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Children should be seen and talked about during students’ most formative years.
By Leah Libresco Sargeant
College brochures put some of a school’s amenities front and center, but other major features of campus life are kept quiet. Dartmouth, for example, wouldn’t want its unofficial mascot, “Keggy the Keg,” to show up during during an official college tour. A party culture might boost admissions but it also cuts against the administrators’ image of their school as a serious institution of higher learning.
Another of higher ed’s secret features — college as a marriage market — seems to be even more unspeakable today, even as admissions departments work hard to put together a gender-balanced class that makes it possible for students to pair off.
The recent Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC struck down race-based affirmative action, but schools are widely expected to continue their practice of differential admission by gender. Admissions departments practice heavy favoritism for male applicants. No one frames this preference for men as reparations for past discrimination — the college administrators say frankly that if they constructed their classes without regard for sex, they’d have too many high-achieving women and not enough men.
The result is that some schools have given an explicit gender bonus as they sum test scores, while others simply admit young men who would never set foot on campus if they had been a girl with the same scores and portfolio. In a 2006 essay for The New York Times titled “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, aired her regrets, but admitted she didn’t see much of an alternative. Enrolling too many girls can trigger a death spiral for a school — many girls don’t want to go to a school where there’s no one to date.
Seeking gender equivalence serves to promote dating and ultimately marriage, but a school’s promotion of marriage usually ends once the admission letters have been sent out. Once there’s a roughly balanced dating pool, the students are on their own...
https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2024/04/04/baby-deserts-family-formation-college-higher-ed/