While much of the debate surrounding college admissions in the last few decades has focused on affirmative action for minority students, a new issue--affirmative action for men--has recently garnered national attention.
While many of today's most selective colleges have reported that their admissions standards for women are stiffer than they are for men, Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg denies that Dartmouth's admissions standards have changed in this direction.
"It's not an issue at Dartmouth and I don't think it's an issue for any other highly selective places like the Ivies," Furstenberg said. "I frankly think it's an issue that has been made too much of."
In a recent New York Times editorial, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Kenyon College, addressed the issue of gender parity at colleges. According to Britz, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they have more female than male applicants, a problem that she believes requires attention.
With students today applying to more and more colleges, the proportion of female college applicants nationwide as reported in the 2005 Admission Trends Survey has risen disproportionately to 58 percent.
"The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants," wrote Britz, commenting on the value of gender parity at a college.
"Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus," Britz continued. "Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.
These "demographic realities" have begun to show at Kenyon, which has a current enrollment of 770 men and 870 women.
At first glance, Dartmouth's admission statistics seem to follow this national trend, with female admits for the Class of 2010 dominating the largest proportion ever at 51.4 percent.
Furstenberg, however, believes that the increase in female applications at Dartmouth can be primarily attributed to the growing understanding of the College as a great place for bright students, whether male or female.
"It was back a decade or two ago that Dartmouth was not as hospitable to women as it was to men and I think that's now totally gone," Furstenberg said. Gender parity was first achieved at Dartmouth in 1995 with the admittance of the Class of 1999.
The differences in admission rates between male and female applicants are relatively insignificant at the College, with matriculation rates for the past several years fluctuating randomly around a 50-50 male to female ratio, Furstenberg said.
"Overall, the credentials of our male and female applicants are very similar," Furstenberg said. "The reason this is not a big issue for the most selective places in my view is that we are looking at a very limited segment of the top of the ability market. I think there are a sufficient number of very talented students at the top of the spectrum that are both male and female that it really doesn't make any difference to us."
For this reason, gender is not taken into account at all in recruiting efforts or in the application process at the College, Furstenberg said.
While Dartmouth and similar schools seem to be the exception, many larger public universities, such as the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, whose freshman class is currently 58 percent female, and smaller liberal arts colleges have begun to feel the effects of these demographic changes.
Britz's voluntary exposure of Kenyon's practices of favoring less-qualified men over women with similar or superior credentials stunned applicants, parents, women's advocates and many admissions officers alike.
While affirmative action in college admissions has been subject to much litigation, the focus of such debate to this point has been on race and ethnicity. Many have expressed concerns about the repercussions and legality of its use to maintain gender parity in college admissions.
In an editorial in The New York Times, responding to Britz's piece, John Tierney wrote that affirmative action was unfair to both the girls who were rejected despite their higher qualifications and to the boys who would not be ready to keep up with their classmates in these institutions.
Tierney stressed that the federal Education Department should focus on how to help boys arrive at college and lessen the gender gap that has widened in the last two decades.
Some have questioned the legality of affirmative action for men on the basis of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bars gender discrimination in all education programs receiving federal funds. While private institutions must comply with Title IX in their treatment of students once they are admitted, the policy only applies to public institutions in regards to undergraduate admissions.
Legal implications aside, the question remains whether actually favoring a less-qualified man over a woman is morally right. Although some agree with Britz regarding the importance of gender parity in an institution, others believe these policies devalue affirmative action.
Katha Pollitt, a columnist from The Nation and a strong supporter of affirmative action, sees such male favoritism as "scandalous."
"Affirmative action is intended to remedy past discrimination," Pollitt said to Scott Jaschik of the online publication Inside Higher Ed. "There is no past discrimination against white males."
Others used this debate to discuss the very nature and reality of the college admissions process in general.
"To some extent, admissions is partially an activity of recruiting more of what you have less of," Furstenberg said.
Joyce Smith, the executive director of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, an organization that keeps track of national trends in the admissions process, shared a similar view about which groups colleges favor. "Institutions want to have a diverse class and you want all kinds of representation," Smith said in Inside Higher Ed.
Ultimately, Furstenberg believes that the decision to attract a particular gender is up to an individual institution, he said. He considers it a big mistake, however, to use different standards in the admission of men and women.
