The Quiet Scandal of Affirmative Action for Men

Colleges systematically disadvantage female applicants.

(Photo by Jan Woitas/picture alliance via Getty Images.)

For most of American history, higher education was dominated by men. But over the course of the last four decades, male dominance on campus has not just attenuated; largely unnoticed in the broader culture, women have started to outcompete men by a long stretch.

Women began to graduate from high school and college in greater numbers than men in the 1980s, and to obtain a majority of doctoral degrees in the 2000s. Today, girls represent two-thirds of all students who graduate with a GPA in the top 10 percent of their high school class, while boys represent two-thirds of all students who graduate with a GPA in the bottom 10 percent of their class.

The knock-on effect for higher education has been enormous. Undergraduate institutions in the United States currently enroll 8.9 million women, compared to only 6.5 million men. In 2021, men received just 42 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the United States. The last time the gender imbalance among American undergraduates was similarly stark was at the end of the 1960s, when about three in five college students were male.

These changes are extremely visible on all kinds of campuses. Community colleges, historically black institutions, and big public schools are now heavily female. So, increasingly, are the country’s most selective private universities. Women make up the majority of incoming students at every Ivy League school except Dartmouth.

If they were to admit applicants without considering their sex, the best schools in the country would end up with incoming classes that have an even greater predominance of women than they already do. So, largely unnoticed by the public, they have started to embrace a solution to this supposed problem that is simple, effective, and manifestly unjust: affirmative action for men.

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It is impossible to be certain just how blatant current forms of discrimination against female applicants are.

Colleges have no interest in a broader public debate about such a sensitive subject. So they closely guard the kind of data, like the average SAT scores of male and female admits, that would allow the uninitiated to assess how large a bonus they give to male applicants. This lack of transparency should, in and of itself, qualify as a major scandal.

But despite the paucity of publicly accessible data, there is strong reason to believe that the practice is widespread. Admissions rates by gender, which some colleges do publish, for example, usually show higher rates for men than for women. In the 2024-25 cycle, 29,917 women applied to Brown, and 1,309 were offered a slot, for an admission rate of just 4.4 percent. The number of men who applied was far lower: 18,960. Even so, the number of men who were offered a slot was actually somewhat higher, at 1,326, giving men a much higher admission rate of 7 percent.

For another, senior campus bureaucrats have publicly acknowledged that the practice is routine. “Gender parity is something that’s an institutional priority for most private colleges and universities in the United States,” Sara Harberson, a former dean of admissions and financial aid at Franklin & Marshall, recently said. Shayna Medley, a former admissions officer at Brandeis, was even more blunt: “The standards were certainly lower for male students.”

It is, in other words, an open secret in admissions circles that many highly selective universities now put a big thumb on the scale to help their male applicants and artificially deflate how big a share of the undergraduate population is female. As Susan Dominus concludes in a long article about the subject in the New York Times Magazine, “The easiest way for many competitive schools to fix their gender ratios lies in the selection process, at which point admissions officers often informally privilege male applicants.”

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Discrimination is often driven by animus or prejudice. But while it is of course impossible to rule out the possibility that some admissions dean somewhere in the country has a bias in favor of male applicants, that likely isn’t the reason for how widespread this practice has become. Rather, universities are motivated by cold calculations of self-interest—and operate in the knowledge that these practices, while morally dubious, are perfectly legal.

Universities have become accustomed to seeing their students as paying customers, whose preferences for everything from lavish meal plans to easy As must be indulged at any cost. And since many prospective students, both male and female, express a strong preference for being on a campus that has rough gender parity, they do their best to accommodate these wishes.

The stakes for colleges are even higher because they have traditionally prided themselves on the share of accepted students who choose to enroll at their institution. If one school stopped discriminating against women while its peers continued to do so, the gender balance on that particular campus would quickly and significantly shift. If this should in turn prompt some accepted students to enroll elsewhere, it would affect the university’s prized yield rate.

Many readers likely suspect that it must be illegal for universities to discriminate against women in such a blatant fashion. After all, civil rights era legislation prohibits universities from discriminating against students on the basis of their sex in many other contexts. Colleges are, for example, barred from offering disproportionately generous athletic scholarships to male students. Surely, similar constraints must also apply to the admissions process?

Not so. When these civil rights laws were drafted, many of the country’s leading universities were still single-sex. Elite colleges fought tooth and nail to win carve-outs from pending civil rights laws, ensuring that private colleges could continue to admit far more men than women if they so chose. Those same carve-outs now make the new regime of affirmative action for men presumptively legal for private colleges.

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The incentives shaping the behavior of universities are real, and the law doesn’t appear to prohibit such practices. But that doesn’t make it morally justifiable for colleges to pick a less qualified male applicant over a more qualified female applicant.

