Obama Wants to Discriminate Against Men in Access to Advanced Science & Engineering Programs in Public Schools and Colleges

Last month marked the 40th anniversary of Title IX, which had a goal of combating sexual discrimination in colleges, though in many programs, like athletics, it has turned into a quota system which discriminates against men.  The main reason for this is the three prong test that is used to show compliance with Title IX in athletics.  The three prongs are:

1. Providing athletic participation opportunities that are substantially proportionate to the student enrollment. This prong of the test is satisfied when participation opportunities for men and women are "substantially proportionate" to their respective undergraduate enrollment.
2. Demonstrating a continual expansion of athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex. This prong of the test is satisfied when an institution has a history and continuing practice of program expansion that is responsive to the developing interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex (typically female).
3. Accommodating the interest and ability of underrepresented sex. This prong of the test is satisfied when an institution is meeting the interests and abilities of its female students even where there are disproportionately fewer females than males participating in sports.

So what's happened is that male athletic programs were canceled in order to make participation amongst the sexes "proportionate".  Now, Obama and his minions want to target Science, Technology and Math (STEM) programs for similar treatment despite the fact that there is probably no evidence of actual discrimination in these fields.  After all, if a girl tests high enough, she gets in.  These fields especially are based on merit more than anything else.  Anyway, the White House announced:

Federal Agencies will commit to developing common guidance to colleges and universities on responsibilities and best practices for Title IX compliance: Building on the success of previous interagency collaboration efforts on Title IX and STEM, the Department of Education will lead an initiative with the Department of Justice and science & technology agencies (including the Department of Energy, NASA, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Health and Human Services) to develop common guidance for grant recipient institutions to comply with Title IX. These activities will consolidate agency expertise – which currently differs from agency to agency – to help institutions better understand their compliance obligations and ways to improve access and outreach to women and girls in STEM fields.

Department of Education will revise Title IX Technical Assistance to K-12 and post-secondary institutions to explicitly address STEM: The Department of Education will announce the revision of its Title IX Technical Assistance presentation, made available nationwide to state and local education agencies across the country, to include information on how institutions receiving federal financial assistance are also required to ensure equal access to educational programs and resources in STEM fields.

Department of Education will broaden data collection to provide new gender-based academic analyses: In 2011, the Department of Education released a first-of-its-kind national data tool for analyzing student participation, achievement, and educational experiences through the transformed Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), a survey of the nation's public school districts and elementary and secondary schools that provides information on student enrollment, educational programs, and services disaggregated by race/ethnicity, sex, limited English proficiency status, and disability. With hundreds of data points collected through mandated school reporting, the publically-available CRDC database allows for powerful analyses of topics such as school discipline rates, retention by grade, and participation in advanced math and science courses broken down by gender. At the time of the Title IX anniversary, the Department has published a new gender-based analysis of the CRDC data, taking stock of the gender gaps across K-12 education. Moving forward, the Department of Education will expand the 2011-12 CRDC dataset from 85% of U.S. students to include 100% of all U.S. public school students nationwide, becoming a universal collection of data representing all schools.

Considering that only about 18% of engineering and computer science students are female, public schools and universities will likely have no choice but to both lower their entrance standards to include more women in these programs AND severely limit male participation (which is strange since aren't we hearing how we need more people to be in these programs for us to compete on the world stage?).  Note that nowhere in the President's remarks does it mention how 57% of college degrees currently go to women meaning men are underrepresented in college as a whole and probably most humanities majors.  This initiative will only lower the male proportion of college degrees even further.  It just isn't clear when this war on men and boys will stop.  When only 30% of college degrees go to men?  Will it ever stop?  I guess it's a similar question to "at what point is a wealthy person paying their 'fair share.'" Never, is the answer according to this administration.