Affirmative Action…for men?

The gender gap in the Class of 2010 applicant pool was too large to escape attention; the applicant pool was 39.4 percent male, while the entering class was 49 percent male. With a gap this large, my natural inclination was to assume that some sort of preferential selection had taken place, and I went to work researching the most recent round of admissions.

The dearth of information forced me to go to the source – Dean of Admission James Miller. While my talk with him was illuminating in some respects, it further fueled my suspicion that Brown is conducting some sort of affirmative action program for men. If this is true, then not only has the University lied about the existence of such preferential selection, but indeed it has gone a step beyond any of affirmative action’s typically accepted roles (i.e. compensation for historically underrepresented minorities).

To begin, let’s review the numbers: Facts (according to brown.edu and James
Miller):

• 7217 Men Applied; 11099 Women Applied (18316 Total Applicants).
• 1197 Men Accepted (16.585%); 1330 Women Accepted (11.983%).
• 730 Men Enrolled (60.986% Yield); 745 Women Enrolled (56.015% Yield).

Using the yield statistics for each gender given to me by James Miller as well as statistics that can be found elsewhere on brown.edu (an August 22nd, 2006 article on the “Media Relations” page), it’s simple math to determine that men overall faced a 16.585% acceptance rate while women faced a 11.983% acceptance rate. That constitutes a 38% admissions advantage for men – which is no small number when you consider how competitive Brown admission already is.

However, I must stress that these numbers are not concrete proof of male affirmative action. In the preceding interview, James Miller stated that the admissions gap was overcome due to a 4% higher than expected yield rate for males as well as the University’s emphasis on the hard sciences (for instance math, physics, engineering, etc.), to which males are attracted in disproportionate numbers. Having cleared the yield issue away by determining the overall male acceptance rate, we can now focus on the University’s supposed preference for the hard sciences.

While general statistics for the Class of 2010 are available – for instance 44% of entering students had one of the hard sciences as their intended major – the only way to tell if the University is telling the truth is to find out the percentage of males in the applicant, accepted, and matriculating pools who expressed an interest in the hard sciences. I asked the Dean for this information, but by that time he had left on a business trip and said that he was unable to help me until he got back.

If the administration is in fact performing affirmative action for men, the story lies not in the fact that it is occurring (I already had strong suspicions of that) but in that the Dean of Admission has lied about the existence of a specific preferential practice that would surely infuriate liberals and conservatives alike. In a February 3rd, 2006 article in the BDH, Miller claimed that the University has done nothing to “specifically” target men. Indeed, Miller has a great incentive to be less than truthful about such practices (if they exist) because the legions of campus liberals would immediately recognize that giving males a leg up in the admissions process is a slap in the face to all other societal groups who have faced true discrimination and in some cases can legitimately argue for affirmative action benefits. Libertarians and conservatives would also revile this practice because one’s intelligence and ability to succeed are completely independent of one’s race, class, or gender. They would see the practice as another way to reward mediocrity, just as all affirmative action does.

I can only hope for the unlikely possibility that the University Department of Admission will provide data to support their claim that the University is not “specifically” targeting males. Until then, all Brown students should remain suspicious of the lengths that the University will go to in order to ensure numbers rather than quality.