If that was your reason, aren’t you contributing to the problem? In other words, if women don’t apply because there aren’t many female students, how are they ever supposed to get their numbers up? Seems self-defeating.
Yes, i am. Why should i suffer to help a university?
It was really bad back then (1970s–80s), like under 20% women, with all that entails and implies. Then the school started actively recruiting more women; now it is roughly more equal, though probably only around 1/3 women in the graduate programs.
Note that there is a lot of anti-female momentum to overcome at many of these schools (to say nothing of the workplace); e.g. before 1970 or so Caltech would not even admit women and that was not a secret.
I withdraw my legal analysis.
IMHO, it is morally wrong, and should be illegal, to discriminate, in admissions, against women (or men, or non-binary) once a school has gone coed. Admissions should be doing what is reasonably best for the individuals who are applying, not what would benefit the institution. Or if they do want to keep on discriminating, they could theoretically forgo all federal funding, as does conservative Grove City College. Of course I don’t want elite universities to do that, as it would destroy their research mission.
Historically, it’s sometimes hard to pin down what year the school went coed, due to it having been gradual (Harvard/Radcliffe, Columbia/Barnard, Brown/Pembroke, University of Pennsylvania College for Women). But even that wasn’t much of an excuse. Wikipedia has a good discussion of this for Harvard/Radcliffe:
There’s never been a time when they didn’t discriminate by race, gender, religion, legacy, political sponsorship, donor relation, or some combination. That’s why this Supreme Count decision, asking them to tweak what I see as a corrupt system, won’t be sufficient.
I think the other students you are with are a major component of the education. So i don’t think that trying to select for a diverse student body is nearly as corrupt as you think it is.
Sorry I didn’t mean to mischaracterize your viewpoint. Yes race as a scientific classification based on genetics is poorly defined, but as a social construct it is a real thing, that ihas its own challengers distinct from poverty, and including students with that perspective on your campus is a good thing. As far as mischaracterization, I would say that self reporting seems to be working pretty well so far. I doubt that the admissions people check up to see whether you actually spent the last Summer helping Hurricane victims in Puerto Rico either.
Bingo! Welcome to world of self-perpetuating systemic bias. If a system is biased it will stay biased even if the things that originally caused the bias are removed. This is why AA is important, its a necessary intervention to break the cycle. As Puzzlegal said its not her job to sacrifice her happiness to fix the system, particularly since her contribution would be a drop in the bucket against a collective trend.
It does strike me as despicable if the same people who were perfectly happy with 90% or 100% male enrollment at a school a few decades ago now want to discriminate against women because they think there are too many girls at their beloved college.
I have said before that blind admissions procedures (where the reviewer does not know the gender, race, size of bank account, etc., of the applicant) could go a ways towards eliminating some of the sources of overt discrimination, but it is, unfortunately, not clear to me that these schools have that as a goal, without getting into the feasibility of such an approach.
Which colleges had 90% to 100% male admission? Just how big a gap do you think there was between men and women? Did you know that women have been outnumbering men in college admission since 1980, and the gap has been growing every year?
‘Quality of student life’ and ‘maintaining the school’s unique culture’ were rationales for excluding black students back in the day.
I see very little difference between Harvard discriminating against Asians because they don’t want to be ‘too Asian’ and it would change ‘student life’, and schools doing the same against black people decades ago, for the same reasons.
We were talking about Caltech and MIT. As for how they maintain their 50:50 sex ratio today despite women outnumbering men, @puzzlegal is much better qualified to answer that than I.
Harvard never admitted to discriminating against Asians, and the changes they have to make based on the recent court ruling don’t make any changes in how they evaluate Asians.
(I think they have been discriminating against Asians, and i think they have been wrong to do so. But that’s separate from this ruling, which attacks their attempts to add racial diversity as it affects members of less-commonly-admitted races. The “missing Asian spots” were filled by white kids. And I’m betting that any spots lost to Black kids will also go to white kids.)
MIT still has more men, although it’s close for undergrads. I suspect they get more men who apply.
But one way to move your numbers is to recruit. Caltech reached out to me and tried to get me to apply, way back when. I bet they still do that for female highschool students with the grades and test scores that Caltech is looking for.
