Hugo Schwyzer reflects on a NYT story on college admissions policies and the implications for both genders.
The New York Times reports today on a new study about changing college admissions policies. The big lede is that both public and private colleges are increasingly likely to admit wealthy applicants who won’t need financial aid, even when those applicants have lower grades and test scores than their competitors.
As troubling (though hardly unexpected, given the dreadful economy) as this news is, another part of the story is in danger of being overlooked: more colleges and universities than ever before are giving preference to male applicants—regardless of race or class. Inside Higher Education (the site that commissioned the study) notes that when it comes to competitive admissions men of all backgrounds are now lumped in the same preferential category as athletes, children of alumni, and offspring of donors. Though rumors have persisted in recent years that some colleges did favor men in admissions to try and achieve a balanced sex-ratio, we’ve never had evidence of just how widespread this practice is until now.
There’s no question that the percentage of women receiving bachelor’s degrees has climbed in recent years—and that at the same time, slightly fewer men are attending or finishing university. There are a host of hotly debated reasons for this shift. Some, like Leonard Sax, argue that boys lack the natural ability to focus that girls possess, and as a result tend to fall behind in school. They may need extra help, a different pedagogical approach – and apparently, preferential treatment in admissions.
But it’s hard to escape the sense that the decision to admit guys with lower grades than their female peers is tied to a panic about the seeming feminization of ambition and success in our culture. In the 1920s, the Ivy League famously initiated quotas to keep down the number of Jewish students, who were considered too bright, too pushy, and too likely to displace the young WASPs in pursuit of their gentlemen’s Cs. In the 1980s, there were widespread rumors that the University of California was taking steps to reduce the very high percentage of Asian students at campuses like Berkeley.
Women, it seems, are the “new Jews” of higher education—forced to be better than everyone else in order to be treated equally.
While affirmative action may make sense for historically disadvantaged groups, it’s absurd to apply less rigorous standards to middle-class white men. To the extent that boys are not as academically successful as their sisters, the blame lies less with the imaginary anti-male bias of the educational system and more with the crude anti-intellectualism of young male culture.
The false belief that “you don’t need an education to be successful” is more rampant than ever among young men of virtually all backgrounds. It is part of a backlash against women’s achievement and the disastrous sense so many young men have that masculine identity requires behaving in ways that women don’t. In this sad calculus, the more women attend college, the more college becomes identified with the feminine—and the less young men want to have anything to do with it. This is not about lack of ability or about different learning styles—it’s about the longing for all-male space.
The culprit isn’t attention deficit disorder in little boys. The culprit isn’t successful girls. The culprit is a Guy Code which prizes as masculine only those things that women cannot or will not do. Rather than punish our daughters and coddle our sons with different admission standards, we need to confront the toxic and worsening anti-intellectualism of young men’s culture.
I really like the “Good Men Project”, but hate 99% of the comments on this site. Such disappointing jerks… Huge shame, cause the articles and contributors are amazing men!
Is that because a large portion of the contributors are women and men like Hugo who blame men for everything even when it is a women who fails.
Two points; 1. hugo has the most convoluted Girl Game imagineable. He really works very hard to manipulate their egoes and make himself attractive to them, such is his hyper-gendered ego. 2. education has been sytematically devalued to get more people through the mill, to raise more revenue, largely supported by debt. The student loan bubble is huge and primed to go off with a very big bang. Also the more of something there is (degrees) and the easier they are to obtain (churn the fees), without a comensurate increase in demand, the lower the value (however defined). The reductionist… Read more »
Look at hugo gender policing.
Little ladies need a helping hand.
Nasty boys suck it up!
When men fail it is men’s fault. When women fail, it is men’s fault. In Hugo Schwyzer’s world, everything is men’s fault, so why are we surprised by this latest piece?
For some feminist idealogues like Schwyzer, affirmative action is only good when it benefits women. When it benefits men? Bootstraps instead.
Asshole.
Hold on,
then why do boys on average have higher iq scores?
and why do girls need to be given a slanted playing field in school?
Oops, here’s the Reddit link: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/kqxtf/hugo_schwyzers_latest_idiocy_women_are_the_new/
A quote from Reddit: http://secondclasssex.blogspot.com/2011/09/hugo-schwyzers-latest-idiocy-women-are.html
“If you measure success in broken homes, the sexualization of children and society, and the tens of other problems brought about by female economic and sexual freedom, not least the alienation of one half of society that are being failed at home and in education (males), then yes, I suppose ‘female ambition and success’ is to be celebrated.”
