ChickSpeak

Ever since sex inequality became an issue in education, women have been told that we are behind.

We spent two generations trying to make up for the opportunities our grandmothers didn’t have, doing whatever it took to achieve our goals, from running every club at school to mastering derivatives and integrals.

All of our hard work paid off; in 1980, the ratio of women and men in college reached parity, and today women make up 57 percent of students in higher education. What’s more, women are getting higher grades as undergrads, too, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s statistics.

But apparently, our success is leading to our downfall. Colleges are so desperate for more men to grace their quadrangles that they reject women at a higher rate so that they can keep a male/female balance.

It’s not happening at Georgetown, (my school) thank God, but some of our peer institutions are leading this trend. How many of you applied to Boston College, Fordham or William and Mary? I did; I almost went to BC, but my mom didn’t think that I could handle a Boston winter. At William and Mary, 44 percent of male applicants were admitted in 2006, while just 26 percent of female applicants got in. Women’s average test scores are right up there with men’s, and their GPAs and extracurricular involvement are generally better, but supply and demand works against us.

The gap only stands to get worse: The Department of Education estimates that the ratio of women and men in college will be 60-to-40 in 2010, a number that many colleges see as the dreaded tipping point of too many girls. Apparently, a school that is more than 60 percent female is a turn-off to guys and girls alike. (One former admissions officer quoted in an article in the U.S. News and World Report suggested that “no one wants to be outnumbered” in the dating scene on campus. If you’re seriously going to put mating rituals over the quality of your education — not to mention the obvious fact that other people can be found off-campus — then you probably shouldn’t be considering a college career in the first place.)

Americans are so proud to call this country a meritocracy, but how can we truly maintain that distinction if we overcompensate for every demographic fluctuation in our society? OK, you might argue that women themselves once benefited from a thumb on the scale in college admissions. But we don’t need it anymore. What really helped women then was the access to preparation and opportunities that only men had had.

This time it’s different. Young men continue to have the same resources as before. They’re just not taking advantage of them anymore.

If you want to talk about ways to fix the new gap, giving men a boost in college admissions — or, if you look at it the other way around, punishing women for being too ambitious — is not the right way to do it. The gap really starts at the beginning of schooling, which is where we should target efforts to narrow it, rather than 12 years of education later.

Boy-backers, for example, point out that girls are more often encouraged to get involved in clubs and that there are programs dedicated to help girls succeed in school, like the well-regarded group Girls Go Tech. Well, here’s a novel idea: Start some programs like that for boys! I honestly have no problem with a Boy Scout-like program that gives boys a comfortable setting for tutoring or learning leadership skills. If a particular boy needs attention or a little prodding to awaken a curiosity in a subject that young boys tend to avoid, like literature, give it to him.

Another argument is that boys suffer from lower GPAs because of behavioral differences. Boys, they say, are at a disadvantage in school because they misbehave more often than girls do, and poor behavior is reflected in their grades. But to say that boys are at a disadvantage in school because they get into trouble more often than girls do discounts the fact that behavior is part of the educational experience. Let’s encourage parents to be more involved in their children’s daily schoolwork and try harder to set positive examples for youth before we decry the system.

Thinking about this issue of an admission sex gap reminds me of a conversation I once had with a friend about our own college application experiences. I mentioned that my father is a registered American Indian, but I never registered because I never identified myself that way. He couldn’t believe it. “You could have gotten into Harvard if you said that you were American Indian!” he exclaimed.

But I didn’t want to get into a prestigious college because I might happen to come from a marginalized race. I didn’t want to get into a prestigious college because I am a girl, and I didn’t want to get rejected from a prestigious college because I am a girl that wanted to go into government and foreign language instead of engineering. I wanted to get into a prestigious college for the things that truly make me who I am, social constructions aside. When did admissions officers stop taking that into account?

Emily Liner is a senior in the College at Georgetown University and layout editor of THE HOYA. She can be reached at liner@thehoya.com.

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