It’s rough being a male on college campuses today. If you’re not told you’re a rapist, you’re told the guy either to your left or right is. You’re told of “toxic masculinity” time and again, and never, ever, will you be told that being male is a good or desirable thing.

And if you’re interested in a scholarship, well, you’ll need to take a number behind any interested female:

An analysis of sex-specific scholarships at 115 of the nation’s largest universities reveals widespread sex discrimination policies. Among 1,161 sex-specific scholarships, 91.6% were reserved for female students, with only 8.4% designated for male students

In reading the above, I can’t help but be surprised there are any scholarships strictly reserved for males. I somehow suspect those are sportsball related, reserved for top athletes, necessary for a winning team.

On the other hand, the female-reserved scholarships are most typically for STEM fields, luring females into science, technology, engineering, or math degrees even if they aren’t so inclined. I have four issues with this:

First, this is wrong because it’s often claimed there’s an “underrepresentation” of females in these fields. There’s never any research provided, it’s simply taken for granted that since less than 50% of majors in these disciplines are female, it must be a problem.

Second, and closely related, is the overlooked issue that there are many fields where the majors are predominantly female (hi Psychology!)…but no money is provided to “rectify” the imbalance via strictly male scholarships.

Third, these scholarships can lure females into field that they wouldn’t try…what often happens here is these students end up wasting a year in courses they just aren’t interested in, causing them to drop out, or harming their GPA.

Fourth, a big part of the reason these degrees are valued is their scarcity. If, overnight, our country had 100,000,000 people with STEM degrees, we’d just end up with that many more people pouring coffee with a STEM degree. Despite this obvious result from basic economics, the push has been, for years, to increase the size of these programs at all cost.

Now, there’s a batch of laws called “Title IX” which is supposed to address this level of unbalanced gender treatment. Title IX was originally targeted to protect females…does it work the other way? Yes!

Well, it does if someone complains enough, and indeed, someone has:

University of Michigan-Flint economist Mark Perry has company in his one-man crusade to expose scholarships that exclude men from consideration in possible violation of the law.

Now, such complaints can merit investigation, and each investigation can cost around $200,000. Granted, that’s pocket change to most schools…but the gentle reader should realize that a school able to blow this money on an investigation should have already spent the money on scholarships.

SAVE noted Tulane resolved an OCR investigation late last year, but the university suggested the resolution will not change its prior practice.

While the above is harmless enough on the surface, do note the extreme irony here: the slightest hint, the merest theoretical microaggression against any group besides males, and a school will warp its campus to keep it from ever happening again.

On the other hand, when a school has objectively sexist policies against males? They’ll just cough up the money and change nothing.

When did hypocrisy at this level become such a fundamental part of higher education?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com