Traditionalist clown.
Wah Wah, I want the government to legislate me a wife.
But a campus that is balanced in terms of men and women is a better place to be socially. College isn’t just about studying. Maybe girls will be better off it there are a decent number of guys in the college. In fact, it might make the college more attractive to the top girls.
The ‘guy code’ thing is true. While I was in school, the girls I knew compared notes, formed study groups, and worked as a team as much as possible. They were much more social. The guys I knew were solitary creatures, working alone. If there was something one girl couldn’t figure out, one of the others in her group could. If there was something one guy working alone couldn’t figure out, he would be stuck on the problem for hours, spinning his wheels. The root of all the problems boys and men face currently is the expectation to be strong,… Read more »
Why does a site about “Good Men” give the stage to a male hating tool like Hugo? Not a good man. Not a productive discussion. Too polar, ideological. There’re a lot of things going on in all this, but the one-sided view Hugo presents is all his poisonous fantascy. He assumes some kind of new evil, candescine agenda against women. (“in danger of being overlooked”, rumors have persisted in recent years”). I’ve never heard the term “feminization of ambition” either. One way to cut through all the BS here, is to recognize that a system as vast as education can’t… Read more »
While I am all for gender equality, this article says that “Though rumors have persisted in recent years that some colleges did favor men in admissions to try and achieve a balanced sex-ratio, we’ve never had evidence of just how widespread this practice is until now.”
There have been many programs and initiatives started (women only scholarships etc.) to try to get more women in post secondary education. If there are now more women than men, like this article implies, isn’t it only fair and equal to promote male admission. Equality has to go both ways.
“Equality has to go both ways.”
It should but feminists don’t see it that way – as this article and many of the comments bear out. In the world of feminism. the waters of equality only flow the female way.
Haha Eric M, you’re really funny.
Hugo, a few points — First, I think that higher education — particularly of the formal variety — is something that should *not* be necessary for financial or social success (which I would describe as lifelong financial stability and access to most social institutions). I think that our constant push toward higher education has led to (1) a devaluation of a bachelor’s in the minds of employers, where it becomes no better than a high school diploma was in 1960, and (2) a real decrease in the rigor of education, as no one wants to completely demolish someone else’s life… Read more »
I’m inclined to agree with professor Schwyzer on this issue.
I would also like say that a lot of men aren’t internalizing what prosperity means to them & not their friends.
I am curious about the origin of this complaint that education is somehow biased against boys. Education in the Western world was restricted to boys only for approximately 2000 years, and always required, at a minimum, that students sit still, shut up, and pay attention to the teacher. In more recent centuries, serious education (I am not counting 19th century “Rich Ladies’ Finishing Schools” that taught embroidery, dancing and socially-charming French), was STILL male-only. And to the best of my knowledge, they all continued to require that students (a) sit still, (b) shut up, and (c) listen and pay attention… Read more »
That’s what I’ve always wondered too. Education back then was more strict than it is now. You could be whipped if you didn’t “sit still, shut up, and pay attention,” even in all-boys schools with purely male teachers. Now suddenly we have lots of female teachers still carrying on the same standards, albeit the whipping, and now there is suddenly a problem and we’re being oppressive to male students because girls are somehow better at this than boys. This sounds like an ego problem to me that society wants to be PC and pander to the male ego by trying… Read more »
Aurora, if it were only those three items there would not be much of a problem. However, the situation is more complex than that. We have seen the removal of recess, the removal of competition, and a change in the way classes operate and how students are allowed to participate. We have also seen a change in the methods of teaching, which now favor girls’ learning needs, along with a change in the teaching materials, which favor girls’ interests. There is also tacit animosity towards boys, who tend to get treated as stupid, aloof, or, as Hugo suggests, inherently lazy,… Read more »
The old feminist females are superior argument.
