This strikes me as self-evidently false.
The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a "tipping point," where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.
Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.
Colleges that are 60 percent female are obviously not proportionately less attractive to male and female applicants. I know that girls are less likely to attend them, but the guys I've known have a fairly high likelihood of slapping out a high-five and sending off that application, the exception being colleges that are traditionally female, which is a different can of worms. Assuming that the case, once colleges do hit the 60 percent female threshold and become less attractive to various applicants, you'd think that the market forces of fewer females applying but more guys attending would bring it back into balance. Moreover, since women are better applicants, if the college starts attracting lower quality students, more men will, by definition, be in that group. It's not clear why pro-male affirmative action would be needed at all.
And Lindsay has more.
