<p>cheers - I don’t think liberals are evil and I don’t believe in leftwing conspiracy any more than I believe in a vast rightwing one. What I do believe is that people frequently do not question their own assumptions or built in biases.</p>
<p>I live in a wealthy suburb of Washington, DC. When I go out to a party it is usually populated with bureaucrats, scientist, NIH folks, folks from non-profits and all the usual K St corridor advocacy groups. The built in assumption when I met a total stranger is that I am a liberal Democrat just like them. I mean all normal people are aren’t they? I will hear some pretty outlandish comments. Generally I’ll just let them slide and laugh it off, but I got to tell you when some of these folks find out a conservative has all his teeth, didn’t meet his wife at a family reunion and doesn’t have six fingers on each hand or alternatively a family trust fund full of tobacco stocks they are flumoxed. It simply doesn’t fit their world picture. NOKD folks aren’t supposed to look and sound like me unless they are Dick Cheney and pure evil. They are supposed to be inarticulate dumb…es like George W Bush. - yeah even at I can laugh at the man’s lack of verbal adroitness.</p>
<p>Which schools are having trouble drawing top male students? The ones without business schools, engineering schools or football teams? Ummmm…</p>
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<p>That is what CCrs call a single data point–limited usefulness in a debate.</p>
<p>FWIW, my father is terribly conservative, my mother voted for Eugene McCarthy. My in-laws lived in Potomac for a few years–and they were surrounded by like-minded republicans.</p>
<p>What you describe is a sharply divided left and right, good and evil world–in Washington, at MIT and all the elite schools. That’s not been my experience.</p>
<p>Gosh, I only know one 'blue-collar" offspring at MIT & he’s brilliant. All the other kids I’ve known who attend MIT/Caltech have at least one prof parent. Faculty I know at Caltech have also come from prof. families. The people I know aren’t looking for a decent paycheck, they are looking to invent, teach, manage, & create. </p>
<p>I don’t think the very top non-tech schools have difficulty atracting high calibre male students. It’s only a couple of years ago that Harvard patted itself on the back for finally achieving gender parity among its admitted students. For other liberal arts schools, it’s easy to account: female students have higher GPAs and SAT scores, so they are more admissible. It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with high school performance.</p>
<p>As for politics, my S was interviewed at MIT (where he ended up not applying) and Harvard. The MIT interviewer did not raise anything remotely political. The Harvard interviewer suggested to my atheist son that he might consider joining a Christian group. I was surprised that she even raised that issue but decided not to mention it to the Admissions Office after all.</p>
<p>I have to laugh at the comment about the elite schools having trouble attracting the best male students. That sure isn’t what I see. The only issues I sometimes see are (a) the widespread belief among aspiring engineers (the vast majority of which are male) that it doesn’t matter where you go to school, so you might as well go wherever it’s cheapest, and (b) economic pressures on everyone, male and female, which divert some kids.</p>
<p>Marite wrote something that has troubled me about this for a while. Thirty or fifty years ago when more males were enrolled than females, it was assumed by right-thinking people that it was because there was a structural bias in the educational system (or “society”) against females. Now that men are underrepresented, it’s because “females do better in school” not that “the educational system discriminates against males.”</p>
<p>(Note: Marite was not directly arguing this point, and it may not represent her thinking at all. Her statement just sparked this line of thinking. It wasn’t my intent to create a straw man argument for Marite.)</p>
<p>Fifty years ago girls were discouraged from thinking about college and had very few career options considered appropriate. So most didn’t go to college. That was only starting to change about 30 years ago, when I went to college (ok, 35 years ago). Girls who were smarter or more academically able than boys had to hide it or be social outcasts. Maybe that’s still true. Actually, it’s been true for my son in the present day. Girls do better in elem and HS because they tend to mature sooner and are more able to sit still, not because they’re smarter than guys. The guys tend to catch up later, if they haven’t gotten so discouraged that they give up.</p>
<p>Females do better in high school using criteria that colleges deem valid, and that many who advocate for strictly objective criteria deem valid: GPAs and SAT scores, This is incontrovertible. No one who has advocated the use of “objective criteria” has challenged the basis on which GPAs and SATs are arrived at–they are deemed to be free of “subjective” biases, unlike AA, geographical preference, liberal politics, and the like. But they’re not–and that is why, I, for one, do not care for the use of these criteria to argue that some schools have admissions policies that are merit-based than others.</p>
<p>There are indeed reasons to question the reliance on GPAs and SATs as a pure gauge of academic excellence and, more importantly, promise. As BethieVT has suggested, boys mature later; indeed, in general, they do not begin to hit their stride until they are in college. Additionally, high schools reward certain types of behavior more readily associated with girls–eg, sitting still for long periods of time. That was true, too, 30-40 years ago. </p>
