It is a well known fact that males are lagging way behind females in collage admissions and college graduation, at every level from undergraduate all the way to doctorate level. Females represent almost 60% whereas men represent only about 40%. That is a trend that has been happening for years and still continues to increase in the same direction.
And yet there are still many more opportunities for female-only scholarships and financial aide available to females than males. So in essence the tables have completely turned over the last 50 years and males are now the minority, a disadvantaged class.My question is, should we institute affirmative action for males in college admissions and reverse the female bias for scholarships and financial aide so that more males are encouraged to enroll in college? In other words, should society do the same thing for men now that it did 50 years ago for women? Is it time for society to show it cares as much about men as it does about women?
Please answer the poll and leave comments explaining your view.
YES, we should institute affirmative action for male applicants to college (explain why)
NO, we should NOT institute affirmative action for male applicants to college (explain why)
Select gender and age to cast your vote:
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+1 y
It seems some people are misreading the graph I included. What the graph shows is the number of scholarships that are available to females only versus the number that are available to males only.
I also realize that my question should have been expanded beyond affirmative action to include scholarships and financial aid. Pretty much exactly what is being done for women, especially for STEM fields.
Is it time to institute Affirmative Action for male college admissions?
Leaving aside the inherent weaknesses in Affirmative Action - that being the allocation of opportunity on the basis not of merit and effort but on factors extraneous to them such as sex and skin color - to impose such a system in a collegiate context would be to impose a greater burden on the education system than it could reasonably expected to bear. In effect, it would be - colloquially speaking - fixing the barn door after the horse is gone.
Men are not doing relatively poorly in college - indeed in academics generally - simply because of their gender. Rather, because of problems in the culture that men are facing that society has been slow, for a variety of reasons, to recognize and address.
As Warren Farrell, PhD, has pointed out in his superb book, "The Boy Crisis," men are suffering to do rising rates of divorce and illegitimacy leaving more boys without male role models. This has been further aggravated by the collapse of intermediary social institutions such as the Boy Scouts, church groups, Boys Clubs and other such organizations that can step in and give boys appropriate frameworks to be educated and socialized.
Throw into this the culture's emphasis on the problems of women and the tendency to portray girls as victims. Boys are, to be sure, wired differently and tend to be more physical and practical. As the economy shifts to a service and tech base, the skills men tend to offer - physical strength and practical as opposed to abstract thought - are less needed.
Yet the culture continues to emphasize the needs of women and thus education, training and other institutions of socialization are not equipping men to deal in a very different work and social environment. The result is rising suicide and violent death rates for men, greater addiction problems, higher arrest rates and a lower capacity to meet academic challenges at the pre-collegiate level, including greater drop-out and sinking high school graduation rates.
Affirmative action for men, then, would not help men. It would merely drop them into an environment where they are neither academically nor socially equipped. This then having the two-fold effect of putting greater burdens on colleges than they are designed to address while setting men up for yet more failure. That, suffice to say, is a recipe for disaster.
Far better to meet the needs of boys earlier in their lives. This, it being recognized, being itself no easy thing.
Government is good at many things, but raising young boys is not one of them. Yet the early Great Society programs in "the war on poverty" - launched with the best of intentions but too little appreciation for human complexity - helped to destroy families by making men less economically important to women. (The so-called "marriage penalty" in which women with a man in the house got fewer benefits then single women.)
This meant fewer men in the house to act as role models to their sons. This further exacerbated by government programs that displaced the old charitable and other civic groups that could help in the socialization of boys. Further, as schools sought to compensate for what came to be seen as discrimination against girls, too little effort was made to provide academic assistance to boys. This in turn made even worse by the aforementioned changing nature of the economy and the jobs that economy provides.
Put all in context then, and all that Affirmative Action for male college admissions would do is make college admission rates for men look better. That might help academia's public image, but it would do next to nothing for the condition of men.
Indeed, it might even hurt more men by inadvertently excluding men who really are academically and socially prepared for college. With only limited resources and a comparatively unlimited supply of men who want to go to college, schools would have to make the cut somewhere and that would likely, albeit unintentionally, lead to the exclusion of qualified men.
