General admission bias in favor of male applicants

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Equity" at work. Trying to achieve "balance" instead of just going with the best candidates.

What do you do then if your student body is 80% mostly middle class, white or asian, female applicants?
I am all for an academic meritocracy, but if all colleges do this, what are the consequences on society for the next generations?
The article tries to get at this.

I understand we are in a patriarchy. It's hard to accept that we need men in college, even if they don't do as well in school as women. Why would we give them a break if they don't have the best academic profiles as a group, and if the people at the top are mostly all men anyway? But then what do you when hardly any men go on to graduate college, and take menial positions in society?

It would be a very interesting experiment, but perhaps not with the result you have in mind.

PP you're responding to. Fair points. My first inclination to answer your question was "yes, of course that's fine" but that is some food for thought. I doubt it is that skewed though. It's 55/45 or 60/40 ok? And why not try to address the problem at elementary age instead?

I actually doubt men will end up taking menial positions just because they don't go to college. There are lot of very high paying jobs that men are more likely to take than women. There was the recent thread about UPS drivers earning 6 figures. There's plumbing and contracting and electrical work. Police and Corrections may not require college. And you could also see new industries develop, like the coding explosion where many programmars were self-taught. Women can do all these jobs of course, but don't tend to go into them in high numbers.

I worry that they will try to might-makes-right bulldoze the merits of education, Joe the Plumber style. We already saw the prominence of that with the previous pres and the whole effort to stigmatize education as "elite." You have ones like Trump in it for the name (like the guy who doctored transcripts actually did any college level work?) but capitalizing on the appeal of his crude uninformed ramblings. And ones like DeSantis, Hawley and Cruz trying to divorce/bury their education to appeal to the grass roots anti ed momentum. Dude culture is already brewing. Guys foregoing higher ed will be the hops. The next era will be dominated by 24 hr beer pong on ESPN 9.

I don’t think men ready to give up that easily. Look what we’re doing at New College. Trying to wrest control back of the institutions.

Hmm. Perhaps. I'm curious how they will coexist. But, I guess that vision for New College just distills anti academic rhetoric and mixes it with Western/Euro ideals. It's a weird mashup.
My kid won an award from an organization that was supposed to be nonpartisan, but the key speaker was all about how 1619 project was assaulting our "great western traditions/ideals," going on and on about how essentially everything great is from Europe. Most of the honorees were Asian.

Asia is wildly successful precisely because it has adopted European economic and technological developments and started beating the West at its own game.

I think you missed the point.

Nope. Essentially everything great did come from Europe, and the success of Asia does not refute this, it supports it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Go out and earn the big bucks, ladies!!

You got watch you wanted. Breadwinner time.

women are the breadwinners in most households now. try again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

a significant proportion of boys are recruited athletes, which then has an impact on school culture: academic girls, less-academic boys.

The stereotype that athletes are “less academic” is dumb and false.

read the article

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The thing is though that high school and middle school favors girls because they go through puberty earlier and that leads to changes in the brain that are advantageous for doing well in school. Boys do catch up eventually, but the current system does make them look like weaker college applicants (esp now that it is so competitive to get into top colleges).

I’m not disagreeing, but when I was in high school boys were just as competitive academically as the girls. There was not this gender imbalance in the classroom. Boys today are particularly disengaged from academics - so I do believe something additional is going on. Chalking it up to simple brain maturity means you’re leaving other explanations on the table.

Maybe 30+ years of “girls rule, boys drool” propaganda wasn’t such a good idea.

[Anonymous]

If I were Queen:

Girls start K at 5.
Boys start K at 6.

make the cut offs national. no more poor NYC who have to go K at 4.5 and are behind the entire way through.

and I'd go further and do an all-boys preK at 5, so parents can send the boys to school when the girls go, but it's not academic at all. you wouldn't even need certified teachers. but a very slow slope to getting kids school ready, starting with outdoor time, simple team sports outside a few times a day, sitting in a circle listening to someone read, choice time, simple cooking or boiling, a day away from screens basically.

[Anonymous]

These ratios aren't a big deal. As long as women do the vast majority of (paid or parental) child care, and parents prefer to hire women, that will soak up women and leave other jobs open for men.

As a group, women utilize college *for career prep* at far lower rate than men.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The thing is though that high school and middle school favors girls because they go through puberty earlier and that leads to changes in the brain that are advantageous for doing well in school. Boys do catch up eventually, but the current system does make them look like weaker college applicants (esp now that it is so competitive to get into top colleges).

I’m not disagreeing, but when I was in high school boys were just as competitive academically as the girls. There was not this gender imbalance in the classroom. Boys today are particularly disengaged from academics - so I do believe something additional is going on. Chalking it up to simple brain maturity means you’re leaving other explanations on the table.

