College admissions: who gets in and why (hint: it helps if you're male)

July 8, 8:10 AMCollege Admissions ExaminerLauren Starkey

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Last week I wrote about a little known college admissions factor: gender balancing. Although the debate about fairness in admissions policy continues to focus almost solely on race and affirmative action, the largest group of less-qualified students who get accepted in the place of more qualified applicants is not defined by color or ethnicity. Perhaps the reason the issue gets ignored is that this group is male—and predominantly white.

About 60% of all college applicants are women (and that number is expected to rise). And, for reasons that continue to be explored, those women are, overall, more highly qualified than male applicants. As schools strive for gender-balanced student bodies, they must apply stricter criteria to women than men. According to a US News and World Report survey of undergraduate admissions rate data from more than 1,400 four-year colleges and universities, that participate in its rankings, many schools have achieved a gender balance over the past decade “by admitting men and women at drastically different rates.”

But, wait—it gets better. Especially if you’re a male applicant who lives in a state or country underrepresented in the student body of the school you’re applying to. Colleges seem even more eager to keep the geography issue under wraps than the gender equation. I asked the question directly to a University of Delaware admissions officer last year. Would my daughter from Vermont have an edge over, let’s say, her cousin from New Jersey, all other factors being equal? Absolutely not, he told me. Admissions is “geographically blind.”

Check out any college website and you’ll find a certain set of statistics prominently displayed: the geographic diversity of its student body. Think that happens by accident? Contrary to the answer I got in Delaware, I don’t either. Walter Kirn, author of “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever,” wrote of his own experience with “geographical affirmative action" in the New York Times last week. “As a child of the rural Midwest, I felt decidedly out of place at Princeton among the debonair Eastern prep-school graduates who still, in the early 1980s (just a decade or so after the campus went co-ed) seemed to embody its privileged heritage, so I could scarcely imagine the alienation of…other yet more marginalized students. And while I happened to know that some of them gained admission on special terms meant to make up for their social disadvantages, I didn’t resent them for this. Not at all. Because I came from a geographic region that Princeton hadn’t favored in the past, but which it was now intent on drawing from, I was also a sort of affirmative-action student.

To have an honest debate about fairness in college admissions, we need to widen the discussion. Race, legacy policies, and standardized testing are a fraction of the story. If the goal is to create a truly merit-based admissions field, some might find the result isn’t exactly what they expected.

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