Some People are Never Satisfied

The Op-ed piece in today's NY Times titled To All the Girls I've Rejected Before by an admissions officer at Kenyon College absolutely screams for comment. The writer, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, first makes a de facto admission that the affirmative action programs launched back in the 1970s to boost female enrollment in colleges have succeeded in spectacular fashion. She does so by citing the fact that 56% of undergraduates today are female and that this number is projected to hit 58% by 2009. 

So, you would think that she'd be happy. Right? Wrong. Instead she launches into a long whinge about how their new majority position has made getting into college more competitive for females:

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation's top colleges? These are questions that admissions officers like me grapple with. 

Good grief! Somebody please sit down with Jennifer Delahunty Britz and explain to her that most things in life involve a trade-off. You can't have your cake and eat it too.  You would think that someone in her position would have grasped such a simple concept already. But apparently she hasn't.

The only conclusion I can draw from the current state of affairs is that we may need a new affirmative action program for males now. (Just kidding.)

In closing, I will say that this article by Jennifer Delahunty Britz makes Kenyon College sound like the last educational institution any parents should send their child to, especially if it's a male.

Comments

[Phillip Edelman]

Would anyone with intelligence or talent be interested in studying at some backwater community college in Ohio?

There's your answer.

Jennifer Delahunty Britz is nothing but a whiner.

[Trevor Matthews]

Tell all this shit to some guy at MIT or Cal Tech where the male to female ratio is 2:1.

The fact of the matter is that today, EVERYBODY goes to college, while 50 years ago, college was only reserved for those with strong academic inclinations.

In your typical high school class, many of the top students are boys, as are many of the bottom students. It is boys who are more likely to cut class and smoke weed, join gangs, and do that kind of stuff. Since only the bottom students do not go to college, this excludes a lot of boys. These schools which have a hard time finding men are shitty 3rd rate colleges that are filled with kids who were just a little smarter than the guy that did not go to college because he killed half his brain cells by inhaling white out.

The reason crappy unheard of little schools have a shortage of males is because males wouldn't be caught dead in them unless they are really poor students.

This article nothing more than the usual feminist bitching.

[Kim]

Nice article on feminist bias by Jennifer Delahunty Britz and KenYon Collge.

Here is another women's view:

It’s not exactly breaking news that most girls don’t want to go to a college unless boys are there. How painful this must be for feminists to acknowledge, after doing everything they possibly could to get girls to attend college free from any intervention or distraction by men.

While [Jennifer Delahunty]Britz and her friends in the academic establishment respond to the enrollment imbalance by using affirmative action to admit boys, they fail to acknowledge why the imbalance occurred in the first place. It’s simple: discrimination. We’ve spent the last four decades discriminating against boys in every way. We hold girls-only campus tours, we distribute girls-only scholarships, and we tell girls they are capable of achieving anything they put their minds to. All the while, we ignore their boy peers.

Britz wonders aloud about the message sent 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, when universities are discriminating against women in admissions. She stops short of an honest answer, however, failing to admit that universities simply have no reason to discriminate. It is lazy that a representative of modern-day university believes must resort to admissions discrimination to achieve gender balance. Here’s another remedy that might actually work - start treating males and females the same.

Britz tries desperately to defend her actions. “Rest assured that admissions officers are not cavalier in making their decisions,” she writes, noting that her admissions committee gives each applicant a shot during a process of several 12 hour days. But what is more cavalier that dumping someone off the admissions list simply because of a genetic reality that they have no ability to change?

Read the entire piece at http://jessicacorry.com/?m=200604

Jennifer Delahunty Britz has the feminist blinkers on when it comes to discrimination against males.

[Kim]

Here is one more view on this ditzy hypocrite.

Ms. Britz’s article is nothing more than the inept hand-wringing of a ninny. What else would you expect? After all, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have always considered college admissions officers slightly below crack whores and pirates on the official evil scale. These are the folks who have specially-coded folders for Latinos, blacks, whites, &c. How do these professional discriminators sleep at night?

In her piece, Ms. Britz laments that female applicants to universities greatly outnumber male applicants, and thus more females will be rejected. On its own, this is entirely uninteresting: Everyone who’s even remotely followed the literature on higher education would already know this.

What’s interesting—unintentionally, of course—is Ms. Britz’s misandrist attitude about the whole matter. For instance, she opines:

…I’m sending out waitlist and rejection letters for nearly 3,000 students. Unfortunately, a majority of them will be female, young women just like my daughter.

“Unfortunately” they will be heavily female? She’d be happier if they were male? For some reason, it never seems to occur to this dolt that women routinely outperforming men in nearly all levels of American education may speak to some societal problems. Surely when men outperformed women, our feminist pals harped and harpied on the sexism in education. Now women do better, and nobody cares?

If you thought that was obtuse, take in this passage:

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges?.

Uh, would someone please inform Ms. Blitz that her remarks largely pertain to affirmative action (a.k.a. preferential treatment)? Why doesn’t she take a step back and realize that she could just as easily write: “What are the consequences of young blacks discovering that even if they do less, they have more options?”

For some odd reason, we have the sneaking suspicion that Jennifer Delahunty Britz doesn’t much care. After all, she didn’t lament that it was “unfortunate” that the majority of those rejected from Kenyon College are white—even though officially declared “underrepresented minorities” can easily gain acceptances with inferior applications.

Perhaps Ms. Britz’s article just demonstrates something we’ve long known: Even those rejected from Kenyon College are smarter than its admissions officers.

From http://hatemongers.mu.nu/archives/165105.php

[Mack the Knife]

This is why most Americans see feminists as complete hypocrites. Thank you Jennifer Delahunty Britz for making this crystal clear for the world. All right thinking parents need to boycott Kenyon College for its discriminatory enrollment policies.