Do male students need affirmative action?

　　In 2009, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced an investigation college admissions to find out if admissions departments are discriminating in favor of boys to achieve gender balance. They’re unlikely to find any overt discriminatory policies; the question is, will they be able to find a pattern that is itself evidence of discrimination against female applicants.

　　It’s quite clear that in the current educational system, girls are outpacing boys when it comes to higher education. Boys are now only 46% of the total college enrollment, and it gets worse the higher the level of attainmentfemale students now earn 60% of bachelor’s degrees.Also, one shouldn’t misunderstand the data. It’s not clear that boys are doing worse than in the past (as is commonly misreported), it’s just that girls are doing so much better. As Ashley wrote last week, overall college enrollment is higher today than it’s ever been in history.

　　What will make it more complicated for the Commission on Civil Rights is the tie breaker phenomenon. As yet, I doubt any colleges need to admit under qualified boys to achieve gender balance. Rather, because there is such an oversupply of applicants, there are more than enough girls and boys who meet most college’s SAT and GPA standards (there’s just a lot more girls). Admissions officers can basically let gender be the tiebreaker. Their incoming freshman boys won’t be noticeably behind the girls, just that more girls on the bubble end up rejected.

　　Why do colleges want balanced gender, other than it’s traditional? Well, what some colleges are finding is that when they tick up to 60% girls, high school boys stop applying there. Why they’re doing so is unclear, but the consequence isn’t: some schools will suddenly have very few boys at all. That tipping point isn’t very far off for a lot of colleges.

　　Now, to be clear, it is currently illegal under Title IX to discriminate against girls. And also, this is not the same as past affirmative action admission preferences for Blacks and Hispanics. (The difference is that boys have never been historically and overtly discriminated against; all affirmativeaction policies [whether you agree with them or not] were sanctioned on the argument that a group was not only numerically underrepresented, but had historically been victims of policybased prejudice.)

　　But just for the purposes of argument, let’s say—entirely hypothetically—that the law was changed. What if colleges decided preserving some gender balance was so important to their mission that they started having slightly lower standards for boys than girls. Either because they wanted to prevent becoming femaleonly campuses, or they just wanted to make sure boys got the benefit of higher education.
 

　　1. From the data in paragraph two, we can see that ___________.

　　A. colleges are discriminating against boys

　　B. female students are more industrious than male

　　C. boys are doing worse than in the past

　　D. girls are doing much better than they used to

　　2. When there are too many applicants for a college, will be the decisive factor in admission.

　　A. gender B. gender balance

　　C. SAT&GPA standards D. academic performance

　　3. The author holds a(n) ___________ attitude towards admitting under-qualified boys to achieve gender balance.

　　A. supportive B. subjective C. suspicious D. opposed

　　4. The number of male applicants reduces when ___________.

　　A. there are more girls than boys in a college

　　B. there are very few boys in a college

　　C. a college insists on some gender balance

　　D. a college has strong discrimination against boys

　　5. The word “preserving” (Para 6, Line 2) most probably means ____________.

　　A. considerateB. instantC. consistentD. persistent