rm | "scarce" resources, college and sexism

I'd love to see what happened with college admission if gender was not an issue and all applications had numbers rather than names and no slots for gender, or gasp, and yes, I'm going to say it, race.

If the admission-types are the Privileged, Privilege will be reinforced. A world without Privilege is hard to imagine, because it would be completely different from what we know.
Imagine trying to understand back in the eighteenth century, a world in which 95 percent of the population was not engaged in agriculture.
Imagine trying to understand back in the the thirteenth century, a world in which every man and women was a clark.

As someone currently attending a school that's at least 66% female, I find this fascinating. I'm... going to have a bit of an ego here and say that I really didn't have trouble getting into any school that I applied to, so I can't really relate to that part, but there are some really interesting ramifications to living in a mostly-female school (where most of us are majoring in science, incidentally). The dating pool is definitely a bit slim for the straight ones, but there are enough boys to be friends with if you know where to look, and the sense of community is absolutely fantastic.

Yeah, I was nodding my head through the article thinking "well, first-tier colleges are so competitive that people get rejected for all kinds of damn-fool reasons", and then got to the second half where the author essentially said "but of course we go easier on male applicants and let's blame the women's libbers". Whoa.

Admissions officers believe, I think, more than is justified, that it matters where you go to college. There are a few schools - a tiny handful -that everyone has heard of and are known to be huge plusses, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, but outside that wee group all the distinctions we make about 'good and selective colleges' are just fakery. People make all kinds of distinctions between, like, Brown and Oberlin and Kenyon and UNC Chapel Hill, as if there is a hierarchy there that means anything in any other part of existence, and it's false.

The single most important thing is to go somewhere you feel at home and not to go into a huge mountain of debt for an undergraduate education. If you're part of the 99.8% of students who don't get into one of the five colleges whose mere name on a diploma matters, there are simply no other significant factors to consider. Admissions officers think there are but they're shilling.

I think there is value in artificially gender balancing colleges, to a point. Obviously if the underlying causes that make college so unattractive to men and so attractive to women keep escalating, no amount of admissions fiddling will be able to solve the problem, but I don't see the harm in correcting for a 10% or 15% bias if the underlying causes are mostly things like maturity at adolescence, perceived cultural appropriateness of learning, and things like that. I can expand on this further, but I want to bring up court reporting as an example of what can happen when there are no checks on admission in a situation that becomes gender biased. In the '50s and '60s, court reporting was an extremely lucrative, respected, male-dominated profession. Over the last 40 years it has tipped over into a 90% female dominated profession, and as the percentage of women increased, salaries, prestige, overall applications to court reporting schools -- not just male ones, though they were affected even more dramatically -- and the level of academic preparedness of court reporting school applicants have all dropped dramatically, to the point where the profession is half as lucrative as it was, schools are closing, 85% of students who enroll in programs drop out before graduating, there's a nationwide shortage of qualified reporters, and the entire profession is on the verge of imploding. This is not all due to the self-accelerating gender imbalance of the last 40 years, but I argue that it might well have been slowed or countered somewhat if schools had made a special effort to reach out to male applicants.

On a side note, that school was my 1st choice-- until the administration actively tried to force a friend of mine from pressing charges against her rapist, because he was on the basketball team. Then the school came to his defense and tried to discredit her, even though there were witnesses. In the end, I didn't even apply there because the whole thing was so appalling.

shit. just shit. :(

If some white person was complaining about these admissions policies in terms of race, would you be so quick to jump on it? Or ask why black people were being held to lower standards?

About that 'tipping point' thing, hell, a campus that was 60% elite, awesome women would have drawn me like a moth to the flame, enough to overcome my usual distaste for private liberal arts education and the accompanying student loan debt (which I watched destroy the nobler ambitions of my generation). But then I was the only guy in my Gender and Empire class, which I loved, so take my protestations with that in mind.

Apropos of sexism but not of colleges, I'm guessing you're at least passingly aware of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl (and I liked it)"?

If not, the quick summary is "I like boys really, but I wanted to try kissing a girl, but it doesn't mean anything really, and now let me make a video with girls in lingerie having a pillow fight!" The premise is potentially touching, but the presentation is nauseating.

Here's a cover of the same damn song that almost makes me cry. It's lovely. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skAMmX-D41Q

Privilege issues aside, I'm really puzzled by this piece. Granted, I was accepted into university a decade ago, but I won a scholarship for three of my five years, and my grades were well above what would have been an automatic accept. This was also at a state school. I can't imagine things have changed so profoundly in just 10 years at least in Salt Lake City. Where are these elusive schools of which the author speaks? Are they all private, ivy-league deals? If so, that's sort of an issue of privilege right there, I'd think.

Ungh. Woops. I failed to notice that "the most selective universities" were specifically mentioned in the article.

Still, that raises an interesting point, doesn't it? Of saying that "elite" universities are somehow better than state schools? And that education there is somehow better than what those of us who didn't go to Harvard or Yale received,

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If you haven't seen it yet...

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