Wait, did we have affirmative action for women, ever? We had affirmative action because the rate of black people in college was significantly less than expected for demographics due to systematic racism and oppression. So they needed a way to boost those numbers towards normalcy that bypassed the influences of the above oppression on grades.

At what % are universities thinking they need to give men an advantage in applications?

There are close to three women for every two men in college in this country. (The way schools report gender may not yet reflect many students’ nonbinary understanding of it, but the overall trend is clear.) Last year, women edged out men in the freshman classes of every Ivy League school save Dartmouth, and the gender ratio is significantly skewed at many state schools. (The rising sophomore class at the University of Vermont is 67 percent female; the University of Alabama is 56 percent female.) Most small liberal-arts colleges are close to 60 percent female, and the discrepancy is even more pronounced at community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities.

Huh, that's significant. And what do they think is the reasoning behind declining enrollment? Does this mean they are seeing men's applications being less competitive than women's? Or that there are fewer men applying? Because those are entirely different issues.

In high school, girls volunteer more on average, all the while getting higher grades, including in STEM subjects. By the time they graduate, they make up two-thirds of the top 10 percent of their class. … The trade-off is especially relevant for young men, who tend to earn higher wages without a college degree than their female counterparts. … Conservatives have also steadily been devaluing higher education in ways that might be more salient for men; the critique that liberal-arts colleges are pushing “gender ideology” on students positions those institutions as threatening to traditional conceptions of masculinity.

So it's mostly how competitive men are, somewhat that tuition is out of control, and right-wing extremism. Joy.

Men without college degrees tend to be underemployed, and underemployed men are less likely to marry and benefit from the grounding influence of raising children.

Having a kid apparently turns you more productive and stable? Yeah that's a load. Seeing as the guy who wrote that has an Institute for the study of Men and Boys, I doubt that's real.

It’s a longstanding fear among enrollment officers that if the gender ratio becomes too extreme at a given school, students of all genders will start to lose interest in attending (an idea that persists even if none of the admissions experts I spoke to could point to research about college enrollment supporting it).

Lol.

“Whether it’s fair or not, colleges with gender parity or close to gender parity have been viewed as the most desirable.” … But Title IX does not prohibit gender-based affirmative action in admissions at all schools. In 1972, when the details of Title IX were still under discussion, the presidents of some of the country’s most elite private universities persuaded legislators to exempt their admissions policies from the law.

Sigh.

I graduated in Engineering and I remember a lot of talk about trying to attract women to that college. But I never heard anyone suggest affirmative action (enrolling less competitive applications) based on gender. It was always geared towards getting more to apply. Perhaps we should not be giving men an unfair advantage (truly the most unprivileged class of people in the history of ever /s) but ensuring they are prioritizing grades and extracurriculars in grade and high school. And keeping tuition down so it's more obviously financially incentivized…