Another reason to despise colleges and the bigoted crooks who run them: Title IX

Title IX:  dedicated to 'gender equality' in intercollegiate athletics has led to massive discrimination against men.  Take soccer as an example:

In 1996 the Education Department issued a set of safe-harbor standards that colleges could follow in order to be deemed in compliance with Title IX and thus avoid expensive lawsuits over disparities in athletic spending. The easiest standard, chosen by the overwhelming majority of institutions, was "proportionality": spending on athletics proportional to the ratio of males to females attending the college in question. Proportionality might have seemed fair in 1996---even though women tend to be less interested in the costly team sports that attract men---because only 52 percent of college students were female back then. Now the female-favoring gender disparity is much bigger: 57 percent to 43 percent.

The effect of the proportionality rule on opportunities for young men to play college soccer has been devastating, the CSC figures and graphs show. In 1996 there were 197 men's soccer teams in Division I and about 190 women's teams. In 2009 there were still 197 men's teams---even though the NCAA had added 27 new member schools---but the number of women's teams had soared to 310. Some 93 percent of Division I athletic programs offer women's soccer, compared with only 59 percent of Division I programs offering men's soccer.

Compounding the problem are the NCAA's scholarship policies. NCAA rules limit Division I men's teams to 9.9 scholarships, while women's teams are allowed 14 scholarships. "when considered across all of Division I, that means that the maximum number of possible scholarships offered to women in the sport in Division I outnumber those available to men by a ratio of greater than 2-1 (4,340 to 1,950.e)."

The growing disparity between men's and women's opportunities to play college soccer doesn't reflect men's declining interest in the sport---far from it. According to data cited by the CSC from the National Federation of State High School Associations, nearly 384,000 boys and 345,000 girls played soccer at the nation's high schools during the 2008-2009 academic year. But those male soccer enthusiasts have more limited college choices than their female counterparts. In Texas, the CSC notes, more than 27,000 boys play high school soccer, but there is only one Division I college with a men's soccer team: Southern Methodist. Neither the University of Texas at Austin nor Texas A&M, both Division I schools, sponsor varsity soccer programs for men, although they do offer women's varsity soccer.

And people wonder why I mock our institutions of "higher learning" as being run by corrupt, cowardly bigots.