New Math on College Campuses

The New Math: Where the boys aren't (NYT Photo)

by Phyllis Schlafly: The New York Times published a provocative news story called “The New Math on Campus.” No, it’s not about the failure of Common Core to teach arithmetic; it’s about the changing ratio of males to females on most college campuses.

Long ago when I went to college, campuses were about 70 percent male, and until 1970 it was still nearly 60 percent. Today, however, the male percentage has fallen to the low 40s on most campuses.

The American Council on Education reports that women have averaged 57 percent of enrollments since the year 2000. Women received nearly 60 percent of all college degrees conferred in 2010.

This has dramatically changed social relationships and interactions among students. Most girls and even some boys do not like this change, but nobody knows what to do about it, and few are even willing to discuss it.

One female student described the new relationship between the sexes like this. “Out of that 40 percent male population, there are maybe 20 percent we would consider dating, and out of those 20 percent, ten have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent.”

Anybody who understands human nature realizes that this situation changes behavior. Girls do not want to get left out in the cold, so they compete for men on men’s terms.

This results in more casual hook-ups that are dead-end encounters with no future and no real romantic relationships. A psychology professor described this bluntly: “When men have the social power, they create a man’s idea of relationships: more partners, more sex, no commitment.”

Colleges claim they grant admissions based on academic merit, and girls come out of high school with better grades than boys. But that doesn’t always mean they are smarter or more capable of doing college work or succeeding after graduation.
Boys do far better on average than girls on the SAT test for mathematics, which means that boys are better prepared than girls for STEM majors in college. This has been true every year for more than 40 years.

Nearly twice as many boys as girls attain very high scores on the Math SAT, with an immense difference at the high end. But the job market for STEM graduates is not as good as it should be, due to corporations’ preference for hiring lower-paid, easy-to-control foreigners on H-1B visas, so many American guys decide that the high cost of an engineering degree is not worth it.

A shocking 46 percent of recent college graduates work in jobs that do not require a college degree. Boys are more likely than girls to look at the cost-benefit tradeoff of going to college. The imbalance of far more women than men at colleges has been a factor in the various sex scandals that have made news in the last couple of years.

So, what’s the solution? One solution might be to impose the duty on admissions officers to arbitrarily admit only half women and half men. Another solution might be to stop granting college loans, thereby forcing students to take jobs to pay for their tuition and eliminate time for parties, perhaps even wiping out time for fraternities and sororities. I went through college while working a full-time manual-labor job and I don’t regret a minute of it; it was a great learning experience.

Another solution would be to reinstate all the men’s sports that were cancelled by an extremist feminist application of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination against female students. The feminists have misused that law to abolish many men’s sports in order to achieve a statistical equality between the percentage of men playing on college sports teams and the percentage of male enrollment in college.

The feminists have abolished more than 2,200 men’s college sports teams since 1981, such as wrestling, gymnastics, track, golf, and even some football, in order to limit the number of male players to Title IX guidelines. That removes a primary motivation for young men to go to college, many of whom want to try out for a sport even if they are not good enough to make the team.

The popularity of the new college football playoff system illustrates how successful men’s college sports can be for participants and fans alike. But when colleges eliminate men’s sports, women are hurt by the resulting gender imbalance in enrollment.
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Phyllis Schlafly has been a national leader of the conservative movement since 1964. She founded and is president of Eagle Forum. She has testified before more than 50 Congressional and State Legislative committees on constitutional, national defense, and family issues.

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