Renewing the fight over men and women in higher education

This week, The New York Times has reinvigorated the debate over Title IX, both in higher education (where women now represent a sizable majority of students) and more specifically in sports. A news story describes small liberal-arts colleges adding football teams to boost their male populations, while in an op-ed John Tierney calls on colleges to call off Title IX enforcement. His argument, in essence, is that we ought to leave sports to the boys, since they're under attack in so many other areas in education. His op-ed produced an onslaught of letters, including one from me.

Three issues are at work here. First, nobody has figured out why there are so many more women than men in American higher education, despite recent reports from the American Council on Education and the Education Sector. Despite what ACE says, this is not only an issue of African-American and Hispanic women flooding the higher education more than men from those groups, though that does appear to be the case. Most elite schools, including public universities, research institutions, and especially liberal-arts colleges are struggling to find men who can pay $40,000+ a year to attend. Remember the stir caused by the admissions dean at Kenyon College, who described her affirmative-action practices in a Times op-ed earlier this year?

Second, colleges of all shapes and sizes use sports in ways that do not lend themselves very well to complying with Title IX. At the big Division I-A schools, football and men's basketball teams bring in thousands of fans and miles of headlines (usually not millions of dollars, but that's a separate argument). At small liberal-arts colleges, admissions directors use sports to drive up enrollment, particularly of men--not just male athletes, but men who want to go to a school with a football team. This has been going on for at least a decade, but it takes the Times to make it a trend. I had a short conversation with Gerald Reynolds, then the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, three or four years ago wondering if colleges could use athletic programs to boost male enrollments and thus correct a gender issue in their overall student bodies. He was curious but noncommittal.

Third, the inescapable irony is that arguments about Title IX always have to do with men--the sex that has enjoyed advantages throughout Western history. Why do we look at the numbers of women in higher education as a crisis or a problem for boys? It's just amusing.