"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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What do "historical and contemporary inequities" have to do with the real and palpable gender imbalance? Does this mean that white boys graduating high school "deserve" no "special" treatment to correct current imbalances that the numbers incontrovertibly demonstrate beause their fathers were somehow advantaged? This is punishing boys because of the "advantages" men have historically enjoyed (we could discuss those advantages at great length, including the palpable disparities in life expectancy, suicide, death from virtually every major disease, and death on the job -- all of which are remarkably skewed in favor of women).
You would do well to look at the current crop of kids and ask yourself what is going on that so many fewer boys are choosing to college. Spewing politically correct mantras about supposed past oppression is not helpful and to the effect it disregards problems staring us in the face, it is downright morally grotesque.
I think that the gender and race issues, when it comes to affirmative action, are pretty much incomparable. Having said that, I'm going to set race issues aside.
Affirmative action that favors males has always seemed like a silly notion to me. If it weren't for the fact that the most successful Americans are still, by and large, white males, perhaps it wouldn't. But regardless of how well our men are doing, I think that the imbalance of women in higher education has several completely rational reasons behind it:
First, women are in fact a majority of the population (52%) and should therefore be a slight majority in the higher education population as well (if we're going with population-at-large-reflecting university populations).
Second, women are less likely to seek manual labor positions and, therefore, are less likely to be able to secure a job without a higher education degree.
Third, women are less likely to seek other routes of employment that do not require education (i.e. the military).
Fourth, women are competing with the glass ceiling that, tragically, has been shown to still exist. Traditionally, higher education levels lead to higher income; perhaps women think that by outqualifying their males coworkers, they can earn as much as them.
I'm sure this list goes on and on, but those four factors really seem to weigh heavily against male affirmative action.
I went to a college that was 75% male (I am female) and...there's an element of truth to this.
Our ratio was skewed enough that it *did* substantially affect how men and women related to one another, and men's behavior in particular. These effects were not entirely salutary. They were functional, but I could see some nearby horizon (say, 80/20) where being female would have become very unpleasant indeed. (And I can't imagine the men would have enjoyed it, either.) It worked as well as it did because most of the men were more inclined to respect than to commodify women, but there's still serious competition over a scarce resource going on.
My husband lived in a coed fraternity which, due to its small size, experienced dramatic swings in gender ratio, and I've heard similar things from its residents; when the gender ratio gets too far out of whack in either direction, the culture starts to break down. Different bad things happen depending on which gender predominates, but it's still bad.
Not that I can see any reasonable way to solve this; if the collegegoing population is majority female, unless women's colleges reverse their declining popularity in a big way, the coed colleges are going to be unbalanced as well. (Which is to say, the problem isn't self-correcting, unless women will avoid college entirely rather than attend a seriously imbalanced one -- which I doubt.)
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