<p>Hey everyone,
My name is Meg Hemmingson and for my college writing class in Elon University I decided to write a paper focusing on the way college admissions boards often pass over girls for boys in an attempt to even out the gender ratios of their schools. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how talented and intelligent a girl is; she might not get admitted to her first choice school if the admissions boards decide they’d rather have a boy to increase diversity. In this paper, I tried to expose some of the faults of this logic and express my hopes that their systems and attitudes will change soon.</p>
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<p>College admissions boards have long been concerned about the number of men admitted to their respective universities, as the number of men attending college in the United States has been steadily declining over the past few years. Some education and political leaders have gone so far as to claim that the education system has declared a war on boys, one that must be corrected through means similar to those used to keep racial ratios in affirmative action. However, it is far more important for colleges to give every applicant an equal opportunity to be admitted to the university, regardless of any socioeconomic factor, especially gender. Diversity, while an important factor on any campus, should not be placed in higher priority than helping out those students that most deserve an opportunity to further their education; college admissions boards should keep in mind that young women deserve an education just as much as young men do, and so not give the men an advantage based on factors beyond their control.</p>
<p>Men do not always deserve the attention they get from college admissions boards, and the women are the ones who suffer as a result of this unfair treatment. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, men make up only about 43% of all university students, and so college admissions boards are always working to bring up their universitys percentage of men in order to try and balance out the gender ratio. However, this means that, unfortunately, highly talented female applicants are sometimes passed over in favor of less-qualified males, who are selected simply for diversitys sake. Women often have to work harder just to be noticed by college boards, since men automatically get more attention, since college admissions boards are, after all, trying to maintain some semblance of gender parity on campus; its then often harder for women to make the cut in the more selective colleges. Because college graduates generally go on to be wealthy and high-up members of society, this form of giving men preferential treatment could well be seen as a form of sexism; the bias college admissions has towards men helps them keep an advantage that they have had in contemporary society for the past 200 years.</p>
<p>This disparity is unfortunate, especially since many studies show that girls have been working harder in school over the past 30 years, improving their overall grades at a much higher rate than boys are. This industriousness doesnt only occur in college, either: from elementary school, girls are the students who generally do the best work in class, and so are best conditioned to be the better students by the time they are old enough to enroll in college. However, this could be due to an unconscious bias that teachers and curricula have had toward young girls for the past 15 years or so. Around that time, a report called How Schools Shortchange Girls was published, detailing how teachers failed to address the academic needs of girls and paid more attention to boys, causing the girls to fall behind. Since that time, the schools curricula have been reworked to better address girls academic needs, without ignoring the boys. This restructuring of Americas curriculum has not made the boys fall any further behind; its just that the girls are improving their performance much faster than the boys are. Girls are also more likely to get involved in the arts than boys are, and less likely to have behavioral problems or be put into special education classes; these qualities definitely help out when filling out college applications. With the girls working harder than ever before in school for the chance to go to college and catch up with the men in the workplace, it only seems fair that they should get every opportunity they deserve to get into the best colleges, to correct the pay inequality that already exists for women in American society.</p>
<p>True, colleges dont use such blatant methods as affirmative action to boost the proportion of males on their campuses; they often use more passive recruiting techniques like marketing to get males more interested in their schools. A few years ago, Elon University in North Carolina started a small engineering program and moved its football team to NCAA division I to attract more male applicants; Greg L. Zaiser, Elons dean of admissions, also says that they created a more strict deadline for applications to motivate the normally less-conscientious male applicants to be more on top of the admissions process. Some colleges have even changed the palettes of their brochures from pastel to primary, in an attempt to make their schools look more appealing to boys. But these marketing campaigns alone are not enough for colleges to get the male ratios they need; they must also quietly tweak their standards to give male applicants a leg up in the admissions process, according to editorialist Robin Wilson. In other words, sometimes the deciding factor for choosing students comes down to a simple matter of gender. Some school administrators, such as Towson Universitys Deborah Leather, are worried that the imbalance of the sexes in schools will create a very different society in a generation or two, and thus are trying to keep their campuses balanced between the sexes to prevent this from happening. The process of marketing the school towards boys, however, is much preferable to giving male applicants an advantage in the admissions process, because this way, young men get to choose which schools they are interested in attending and they arent given as much as an advantage over girls interested in the same schools.</p>
<p>While some may feel that giving boys an advantage in the college admissions process is merely a way to correct the gender imbalance that currently exists, the opposite is actually true, as it is women who need to be given more advantages. Women still dont earn as much in the workplace as men do; and if they are given a quality higher education, some of this might be reversed. The best way for college admissions to select students would be for neither gender to be given any sort of weight in the admissions process, and for only the most qualified applicants to be granted admission to the universities they apply to regardless of gender; however, that is unlikely to happen in a world obsessed with trying to deny women the chance to make up lost ground. College admissions boards should not give men any sort of advantage in the admissions process, as doing so will deny women the right to catch up to this male-dominated society.</p>