How old are you? At the *median*, which is relevant to the article and society overall, girls have outperformed boys in school for decades, since girls got rights. Some argue that the rigid sit-in-chair nature of school favors girls' temperaments.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well, this didn't seem to help my boy during admissions...

Even rejected at some SLACs where I've seen DCUM people say a boy would get a boost, Meanwhile, those schools took lower stats/rigor LGBTQ girls from his grade instead. (I have no complaints, those girls will do great - but it just doesn't follow the narrative that "boys are in demand").

Yours is one, unsubstantiated anecdote. I just went through the process two years in a row: first with son, second with daughter. Son, with much lower grades and rigor, but slightly higher test scores, admitted to all the mid-tier SLACS (think F&M, Lafayette, Lehigh, Conn College, etc.); DD the next year with much better grades and slightly lower scores--which were still well within 75th percentile, waitlisted at all but one. That's my anecdote.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If I were Queen:

Girls start K at 5.
Boys start K at 6.

make the cut offs national. no more poor NYC who have to go K at 4.5 and are behind the entire way through.

and I'd go further and do an all-boys preK at 5, so parents can send the boys to school when the girls go, but it's not academic at all. you wouldn't even need certified teachers. but a very slow slope to getting kids school ready, starting with outdoor time, simple team sports outside a few times a day, sitting in a circle listening to someone read, choice time, simple cooking or boiling, a day away from screens basically.

That’s not a fit for all kids. My older son was reading at 3.5. This would have bored him to tears.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The thing is though that high school and middle school favors girls because they go through puberty earlier and that leads to changes in the brain that are advantageous for doing well in school. Boys do catch up eventually, but the current system does make them look like weaker college applicants (esp now that it is so competitive to get into top colleges).

I’m not disagreeing, but when I was in high school boys were just as competitive academically as the girls. There was not this gender imbalance in the classroom. Boys today are particularly disengaged from academics - so I do believe something additional is going on. Chalking it up to simple brain maturity means you’re leaving other explanations on the table.

How old are you? At the *median*, which is relevant to the article and society overall, girls have outperformed boys in school for decades, since girls got rights. Some argue that the rigid sit-in-chair nature of school favors girls' temperaments.

it's very hard to see these kinds of numbers in a single person's experience. your high school classroom might have been tracked .. you may have seen the same 20 boys in most of your classes, and 1 or 2 that didn't stand out wouldn't be noticeable to you, but that same 10% over a national base would be impactful. similarly, you seeing a group of boys in your neighborhood still stuck on their games, esp post-covid is not a national test. this is why we rely on bigger numbers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Equity" at work. Trying to achieve "balance" instead of just going with the best candidates.

No one complained when "Equity" worked in favor of women (and continues to do so in many domains) for decades. Now the pendulum has to swing to the other side.

No one complained when women weren't allowed to vote, have credit cards, or go to grad school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If I were Queen:

Girls start K at 5.
Boys start K at 6.

make the cut offs national. no more poor NYC who have to go K at 4.5 and are behind the entire way through.

and I'd go further and do an all-boys preK at 5, so parents can send the boys to school when the girls go, but it's not academic at all. you wouldn't even need certified teachers. but a very slow slope to getting kids school ready, starting with outdoor time, simple team sports outside a few times a day, sitting in a circle listening to someone read, choice time, simple cooking or boiling, a day away from screens basically.

That’s not a fit for all kids. My older son was reading at 3.5. This would have bored him to tears.

he wouldn't have been prohibited. but if you're saying your 3.5 year old couldn't play outside or on teams, maybe that would have been helpful. there's not a lot of reading happening now in the K curriculum, but kids who can read are allowed to read.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

a significant proportion of boys are recruited athletes, which then has an impact on school culture: academic girls, less-academic boys.

The stereotype that athletes are “less academic” is dumb and false.

Not in my experience.
--Professor

Athletes are like everyone else. Many have excellent time management and work very hard. Others are not so great at or invested in college. So, IME, dumb and false.
- Another Professor.

[Anonymous]

Women control k-12 education and now college. They design the experience and set the expectations. When girls do relatively worse on standardized tests, they de-emphasize standardized tests. Everything about education these days is hostile to masculine energy which is of course considered toxic. Look at the books your son has to read in English class. The college application process itself favors girls- cultivating relationships with teachers for recommendations where they divulge all their feelings and dreams, getting involved in all these silly organizations. The system is dominated by women and rigged against boys.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Women control k-12 education and now college. They design the experience and set the expectations. When girls do relatively worse on standardized tests, they de-emphasize standardized tests. Everything about education these days is hostile to masculine energy which is of course considered toxic. Look at the books your son has to read in English class. The college application process itself favors girls- cultivating relationships with teachers for recommendations where they divulge all their feelings and dreams, getting involved in all these silly organizations. The system is dominated by women and rigged against boys.

Lol. Maybe if the field paid more, a few men would be willing to come in and make things right!