** Previously recorded by Phyllis Schlafly // May 2015 **
Colleges claim they grant admissions based on academic merit, and girls come out of high school with better grades than boys. But that doesn’t always mean they are smarter or more capable of doing college work or more likely to succeed after graduation. Boys do far better on average than girls on the SAT test for mathematics, which means that boys are better prepared than girls for STEM majors in college. This has been true every year for more than 40 years.
Nearly twice as many boys as girls attain very high scores on the Math SAT, with an immense difference at the high end. But the job market for STEM graduates is not as attractive as it used to be, due to corporations’ preference for hiring lower-paid, easy-to-control foreigners on H-1B visas. Many smart American guys decide that the high cost of an engineering degree is not worth it.
A shocking 46 percent of recent college graduates work in jobs that do not require any college degree. Boys are more likely than girls to look at the cost-benefit tradeoff of going to college. The imbalance of so many more women at colleges has been a factor in the various sex scandals that have made news in the last couple of years.
So, what’s the solution? One solution might be to impose the duty on admissions officers to arbitrarily admit only half women and half men. Another solution might be to stop granting college loans, thereby forcing students to take jobs to pay for their tuition and eliminate time for parties, perhaps even wiping out time for fraternities and sororities.
I went through college while working a 48-hour-a-week manual-labor job and I don’t regret a minute of it; it was a great learning experience. I received nearly all A’s (long before the phenomenon of grade inflation) because I devoted 100 percent of my available time to studying for the courses I was taking.