Re how MIT gets a 48 percent female undergraduate student body, proof is lacking because the admissions criteria, as at all such schools, is opaque. But it is obvious to insiders, as my next link will show, that, on top of recruiting, there also is AA gender discrimination when making admit decisions. And like any such preference, the students who are the supposed beneficiaries know it – and it has a negative effect on how they think about the world, and themselves. This from a MIT undergraduate woman is old but honest (and to the school’s credit, they have not taken it down):
I don’t know how MIT’s admission decisions are made. But Harvard has always had a hard “this person can make it here” requirement. They select the class from among the students who meet that requirement. That’s a lot more applicants than they have room for.
I’m going to reiterate that i believe it’s a mistake, at least at a place like Harvard, which values a lot of different aspects of the students, to believe that there’s an unambiguous way to rank the students. MIT, which is more focused on specific types of learning, has always relied more heavily on test scores than Harvard has, as they are a decent proxy for “will succeed in freshman physics”.
The funny thing is that despite all that, there are a lot of ways in which the MIT student body is more diverse than Harvard’s. You can see it in their dress as you walk across campus. One year i attended some events at MIT in the middle of my Harvard reunion, and the contrast was striking. MIT is a lot more tolerant of “weirdos”, and has a lot of trans students, a lot of polyamorous students, and also more traditionally religious students than Harvard does. What was visible just walking around is that MIT has lots of people with hair in unnatural colors, whereas most Harvard students look fairly conventional.
Is that systemic bias, though? As @puzzlegal tells it, Caltech reached out to her to try to have a more balanced gender ratio, and she turned them down. I don’t blame her for choosing what’s best for her, but I’m not sure what I expect the college to do, either.
Yes, it came from a history of systemic bias, which was in the “self perpetuating” stage by the time i was looking at colleges.
Caltech was only open to boys until 1970, and there’s also been a history of denigrating the math/science ability of girls, which discourages many from pursuing those areas. MIT has always been (technically, at least) open to both sexes, and that’s a major reason why it was well ahead of Caltech in female enrollment in the 80s.
Just equalizing the official rules does not fix bias. It helps, of course. It’s necessary but not sufficient.
What more would you do to fix it, then?
Both selective recruiting and affirmative action can be helpful, depending on the circumstances. IMHO.
I’m not sure how much that would help eliminate discrimination. I think the student body would end reflecting the discrimination systemic in the society. If they are just looking at qualifications, chances are that the majority would end up naturally getting most of the spots. In most cases, that would probably mean that rich, white kids would get the spots since they more often have the educational benefits of wealth and come from families which are more college focused. They would naturally comprise a larger share of the applicants, and their applications would look overall better than the minorities. They would generally have better test scores, have transcripts with more college-prep classes, have more extracurricular actives, etc. It seems like a college has to take things like race and economic status into account if they are going to have a diverse student body. Picking the most qualified applicants based on criteria like grades doesn’t seem sufficient since minorities will often be less qualified on paper.
If minorities have educational disparities that require affirmative action, wouldn’t a better answer be to fix the educational disparities? Instead, we graduate minorities from terrible schools with low standards, then use alternate selection criteria to put those people into classes with others who are much more prepared. So they don’t keep up, which requires grades to be changed. This lowers the signalling value of the degree for everyone.
And markets aren’t stupid. If they hire Harvard grads because they are the best, but Harvard is now focusing on diversity instead of the best, they will just decide that minorities coming out of Harvard are not the same as the kids who went there on merit. So then we need to force them with ESG rules and such. But then the company becomes less competitive. So then we try to orce ALL companies to do it, which means the consumers and the economy as a whole pay.
Reality eventually asserts itself. In the meantime, you’ve done nothing about the root cause, which is that many of the schools that are predominantly minority are also the worst schools in the country. Fix THAT. Or if you can’t fix them, admit it and embrace school choice so parents can find schools that will educate their kids.
Again, this should be good news for Democrats, because they don’t need Republicans to play along. Democrats run the schools, the teachers are almost all Democrats, and the cities are run by Democrats. The head of the Dept. of Education is a Democrat, as is the President. The entire chain of responsibility of the school systems is under the Democrat’s control. So why aren’t you fixing these problems instead of focusing so heavily on social justice issues? Shouldn’t you be teaching the kids to read first? Then maybe we don’t need affirmative action anyway.