The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Washington Post: "Trump's Attack on DEI May Hurt College Men, Particularly White Men"
Yet the facts in the article would equally have supported the headline, "Elite Private Colleges Apparently Hurt College-Bound Women, Trump May Stop That."
The federal Title IX provisions generally ban discrimination based on sex in federally supported higher education programs—but they specifically exempt sex discrimination by undergraduate private universities (and not just single-sex ones). And, according to Thursday's Washington Post article, there is evidence that elite private universities are taking advantage of that to discriminate in favor of men:
[Brown University] accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in—7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared with 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data shows….
Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data shows…. Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will crop up if campuses become too female ….Colleges worry, "will men look at that and think, 'That's essentially a women's college, and I don't want to go there'?" [former private university head admissions officer Madeleine] Rhyneer said. "For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, [gender imbalance] is a problem," she said. "They want to create what feels like a balanced climate."
There are more similar claims as to Columbia, Chicago, Vassar, and (less elite) the University of Miami, though the exact magnitude of any suspected preference is unclear; the article, for instance, cites a study saying that "The country's top 50 private colleges and universities have two percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission." Of course, the data doesn't prove that universities are indeed using sex as a factor to prefer male applicants over females. (For instance, it's conceivable that women are more willing to apply to long-shot schools than men are, and that this explains the difference in the percentages of applicants of each sex who were admitted.) But the article treats the data as quite telling.
Yet the article is not framed as "elite private universities are apparently discriminating against women in admissions." And when the article notes that the "Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations," it doesn't quote anyone (other than, briefly, Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education) who takes the view that maybe stopping this discrimination against women are a good idea.
Rather, the article is framed, as the headline suggests, as "Trump's attack on DEI may hurt college men, particularly White men." The first quote in the article is from the president of the American Council on Education, Ted Mitchell:
This drips with irony…. The idea of males, including White males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.
OK, maybe it's ironic (a subjective matter). But isn't it also other things? Maybe pro-equality? Feminist? If males have been getting an express admissions advantage because of their sex, why isn't it a good outcome that they lose this advantage? Likewise, isn't it more accurate to say that females have been at the short end of the stick, if the factual claims in the article stand up, and that the Administration's actions would give both sexes equal ends of the stick? (For the record, I think it would be very good if universities treated applicants equally without regard to sex.)
Some later quotes likewise focus on how the Administration's actions would be bad for men, without equally focusing on the current's system being bad for women. The one quote from an expert from a "right-leaning" institution (Rick Hess from AEI) simply suggests that the change won't have much of an effect on universities' gender makeup. No quoted source (again, other than Secretary McMahon, who is briefly quoted as saying that "aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex") suggests that, if there is an effect, it might be the fair thing to do for women.
This, I think, helps illustrate why many people have lost confidence in the fairness of the mainstream media. Here the authors have evidence of deliberate sex discrimination against women—yet apparently because the attempt to end it is coming from the Trump Administration, the story is framed instead about how it's "ironic" that the Trump Administration is supposedly hurting men by forbidding preferences in favor of men.
Now there are of course other things that could have been discussed here. For instance, perhaps maintaining gender "balance" is a good idea, though, if so, why—and what about the counterarguments? (One argument I've heard in favor of gender balance is that this makes for a better dating environment, but is that an adequate reason to justify sex discrimination in education? Another offered in the article is that men might avoid heavily female campuses, though that sort of consumer preference is generally not seen as an adequate reason to justify sex discrimination in education, plus of course perhaps some men might prefer a higher female-to-male ratio precisely because that might create a better dating environment for them.)
Or perhaps the government has been going too far in intruding into the decisions of private institutions, even when the institutions get government funds. (The article briefly quotes, at the very end, a 1971 statement along those lines by a Republican Congressman who helped exclude private university admission decisions from Title IX.) But there are obvious counterarguments there as well that would seemingly merit discussion, especially since Title IX does ban sex discrimination in admissions to private graduate and professional education, as well as in ordinary private universities as to most matters other than admissions.
Or perhaps one can question whether the Administration has the authority to impose this demand by Executive action, in the absence of Congressional authorization. Or one could bring up the laws in some states that already ban sex discrimination in private university admissions. The article mentions Columbia, Vassar, and Pomona College in its list of private universities that take a smaller percentage of women applicants than of women; they are in New York, which appears to ban sex discrimination in private university admissions, and in California, which appears to do the same as to private universities that get state funds.
But in any event, the near-exclusive focus on how the Administration's actions "may hurt college men" by mandating equal treatment without regard to sex, as opposed to on how the status quo may hurt women by expressly discriminating against them based on sex, struck me as unsound.
