and still best) justification for affirmative action was to help students who, because of their race, had fewer opportunities to attend a good K-12 school and had historically suffered discrimination in society at large. For boys, the former is highly debatable--there are good reasons to think the so-called "boys crisis" in K-12 education is overblown--and the latter could obviously not be less true.
In the end, the biggest losers here are women from the middle and lower parts of the socioeconomic spectrum. This is why:
The overall pool of college students is, for the purposes of this discussion, fixed at 57 percent women, 43 percent men. Individual college policies don't change that in the aggregate, because everyone can go to college somewhere. So gender-based admissions policies don't solve the gender imbalance, they just redistribute it downward to colleges that don't have selective admissions, and thus aren't in a position to manipulate their gender mix.
As a result, women who attend selective colleges suffer a reduced chance of getting into the college of their choice, but enjoy a more balanced gender distribution. Men who attend selective colleges get a leg up on admissions, and get to hang out with smarter women who are more fun to talk to and will earn more if they marry them someday. For men, it's win-win; for women, it's win-lose.
The lose-losers are women who attend non-selective colleges and universities, women who are more likely to be first-generation, mid-to-low income students. They have to put up with an even more maldistributed gender mix than they would otherwise experience, plus the men they go to school with are less smart than they would otherwise be.
So if you're a women attending Regional State University and you're wondering why there aren't very many guys around, and the ones who are around are a bunch of drooling idiots, blame the admissions director at William and Mary.
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