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Anonymous
(30-35)
+1 y
First thing we should do is get rid of affirmative action. Second thing is to either forgive student loan debt like all other debt can be forgiven or lower the cost to college. Even taking community college and then transferring to a state college is more expensive than it needs to be. Let's not get started on books. I stopped going to college after community college because I didn't feel like taking on the debt and I didn't enjoy what I was good at. 2 of my brothers went to a 4 year straight out of H. S. and they both have really good paying jobs and are still paying off their debt despite being in their early and mid 30s. While I have never been in debt. I see college as a waste of money especially in this information age where you can literally learn everything you want too on the computer for free. Those undesirable jobs pay just as well if not better than those jobs that require a specific degree. My dad was an engineer and lived a very stressful life because of his career and died of a heart attack at 47. One of my brothers is an engineer and is suffering from high blood pressure due to the stress the job gives him. I was studying to be an engineer and looked at what my future would be like if I kept on that route and said fuck that and hopped off the train. Hell, an old friend of mine had a nice engineering job and at the age of 25 got so stressed out from his work and the debt he was in because of his chosen field and where he went to college that he committed suicide. I don't think we should be viewing going to college as a thing people must do. Especially when we consider that how many degrees are actually worth it vs degrees that are used to say, "hey I got this piece of paper that says I completed school for this subject but it's not even worth the paper it's printed on". So, when I see less males being admitted into college than females I see that more males are just seeing that college isn't worth what it once was. In this day n age, it really is just a big waste of money and the only reason many people still go is because business like to see that piece of paper. My oldest brother ended up getting his masters just for the sake of getting a higher salary at his job, even though his degree didn't improve his knowledge and skill in his current job. All because of the, oh you now have a masters degree instead of a bachelors degree... we'll pay you more. With that pay raise is also a little bit more debt added on to his previous debt.
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Anonymous
(18-24)
+1 y
Affirmative action is simply putting a bandaid on an already broken system— if we wish to fix the system, we must go to the root and address the fundamental issues regarding the American education system before questioning the admissions process. We have problems— problems that cannot be rectified by selecting students on the basis of race, gender, income—- the statistics vary not because of a fundamental difference but the context of upbringing. And perhaps if statistics do not serve as an accurate guide for acceptance, we should reevaluate our system of statistics. And then, revaluation the college admissions itself. It’s always baffled me that education is so competitive to receive— why the hell wouldn’t we want a world of people with the highest education possible? As if we don’t have the resources to do. It’s barbaric. But here we are, and on the basis of affirmative action now? No. Men should not receive precedence over women. Same as how Asians and Whites shouldn’t receive precedence over Black people. Flawed? Yes. But the best bandaid possible of a wound we refuse to fix entirely? Yeah.
Maybe. I’ve noticed that our generation has produced significant quantities of men who don’t value education. Or they think university or any sort of HE is for sissy’s. What we end up with is with a generation of repairmen; men who can perhaps perform some low-skill tasks but nothing on the lines of what they could have achieved. These men still end up doing OK for themselves but end up in mid-level jobs.
Do keep in mind that these provisions are already in place in many universities!
Universities do reject female applicants in order to accommodate male applicants to balance the ratio. Also I don't know what country you’re from but I just graduated from a university in England and there wasn’t one female-only scholarship available. There we plenty of merit-based ones, if you’re up to the challenge though!
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+1 y
Thanks for your comments. FYI, there is a very long list of female only scholarships available in England.
The list actually seems to be focusing on niche professions, ones in which women rarely qualify in. Also disadvantaged socio-economic groups.
Perhaps if those exist then there should be more scholarships for men entering professions that were stereotypically female, such as beauticians, cooks and teachers?
I did find some of these for US male students: www.fastweb.com/.../the-scholarships-for-men These include scholarships for media students, dance students and married men and fathers.
Yes, there are some scholarships for male students, just not nearly as many as there are for females. That should be reversed to try to encourage more males to enroll.
That's what is going on with females and STEM fields. There are tons or scholarships for them and entrance criteria are relaxed to encourage girls who might not otherwise be as enthusiastic about it. We should do the smae for males to encourage them, just like we do for girls and STEM.
Yup. I don’t really like the idea that females are being rejected from unis simply for being female. Credit should be given where credit is due. Scholarships would work better in encouraging males to flood certain courses, than to simply lowering entry standards or using ratios to compensate for the lack of male applicants. Also some good advertising might help.
I agree in principle about not rejecting qualified applicants simply because of their gender. Unfortunately, that is what males have faced in the US for a long time, and still face today, especially white males.
I personally think we should have a hard look at how boys are being educated long before college and that we should work to accommodate a more male centric approach for boys and possibly even separate boys from girls at least for portions of their education.
I also think we should do more to incentivize boys to attend college through special scholarships and life/ career planning education in high schools
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I agree % with every word of this. I agree with that approach, and I appreciate that you as a woman are aware enough of the challenges boys face in our education system, which are hurting them from the very beginning and throughout the education process. It's a major problem for males and for society as a whole. But most people seems blissfully unaware that it is happening, or worse, are unwilling to do anything about it, which is really sad considering how much has been done, and continues to be done today, for females in education.
