The federal Title IX provisions generally ban discrimination based on sex in federally supported higher education programs—but they specifically exempt sex discrimination by undergraduate private universities (and not just single-sex ones). And, according to Thursday's Washington Post article, there is evidence that elite private universities are taking advantage of that to discriminate in favor of men:
[Brown University] accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in—7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared with 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data shows….
Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data shows…. Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will crop up if campuses become too female ….Colleges worry, "will men look at that and think, 'That's essentially a women's college, and I don't want to go there'?" [former private university head admissions officer Madeleine] Rhyneer said. "For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, [gender imbalance] is a problem," she said. "They want to create what feels like a balanced climate."
There are more similar claims as to Columbia, Chicago, Vassar, and (less elite) the University of Miami, though the exact magnitude of any suspected preference is unclear; the article, for instance, cites a study saying that "The country's top 50 private colleges and universities have two percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission." Of course, the data doesn't prove that universities are indeed using sex as a factor to prefer male applicants over females. (For instance, it's conceivable that women are more willing to apply to long-shot schools than men are, and that this explains the difference in the percentages of applicants of each sex who were admitted.) But the article treats the data as quite telling.