<p>Still, as BethieVT argues, 30-40 years ago, girls were not encouraged to the same extent as now to pursue a higher education degree. And many went to college to pursue what we used to call the Mrs. degree. I remember my own college roommate being quite open about it (see Mona Lisa Smile). When I arrived in this country, there was a plethora of secretarial schools and finishing schools and two year colleges in the Greater Boston area. They’re gone now. Since the early 1970s, women have begun competing with males for the same spots at HYP. The number of spots has not expanded significantly, but the pool has doubled.</p>
<p>WashDad wrote, "Thirty or fifty years ago when more males were enrolled than females, it was assumed by right-thinking people that it was because there was a structural bias in the educational system (or “society”) against females. Now that men are underrepresented, it’s because “females do better in school” not that “the educational system discriminates against males.”</p>
<p>I’ve also wondered about this. Was the difference the fact that there more male teachers 30-40 years ago? Or that the teachers were those who majored in the subjects they taught and hadn’t had the “benefit” (???) of all the educational courses and pedagogy. </p>
<p>In my son’s high school, the males generally have the highest test grades. In the courses, where the grades are based on these tests The girls, however, do better on the “projects” - they are much more willing to embellish and decorate and… The girls also generally have better homework grades.</p>
<p>Marite, girls as a group do not have math SAT scores as high as boys. Boys are far more likely to be the outliers, scoring 750+. Also far more likely to have taken 4+ years of math in h.s. Girls are more likely to have completed their assignments in a timely fashion & earned higher GPAs. If MIT only enrolls about 1,000 freshmen, and is seeking to have half of the class be female, I’m sure they have no trouble finding high achieving, math-oriented girls. But to do so, higher achieving boys are turned down. Anyone can argue whether this is an “Ends justifies the means” situation or not. But it’s pretty clear that it goes on.</p>
<p>Marite stated, “Females do better in high school using criteria that colleges deem valid, and that many who advocate for strictly objective criteria deem valid: GPAs and SAT scores, This is incontrovertible. No one who has advocated the use of “objective criteria” has challenged the basis on which GPAs and SATs are arrived at–they are deemed to be free of “subjective” biases.”</p>
<p>Actually, according to the last Collegeboard report, males do better on Math and Critical reading subtests and females do better on the writing. And, I would be interested to see the grade distribution from other schools on the project/homework/test scores over the entire curruculum.</p>
<p>The GPA difference is, indeed, well-established, but males continue to score higher than females on average on the SATs. (Slightly higher in verbal, significantly higher in math. The gap has narrowed somewhat over time, but male averages are still higher.) Moreover, at the right tail of the SAT distribution (in the above-700 range), there is a substantially higher proportion of males than females.</p>
<p>EDIT: However, it should be noted that the pool of students taking the SATs is predominantly female: 785,000 females and 681,000 males according to this College Board report:</p>
<p>Yep. that’s girls alright. Mine actually was ranked 5th in her class (and had the highest) SATs–i base it all on glitter pens. I figured she’d major in dollhouse making or something else suitably “girly” but for some darn reason she went to a top school and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in government.</p>
<p>Go figure! I guess she must have used an awful lot of pretty colored graphics on her title pages or something…</p>
<p>I have three sons and one daughter, all of varied interests, so I hope that college admission officers are even-handed and equal-opportunity in their thinking as they look at the “ratio” issue.</p>
<p>Garland, did you never observe a huge difference in the “projects” completed by boys & girls? I certainly have. Didn’t matter if it was the dullest girls or the brightest girls, their projects were obviously the result of much more care & attention than the boys. This in no way implies that hot glue gun & glitter pen skills accounts for their success. Or means their work is all fluff/no substance.</p>
<p>Actually, one of my friend’s daughter got a B on her AP Lit project due to the lack of glitter pens and decorative-edged scissors. The teacher actually told her that although her literary analyses were the best in the class - but her tri-fold project board upon which these analyses were mounted was “unimaginative”. She had backed each of her analyses on colorful paper and printed out nice titles in WordArt etc. But, that wasn’t enough. The teacher wanted embellishments: “Victorian” floral napkins" glued to the board, miniature teacups, etc.</p>
<p>Reflectivemom, WashDadJr was dropped a full letter grade in Spanish because he “failed” his Language Week t-shirt project. He brought his t-shirt in a day late, and then made up a slogan which sort of made fun of monolingual Americans, including an English word as part of the sentence. Since all writing on the shirt had to be in Spanish and he included an English word, the teacher failed him on it. Personally, I don’t think she got the joke, and having met with her twice, am firmly convinced she should be a guard in a women’s prison, not a school teacher. Anyway, my son went from an “B” to a “C” in Spanish II because he flunked arts and crafts. (Actually, he flunked “not being smarter than the teacher” but that wasn’t on the report card.)</p>