I won't disagree with that. But the point of this question was to underscore the disparity in willingness to address boys' education concerns compared to girls', especially at the college level.
To me, the issue of girls and STEM fields is very similar to the issue with boys and college. Neither one is as interested or enthusiastic as we want them to be. But in the case of girls and STEM, we as a society devote billions of dollars to encouraging girls into STEM field. I believe we should show the same support for efforts to encourage boys to go to college.
There is NOTHING like this available for boys, and virtually no support even for the idea to improve that.
I think if parents gave proper attention to the right things the sons will have no issues. It’s the government and others that are doing the wrong things ergo I don’t really trust the government to provide anything for my son. It’s on me and my husband to give proper guidance and not let the idiots tell me what’s best for my family. I would support the things I said above but this aren’t things I can’t do for my own children
OK, I will be more to the point. Do you think it's fair that we spend billions of dollars to encourage girls to go to college and study STEM fields, but we don't do anything like that to encourage boys to go to college?
no, stop with funding, stop governmental grip. have people really still not learned from affermative action.. well i guess socialism still very popular as well.. I'll just let y'all take action:)
Theoretically, yes, if we were to take the STATED OBJECTIVES of the Left (possessed by post-modernism/ neo-marxism) of equality (in outcome, no longer in opportunity, which I thoroughly believe they've abandoned). However, as previously mentioned, the neo-marxist bent of the NEW LEFT sees not economic classes as preeminent, but RACIAL/ GENDERED classes as the more salient examples of human categorization. Therefore, in typical revolutionary fashion, it is not the ACTUAL OBJECTIVE to achieve parity (via government interference) along economic lines, but to overthrow the neo-bourgeois (i. e. whites and/ or males) in favor of the previously alienated neo-proletariat. However, if the Left were to succeed, and whites are turned into a minority, before being bred out/ killed off, and men were to then be placed in a legally defined subordinate role (all in the name of social justice), the Leftist Avant garde would begin to consume itself: Black women would "overthrow" white women, who would be directed by LGBTQP... black women, who would then be "overthrown" by increasingly marginal groups, where genetic/ psychological tests would be taken to examine the level of "oppression" one faces (which is now a sign of ultimate virtue) before ones "rank" would establish a hierarchy entirely based off classifications one has absolutely no control over. At the apex would be a dark-as-night post-op transgender-fluid, demisexual, infant (as ageism is a thing), and the bottom would be the last white man working his ass off to support such a system before the entire thing collapses under the weight of its own blatant contradictions.
In my field there are more men than women. I don't demand it is easier for girls.
The problem is how guys are educated before college. Girls are more encouraged to be organized and balanced. Parents seem to go easier on guys. They allow them to do more stuff in the bad sense. If parents and schools would demand guys be as organized and hard-working things would be different. Usually guys with stricter parents, which encourage them to be good students, help around the house and ve responsible in general, but who still let them have a life, don't struggle in college or any educational institution. It all. comes down to how they were raised.
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I completely agree the root problem is how boys are educated early on, but strongly disagree with how you characterized it. The real problem is that schools treat boys as defective girls when they fail in the feminized school regimen rather than trying to adapt the process to how boys learn. Boys learn very differently than girls and at a very different schedule.
None of this is new information, but there is a huge resistance in the schools system to making any changes to accommodate boys. THAT is what needs to change. If we just say we need to teach boys need to "behave better" (ie more like girls) we will just continue to set them up to fail.
The fact that your field has more men than women is pointless in this discussion. I hope you are savvy enough to understand why.
I'd need more info than that, maybe more women have the mojo now? It should be based upon desire, passion, abilities, not sex color... that's "isms". If someone wants to market to a subgroup to get them to the scholoarship, that is ok. But allocating specific for a group is wrong.
I'd add to it south American people and mexicans... the oppressed... they need resources and have the drive. They are being treated like the Indian "Patels" treat the lowest sub class... their servants. That's not American, it's about passion and drive... everyone should have a shot at a better life based upon their desire to work. that is what makes country great, not political differentiation.
I'll add as well... people with unique brains... are often those we need the most... and we should welcome and get them into the right training. There are brilliant children who aren't wired to sit in a chair. Education system is a a square peg...