Part of the problem with the current practice is that it is both individually rational and collectively futile. There are simply not enough young men who are motivated and prepared to excel at college. By giving a big leg-up to male applicants, the best colleges in the country can artificially boost the share of male students on their own campuses. But this only means that slightly less exclusive colleges wind up with even more lopsided sex ratios. Rather than solving the growing gender imbalance in higher education as a whole, affirmative action for men merely attenuates the problem at the very best schools while deepening it everywhere else.

An even bigger part of the problem with the current practice is that it is unethical. A key argument for meritocracy is that it provides an institution that needs to allocate a small number of coveted slots among a large number of applicants with an explanation that it can in good conscience proffer to those whom it must disappoint. Applicants who are turned down from their dream school are always going to be sad. But if the college can truthfully tell them that they were rejected because other applicants had higher GPAs or better SAT scores, they should be able to see that the decision was made on fair criteria. If, by contrast, the college was sufficiently forthright to tell them that they were turned down for the sole reason that they are female, they would, for good reason, feel that the decision was made according to deeply unjust criteria.

Indeed, there is, if you pause to think about it, something fundamentally unseemly about administrators caring so much about the gender balance on campus. It may well be true that many applicants prefer colleges with roughly equal numbers of men and women, in part because they worry about the dating scene on campus. But should it really be the job of admissions officers to make sure that students have a suitable number of potential romantic partners available to them? And might some of the broader problems of academia—such as the extent to which it has become the training ground for a professional-managerial class that is increasingly out of touch with the rest of the country—not even be alleviated if a few college students had reason to venture off campus in search of a potential date once in a while?

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There is a positive reason for the feminization of campus: Women have more opportunities than they did in the past, and they are working hard to seize them. There is also a negative reason: A growing share of men is doing poorly, with a substantial minority lacking all purpose or ambition.

The struggles of boys are especially stark at the high school level. According to the American Institute for Boys and Men, they are three times more likely than girls to be expelled from school. The ranks of young men who are not pursuing a degree, not formally employed, and not part of a vocational training program have swelled ominously: The share of such men has grown by about a third since the beginning of the century.

As Richard Reeves has chronicled in recent years, it really is a serious societal problem that boys are falling behind. A growing number of men dropping out isn’t just bad for economic prosperity; it also presages a rise in disease and loneliness, in crime and even deaths of despair. A healthy society needs both boys and girls to thrive.

Fixing this problem should therefore be a serious political priority. And as Reeves has argued, there are significant reforms that can help boys succeed at higher rates. To name but one example, K-12 schools should consider embracing more forms of active learning, which, according to some prominent researchers in the field, is more suitable for the learning styles of young boys.

But it would be naïve to think that universities can, or should, fix this pipeline problem. If elementary and secondary schools are failing boys to such an extent that some of the most talented men are dropping out, then they are in need of serious reform; but those lost boys aren’t in any way helped by giving a male applicant who is already on a path to a good life an unfair advantage over a better qualified female competitor when they both apply to Harvard.

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It is remarkable how little attention has so far been paid to the quiet scandal that is daily taking place in admissions offices around the country.

Part of the explanation for that quiet acquiescence, I think, lies in the fact that the country has for so long been consumed by the fight over race-based affirmative action. Another part of the reason lies in the secrecy with which colleges have instituted these practices, which makes it hard for their victims to recognize the injustices they have suffered. But perhaps the biggest part of the reason lies in a background assumption which has become such a well-entrenched part of American life that we have grown blind to its fundamental strangeness.

Admissions officers at elite schools have long ago convinced themselves that it is their job to socially engineer the “perfect” incoming class. They think they must make sure that each group of freshmen has the “right” racial balance; has somebody who can play the second violin in the university orchestra; includes a good number of students who are likely to make (or, better still, inherit) money they can donate to the university; and, apparently, that it should have a roughly equal ratio of men to women.

This assumption would strike most citizens of other countries as thoroughly odd. In Cambridge and Oxford, professors personally interview applicants with a focus on whether prospective students are likely to excel academically. In China and South Korea, students qualify for places at top universities through national exams that assign them a numerical score. Though none of those universities have a dean of admissions who claims to know the secret formula for how to create the perfect entering class, all of their orchestras somehow seem to find a second violinist who is up to the task.

The search for a “balanced” class amounts to verbal dress-up for rank discrimination. It is wrong when it entails disproportionately rejecting Asian applicants, a practice that widely persists even though it has officially become illegal. And it is just as wrong when it entails disproportionately rejecting women.

Ideally, colleges would recognize how indefensible this practice is of their own accord. If they don’t, the federal government should step in. For while it might sometimes be driven by the best of intentions, the search for the perfectly balanced entering class simply isn’t a good enough reason to discriminate against college applicants on the basis of their sex.

This article was originally published by The Dispatch.