Schools may be using affirmative action to solve the boy crisis

We all thought affirmative action was struck down when the Supreme Court ruled in the Students for Fair Admissions case in 2023. But some schools appear to be giving a boost to an unexpected group: men.

“I do think that males have it a slight bit easier than females in the admissions process, based on the outcomes I’ve seen with my students,” Chris Rim, CEO and founder of boutique college admissions consultancy firm Command Education, told The Post.

Men were getting more degrees than women for the majority of the 20th century, until the gender gap closed in 1982. Then it flipped entirely.

Today, there is a 17% gap between boys and girls graduating from undergrad — with boys getting just 42% of degrees.

With far more girls applying than boys, some schools are eager to even out their enrollment.

“They want to keep a 50/50 class balance,” Rim said. “That implies that male applicants might be admitted at different academic thresholds … In general, I do think, yes, male students have a slight advantage, even at the Ivy League schools and top tier colleges.”

Take Brown University. In 2023, the school had 19,666 applications from boys and 31,650 from girls — a roughly 3 to 5 ratio. And yet it accepted a near perfect 50/50 ratio, making the male acceptance rate 6.9% and the female rate a far more cutthroat 4.2%.

Some other schools have even more drastic numbers.

At Vassar College, which went co-ed in 1969, the admissions rate for male applicants has remained significantly higher than female applicants since at least the Class of 1999. For the Class of 2022, men were admitted at a 33% rate, compared with a 20.9% rate for women, according to the school newspaper.

“Like many liberal arts colleges — and especially as a former all-women’s college — Vassar consistently receives significantly more applications from women than men,” a spokesperson for the school told The Post — pointing out that the male admit advantage fluctuates, with only a 2-point admit rate edge in the 2024-2025 cycle.

They also pointed to a Forbes article written by Vassar president Elizabeth Bradley that declared men in college are “another casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic” and called for intervention to close the gap.

A 2021 analysis by the Hechinger Report found that Boston College, Vanderbilt University, Pepperdine University, the University of Miami, Bowdoin College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, Denison University and Wesleyan University all had at least a 2-point advantage for male applicants.

The Post reached out to the aforementioned schools, and all either did not respond or declined to comment.

For the class of 2027, all the Ivy League schools except for Cornell had more female than male applicants, according to Rim. And yet they all wound up with roughly equal numbers of male and female students in their matriculated classes.

Although race-based affirmative action was made illegal in 2023, a key 1996 decision written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg drew a legal distinction between race-based and sex-based policies. That means a sex-based preference isn’t illegal.

In some contexts, gender-based affirmative action clearly helps women, too. For instance, some colleges have initiatives to attract more girls into STEM fields where they are outnumbered.  

But in the undergraduate admissions context, it appears to be giving boys a leg up overall, as they fall behind academically. 

Two-thirds of students in the top decile of high school GPAs are girls, compared with two-thirds of students in the bottom decile who are boys, according to the American Institute of Boys and Men. Meanwhile, the gender gap in degree attainment continues to widen post-pandemic — a trend that holds steady across all racial groups.

Boys slipping behind comports with Rim’s experience: “Thinking about my female students, they’re just a little bit more competitive in terms of academics, coursework and extracurriculars.”

His clientele — who tend to be high achievers and often get into several Ivy League schools — are roughly 60% female. If he had to select his top five students, Rim said, they’d all be girls.

“They tend to be the students who are following up after a call with us and asking, ‘Hey, did you do X, Y and Z?’” Rim explained. “Generally, they just take this application process more seriously.”