The Quiet Scandal of Affirmative Action for Men

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.

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