This all make me laugh pretty hard. I say you all are making too much of gender qualities. Gender doesn’t have qualities, gender is a personal internal feeling. Everyone expresses gender differently. Society really need to stop enforcing “This is how boys are and this is how girls are,and there are only boys and girls.” Really? Every boy learns better how you were explaining? Every girl learns how you explained? I say allow kids to fricken develop however, you will notice boys might pick up behavior that is ‘girlish’ and girls might pick up ‘boyish’ behavior. The big picture is… Read more »
Elisia, I don’t think you comprehended Hugo’s message. It was not about policing gender. It was about preferential treatment in admitting boys to colleges and universities. It was about the value of higher education going down because more women are getting degrees. It was a comparison of the difficulties that Jews, Asians, and women have faced because of their high academic achievements vis-a-vis privileged white Gentile males.
Why is preferential treatment is good when women are the recipients but wrong when men (or boys in this case) are the recipients?
Preferential treatment of any group over another is never okay…
Feminists are heavily in favor of preferential treatment. For girls and women only.
I’ve been a teacher for almost twenty years. In my experience, there is quite a bit of anti-intellectualism among kids I teach, but I haven’t noticed any big difference between male and female students. They may be anti-intellectual in different ways and in different subjects, but boys certainly have no monopoly on seeing school as a low priority waste of time. I daresay none of my students, male or female, are texting each other about vector calculus or Harriet Tubman or plate tectonics. I suspect that if girls fail they are a little more likely to blame themselves, while if… Read more »
Hugo’s anti-male view of the world shows what current feminist thinking still is: Unapologetically anti-male. This article is just the latest installment.
Don’t be hating because your insecure. He does not depend on the oppression of women to feel like a man, he’s obviously secure and does not have an ego problem or a shaky sense of manhood like alot of males in the world.
Come away from the dark and walk to the light Eric.
Hugo is your definition of a good man? Some of Hugo’s other characteristics: He had inappropriate relationships with students, Cheated on his wife, Has been divorced and re-married multiple times, may have fathered a child with another man’s wife, and didn’t realize he was allowed to have a Sprite without his wife’s permission.
I think he just says what you want to hear.
Only those who truly have deep seated and abiding ant-male thinking agrees with Hugo, as every article he ever writes is founded in misandry.
As someone working in academia, I see some irony here, or at least affirmative action moving in multiple directions. Many schools are trying harder to recruit women than men for faculty positions because of the existing percentages of male versus female faculty. Schools are trying to get more women on the faculty as they’re trying to get more men into the student body. Meanwhile, whole portions of the administration are virtually all female (HR, custodial staff) and other portions are virtually all male (physical plant). No one seems bothered about the asymmetry. I’ve never heard anyone complain that 90% of… Read more »
Hugo,
Just another feminist. No sense. No sense of fair play. You must hate yourself deeply, in order to have such hatred of your gender.
What the title of this article should have been: “Affirmative action: It’s only unfair when boys get it “
edit – punishing girls not publishing girls
Well, its a blatent lie to describe moves to fix the education gap that has been created by affirmative action for girls and the feminisation of education as publishing girls.
Good men don’t tell blatant lies Hugo.
Boys are only 40% of post secondary enrollment and it is still dropping. That’s a 20% gender gap. When girls had problems in math or science, and were underrepresented in law and medicine, we asked parents, schools and political leaders to take responsibility. Now boys have problems. We need to take responsibility. One study, compiling the data from student satisfaction surveys which collected information about all aspects of student life including non school related experiences was particularly interesting. Male students always had longer work weeks in addition to being full time students. Male students also routinely reported higher levels of… Read more »
First off there are not ‘two genders’. Gender is the social context in which masculine and feminine identities are produced. There are not even ‘two sexes’ as we have intersex and transexual people too.
Secondly calling girls the ‘Jews’ of education is just ridiculous. Why is it impossible to imagine that parenting and education may be biased in favour of girls educational achievement? It is as if you are blaming boys for their own problems.
Citation needed.
Citation needed.
Citation needed.
The last two are just ridiculous theories, but the first is somewhat true. While I do not think many young men believe they do not need an education, I do think a lot of men from Gen Y think they can get by without having a college degree since many of the successful people they look up to never graduated from or went to college.
Jacob,
I agree that the first view may be pretty prevalent that many boys think they can get by w/out college.
However, the point that this view has grown MORE prevalent doesn’t pass the sniff test.
A lot of white collar workers or highly-skilled blue collar workers in male-dominated fields were laid off in the last 5 years (i.e. the He-cession).
If anything thing, common sense says this view should be declining.