The Latest Victims Of Trump's Anti-DEI Hysteria? It's White Guys!
Oh, the irony.
For the last year, the Trump administration has fought tooth and nail to restore straight, cisgender, white Christian men to what it considers to be their rightful place at the top of the hierarchy, even going so far as to pronounce DEI programs illegal in many circumstances. One of their main targets, naturally, has been college admissions, which the Right has had a bug up its ass about since forever. Oh, how they have wept for the deserving white men supposedly denied entry into America’s elite schools in favor of supposedly less qualified women and minority students.
Except, as it turns out, men have actually been benefiting from these diversity initiatives for many years.
You see, right now, 40 percent more women than men are enrolled in college — and it seems that number would actually be a lot higher if colleges hadn’t been admitting men at higher rates than women for many years now, for the purpose of keeping a relatively gender-balanced campus. This is especially true for the most elite institutions. Brown, for instance, accepts seven percent of male applicants versus only 4.4 percent of female applicants, in an effort to keep things 50-50.
Private institutions have long been able to consider gender in admissions, a loophole that was carved out in Title IX back when men vastly outnumbered women on campus. As a result, they have two percent more men on campus than do public colleges and universities that are not allowed to make gender a consideration.
However, the Trump administration has been pushing for these schools to stop considering gender in their admissions process, along with other characteristics like race, religion or sexual orientation. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful in getting them to sign on to their ridiculous Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education (the one that would also bar them from “belittling” conservative ideas) in order to keep their federal funding, but it’s likely that many may drop these considerations in order to avoid conflict.
Via the Washington Post:
The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data shows. Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.
“If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” [president of the American Council on Education Ted] Mitchell said.
Oh, and because a majority of the men who apply to college are white, they’re also the ones who will experience the most rejection. Whoops!
It’s not incredibly surprising. Women have been told they have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good, and this is the result of that hard work. Conversely, men — white men in particular — have been repeatedly told that, in a true meritocracy, they naturally win out, and that if they haven’t succeeded, it is simply because everyone else has gotten undeserved “special treatment.”
While the irony is certainly hilarious, this still isn’t a good thing — because campuses actually do benefit from diversity. It’s good for all of us to be around different kinds of people. Frankly, as a society, we also benefit from educating white men, as it makes them far less likely to vote Republican. I’m half-kidding there, but the fact is that the less men interact with women, the less likely they are to see us as people. I absolutely believe that the decrease in in-person socializing among young people is why we see so many young men turning to cretins like Andrew Tate to “learn about women” or spending their days hypothesizing on our evil on incel message boards instead of, you know, actually talking to us. Fewer men at college means fewer men regularly interacting with women in an intellectual environment, and that’s probably not a good thing for anyone.
The Washington Post contacted several private universities that accept men at a higher rate than women, though none of them were willing to say, just yet, how they would be adjusting their admissions criteria.
But if it does happen, at least we know it will bring relief to the many conservative white men across the nation, who surely would not want to be so insulted by this “special treatment,” and who have always just wanted to live in a true meritocracy — even if that means they lose in the end.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Many years ago, I heard a couple of men who were discussing the recently published, “even cowgirls get the blues.” They both agreed that they really benefited from reading this book that was written from a woman’s point of view, and that it was really eye-opening to think about it from that perspective. I printed out that the author was Tim Robbins, who was male, and they had no idea why I was contributing to the conversation, or what my point was, so they both ignored me.
That memory came floating up unbidden when I read the bit about men turning to Andrew Tate to learn about men. We have always been at war with Eastasia, in a manner of speaking.
I know of a well-regarded regional State college in the Southeast that has tried and tried for years to equitably address this issue.
The problem is this: the campus is just a 20-minute bus ride from some of the best surfing on the east coast of the United States. Lots and lots and lots of white men apply to be students there.
But here's another dimension to the problem: the school is actually pretty academically rigorous. It's not a party school, necessarily.
And here's another problem: the public schools in the rural counties surrounding the campus are awful.
For decades now the campus has received huge numbers of applications from males in the region that it is supposed to serve, but very few of them are qualified to attend.
They tried outreach to the public schools to try to improve quality, and that proved to be a 1,000-year project. They had more success working with the community colleges in the region to harmonize curricula so that courses would more easily transfer to the state college campus. But this occurred at the same time that the state government, spurred by employers, made the community college curricula more rigorous. You see, you can't get a job on the floor of a modern factory without at least an associate's degree worth of mathematics. The CNC milling machines do all the work, but to communicate with one a worker has to have a lot more than high School math. (There's also a labor shortage for the factories that the region is attracting from the Northeast.)
So over the last 25 years the regional State college campus has become more and more female. Achievement levels are high. But campus life, near the beach, it's become a bit boring.
So in one sense, the campus is thriving with engaged and high achieving students. But it sits in a region in which employers can't readily find the educated workers they need, and there is a growing community of sidelined former high school students, predominantly, white and male, who are unqualified for college study or factory labor.
And the region continues to vote overwhelmingly for that asshole in the White House™.
To learn how the story ends, be sure to read the final chapter of the comprehensive American history that will be written by Chinese scholars.