Colleges Lag in Opening Discriminatory Scholarships and Programs to Male Students

Rebecca Stewart: 513-479-3335

Colleges Lag in Opening Discriminatory Scholarships and Programs to Male Students. Stanford U. Appears to Be the Worst Offender.

WASHINGTON / March 1, 2022 – Despite recent progress, hundreds of universities continue to offer scholarships and programs that discriminate against male students. SAVE calls on administrators to promptly remove all vestiges of sexism and discrimination at their schools.

Although the Title IX law bans sex discrimination in schools, many institutions have established female-only scholarships and programs that flaunt the federal mandate. For example, the University of Missouri at Columbia offers 70 scholarships for female students, and only one scholarship for male students (1). This imbalance likely contributes to the fact that female enrollments at the school outnumber males: 17,214 versus 13,875 students (2).

Since 2018, SAVE has filed Title IX complaints against over 200 institutions, including the University of Missouri. Virtually all of the resolutions to date have been favorable to SAVE. Colleges that have agreed to terminate their discriminatory scholarships include the University of Massachusetts System, Northeastern University, Texas A&M, American River College in California, and others.

But many complaints are still unresolved. Currently, 152 OCR investigations of sex-discriminatory scholarships remain open (3).

Regarding sex-discriminatory programs, the Office for Civil Rights website currently lists 118 open investigations of such activities (4).

The most egregious offender appears to be Stanford University. An OCR complaint lists a total of 33 discriminatory programs sponsored by the school. A partial list of the programs includes: Girls Teaching Girls to Code, Girls Code @Stanford, VMware Woman’s Leadership Program, Girls Engineering the Future, Women in STEM, and many more (5).

A recent article suggests that sex-discriminatory policies may arise from an undercurrent of anti-male sentiment on college campuses (6). In Teamsters v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination is not limited to direct signs that people will see (like “no male students allowed”), but can also include “actual practices” such as how the opportunity is publicized and “recruitment techniques.” (7)

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