No. We should ban sex based scholarships, grants, etc. altogether. There is no need to try to value one over the other. If a group must rely on affirmative action it is because they feel inferior and like they need an equalizer. Women have such an advantage in school for 2 reasons mainly. First, throughout early schooling the school systems give more resources to females and punish males for their natural actions. For example, boys at a younger age have way more energy than girls yet recess is becoming increasingly rare. This hurts boys but not girls. However, bringing recess back benefits both boys and girls and costs nothing to implement. The second main reason is because it is emphasized more to women than men to value their education so there is not much appeal to men to succeed. I do not think affirmative action for males is the answer. The answer is, at a young age, for the school systems to start valuing males equally to females.
Affirmative action on this scale is creating many worthless titles. I see these women in STEM that have these degrees that are worthless in the applied real world. Some of us are stuck with mentoring them but they simply do not have the academia-to-real-world-applications ability. Few out there can naturally apply academia to the real world in STEM. Therefore, I see all these titles walking around with no capability. Eventually, businesses will have to move to foreign soil to get some male technical talent. Within a another generation of this forced flooding of these positions the staffs will be overcome with incompetence and other countries will outpace the affirmative action countries especially in STEM.
Definitely. We need to fight back against feminism / misandry. And like Trump said, stop funding colleges that discriminate against certain groups. The United States stands for freedom of opportunity and the right to sue and more. So this type of discrimination needs to be attacked and stopped. Come on MRA's, it's time.
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+1 y
There are some MRAs trying to do something about it. Here's is a guy who filed suit against two universities who discriminate against men. One of them, USC, retaliated against him, first by terminating his stipend and then by terminating his Ph. D. degree altogether.
No, not nearly enough. The societal bias against men is so deeply ingrained that it will take decades to overcome, but all we can do is take baby steps wherever possible. My small contribution is posting this here, as well as contributing to this guy's GoFundMe, linked below. I hope anyone who gives a fuck about the other half of the population will do the same.
This is ridiculous. I went through college and had plenty of scholarships available to me. Haven't met any of the guys there who didn't have the same opportunities. More women empowered by higher education now than they could have been in eras past so I say let women have all the scholarships they need.
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+1 y
Bullshit. Your alleged experience is exactly the opposite of reality for most guys in the US today. I just went through this in the last few years with my niece and nephew, who are a year apart in age and are white. When he applied to college there were very few scholarships available to him. She went through the same process and there were tons of scholarships for her. College is costing him many thousands of dollars more than her simply because he is male and she is female. His grades were better, by the way.
I find that hard to believe. I went to BGSU Ohio and there were tons of scholarships. A poor guy from a trailer park even made it with good grades and scholarships. There are always scholarships and Grant's and people just need to look for them.
I oppose affirmative action in all ways - that includes this. You should be assessing people based on their skills and ability, not their sex or race. Affirmative action hurts everyone, through mismatch and denying skilled students the ability to thrive.
No. I personally believe affirmative action is a bad thing, regardless of who it helps. It may help a group initially, but it ultimately perpetuates the idea that the class it is designed to help is different, inferior, and incapable of accomplishment without preferential treatment.
My personal perspective, people (I mean in general) ask/want more equality. In some countries if the parents want their children to succeed, they are put into 'boarding schools' where they the child is exempt from any news of family members (even upon death of a family member) until the child has achieved what were originally planned.
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+1 y
I can't determine from what your wrote here what your perspective is on the subject at hand.
Females have a higher tendency to excel than the male counter parts! And with the rise of equal opportunities for genders, and ofcourse the nonsensical people who wash their lives away, it is not hard to believe. Parents, where i am from barely plan anything before contemplate having children, and or change their minds. This is not set well for their child/children. I am not saying this "Woman were going to take over", their genetics are capable of achieving higher levels of concentration, where the male would see his failures as distraught.
"Women's genetics are capable of achieving higher levels of concentration"? Can you please provide something to support that?
"Females have a higher tendency to excel than the male counter parts"? Again, some corroborating evidence is needed here because I have never seen anything to suggest that is true.
What IS true is that men are having a difficult time adapting to the new service based economy, and the only way they ever will successfully adapt is to be educated. Encouraging them to do so is good for everyone. Redirecting some of the billions of dollars spent on female-only education, which right now FAR exceeds what is spent on males, is a no brainer. And it's fair. Why would anyone with a brain and a shred of honesty oppose that?
The graph in which you have posted has shown the evidence. Men have choices too, in which most i have seen in pubs or bars drinking their life away. Education does cost, but who are the real people willing to put themselves to save up, or go through education after education!
No, you completely misread the graph. Go back and look at it again. It shows the number of female-only scholarships compared to male scholarships, which is one of the biggest reasons there are so many more females going to college.
Affirmative Action is just another name for discrimination.
