“Hey, where are all the college guys?” inquired USA Today in 2001; “Gender imbalance in college applications: Does it lead to a preference for men in the admissions process?” asked the Economics of Education Review journal in 2005; and Shirley Wilcher, executive director of the American Association for Affirmative Action, proposed in Diverse in 2010 that “Affirmative Action May be Needed — for Men.”
Particularly, on historically Black campuses, the female-to-male ratio has been even greater.
In 2006, Roderick J. Harrison, a demographer with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, predicted that gender inequity in college enrollment would have serious consequences for African-Americans.
“Longer term, it means that in a period when women and African-Americans should expect expanding job opportunities, Black men will simply not be prepared to take advantage of them,” Harrison told Diverse in a 2006 article titled, “Grappling With the Gender Disparity Issue.”
An even louder alarm was sounded when annual statistics began to confirm what students and faculty were seeing in the classrooms. <Read more.>