Last month in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed use of race as a factor in college admissions decisions. Isn't it time, then, to prohibit the use of gender as well?

Statistics indicate that males are given preference for admission to the most selective colleges. Here are a few examples:

— In the spring of 2023, the nationwide rate of college enrollment was 58% female and 42% male. And yet in the eight elite colleges of the Ivy League, which include Harvard, the average enrollment of males is 48%, six points higher.

— At Dartmouth, another member of the Ivy League, men formed the majority of undergraduates.

— According to the student newspaper at Brown, also an Ivy League school, 6.7% of male applicants were accepted there in 2021-22, compared to 4.1% of the females. In other words, a male applicant had a 1 in 15 chance of being accepted to Brown, while a female's chances were 1 in 25.

As far back as 2006, Jennifer Delahunty, then the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, apologized in The New York Times to worthy females who were denied admission to the top-50 liberal arts college. She explained, "The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants."

The majority in the Harvard case implicitly insists on the importance of academic achievement in making admissions decisions. The average high school grade point average of females is 3.1 and of males is 2.9.

Despite their lower overall high school GPA, do males in the top tier of academic performance outmatch their female classmates? Apparently not at Harvard. This spring, Sophia Freund Prizes were awarded to 40 Harvard seniors who graduated summa cum laude, the highest academic achievement. Twenty-four, or 60%, of the prizewinners were women. More generally, a college diploma hikes a woman's salary even more than a man's, according to a paper written for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

These discrepancies did not go unnoticed during the oral arguments in the Harvard case. Justice Elena Kagan, former dean of Harvard Law School, pointed out the existence of "statistical evidence that suggests that colleges now, when they apply gender-neutral criteria, get many more women than men." She then asked, "could a university put a thumb on the scales and say 'it's important that we ensure that men continue to receive college educations at not perfect equality but roughly in the same ballpark'?"

I never had Kagan as an instructor while at Harvard Law myself, but had she called on me in class to answer her question, my reply would have been straightforward and unequivocal. "Professor," I would have said, "the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws such discrimination." If necessary, I would have read aloud Title IX of that act which states no one "shall on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Harvard case, "A benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former group at the expense of the latter." Favoring males for admission to college disadvantages females. It is against the law.

Academic and other achievements should count in college admissions. Gender should not.

Case closed.

In Keith Raffel's checkered past, he has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started an award-winning internet software company and written five novels, which you can check out at keithraffel.com. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. To find out more about Keith and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com.

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