Many college degrees are useless. A good mechanic or plumber makes more than the almost any B. A or M. A. in Gender Studies, with no perpetual student loan debt.
My employees make from $25 to $40 per hour and only need two weeks of on-the-job training and a notary (one day class after which the test is given).
How about we just get RID of race, gender and sexuality based affirmative action PERIOD. Only give it to people who come from disadvantaged families.
I got an undergrad degree. But I also spent years doing MMA and I met lots of blue collar working class white guys. They are not stupid, but many of them came very disadvantaged backgrounds.
The reason I said no is because the reason women have so many scholarships is because of something like affirmative action. If you give men affirmative action then the feminists are going to give women more. Either give men more scholarships and prevent women from getting more or take the women’s ones away. The fact that women are able to get more scholarships is honestly kinda sexist too now that I think about it.
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Of course it's sexist, and that was the entire point.
Dont wanna offend but maybe in USA its cause females can earn easy money, they didn't even need to prostitute themselfs or do a striptease, they can earn money with findom or even selling pictures of their feets. Males can't earn easy money, they can with violence and crime but its not easy.
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There may be some truth in those tings but they have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I agree with all that however I don’t think think it would change as much because men in general aren’t as interested or passionate about higher education (in my opinion👀)
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+1 y
Women weren't as interested or passionate about education 50 years ago. What changed that? The answer is a lot of things but society making a concerted effort to encourage them to get educated and throwing billions of dollar toward it certainly helped a lot. There is no reason to believe the same wouldn't help the sex that is actually in need of help today rather than continuing to just throw money at the sex that is already dominating enrollments and graduations in pretty much every western university.
Men need to adapt to the service economy we live in today and the only way that will happen is if they get educated. Financial and other incentives have worked exceptionally well for females and continue to. Why in the world would we not do the same for males? Please give that some real thought and let me know.
Well... they were, or at least a significant amount of them were. That is why they put on their big girl panties and fought for what they wanted.
Now... if this is the same case with men then... they should take notes and fight for themselves regardless of the consequences because sometimes things have to ugly in order for change to speed up.
What I am doing right here, right now, is exactly that. I'm trying to raise awareness about the problem and change attitudes about it. Lots of men are doing the same. But sadly, what we facing is the fucked up attitudes and resistance from feminists like you who say they are about equality and that they care as much about males as they do about females, then out of the other sides of their mouths they deny the problem, talk about why solutions aren't needed or won't work, and say things like "put on your big boy pants and do something about it". Would it really be that difficult of your feminists to just stop resisting it? We're not asking you to fight the fight for us; we just want some fucking support from you for a change rather than the usual resistance.
The ONLY way women were able to make positive changes in society for females over the years was because they had the support of society and of good men. Where is that support for men now that it's time to return the favor? Where are the good women who are willing to support men who are trying to help our boys?
Is it really any mystery to you feminists why men almost universally believe you are self-centered hypocrites?
Honey, even feminism got resistance. You’re really mad because getting what you want isn’t coming to you on a silver platter?
I am personally all about equality. I punch you in the dick, you punch me in the pussy. We all walk around with nasty attitudes 😂 I really cannot speak for anyone else. I am giving my opinion. As I said before... I AGREE with your dumb ass about making affirmative action for men. I just don’t think it’ll change much.
If you don’t believe there are any “good” women out there willing to support men... I really have no idea what to tell you😂
Here is a solution right here... get violent. That what the early feminist did 🤷🏾♀️😂 Shit. I already said it. THINGS NEED TO GET UGLY.
If women can do it, men can do it. So yes, put on your big boy pants and smack a hoe if it means getting your point across and I mean that wholeheartedly.
No! The college scam needs to end! The endowments should be confiscated and used to pay off the debt that already exists. College is useless. Only universities worth attending are ivy leagues or prestigious universities. The rest is used to turn the rest of us into debt servitude.
We could easily upload lectures/lessons/books to the internet and make college level education free for the world.
I think guys have figured out that college is a money racket. You can make just as much money these days learning a trade. So in two years a guy go into a trade program get hired into a company with an apprenticeship program, the company will help with school and he has a job. So at the end he owes very little to the school and after 10 years he could be making 6 figures depending on his location.
No, thats bullshit. Get apprenticeships and learn a trade from a person in the industry. You will do better that way. I took after school classes as a welder for 3 years, I start this Monday. I dont need college or university. All the power to the people who go there, but its not for me. Academics is not a ticket to success.
Affirmative Action is the most degrading concept. People control their own destiny. Those who choose not too just need a scapegoat for their own guilt of failure.
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