Common Ground on Gender

By Lise Eliot & Richard Whitmire

The recent news that wives are becoming primary breadwinners in many marriages signals a remarkable shift in women’s workplace achievement.

But the downside is what’s going on with men, who have fallen substantially behind women in educational attainment. Men now constitute just 43 percent of full-time college students and an even smaller share of part-time students.

As colleges struggle to maintain an equal balance of men and women—which both sexes understandably prefer—they are stuck with rejecting more-qualified women. Recently, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced it was investigating whether that admissions bias amounted to discrimination against female applicants. But what truly needs investigating is why colleges have to dip so deep into their applicant pools to...