In 1972, the federal government instituted the nation’s first law prohibiting sex-based discrimination against students and employees at institutions of higher learning.  The law’s intent was to make a college education, and everything encompassing it, equitable for both males and females.  The interpretation of Title IX today makes it look and feel much different than what its original proponents probably envisioned.

The law is most acutely felt in men’s and women’s college athletic programs.  While originally designed to provide women the same athletic opportunities given to men, Title IX is now causing women’s athletic programs to bite the hands that feed them, namely the men’s programs whose revenues pay for the women’s programs.

Title IX requires schools to provide athletic scholarships on a proportional basis according to its student population.  This means that if a school is 40% male and 60% female, then only 40% of the school’s athletic scholarships may be given to male athletes.  When you consider that there are almost twice as many male collegiate athletes as female athletes, this proportionality rule defies common sense.

If you further consider that many schools have had to cut funding for some men’s programs, or cut the programs altogether, in order to be in full compliance with Title IX, it makes even less sense.  Why should baseball teams only get 11.7 scholarships for 35 players when women’s rowing gets 20 scholarships and has to advertise in the school newspaper to get women with no rowing experience to try out for the team?  Most college baseball players have been playing the sport for their entire lives, and many have the option to turn it into a career.  How many high schools have girls’ rowing teams?  How many professional female rowers do you know?  But yes, it makes perfect sense to give rowing twice the number of scholarships that baseball gets.

While we’re comparing sports, why should women’s basketball teams get more scholarships than men’s basketball teams?  Does that not defeat the very purpose of Title IX … to eliminate sex-based discrimination in colleges and universities?  And that’s beside the fact that it’s revenue from men’s football and basketball programs that provides the money for all those rowing and women’s basketball scholarships.

For football, the NCAA allows 85 scholarships per team.  Due to Title IX, those scholarships are available to both male and female athletes (I’m sure we all remember the female place-kicker at Colorado a few years back).  Yet, in terms of the proportionality rule, those scholarships only count in the total for men.  Even if a football team had a female player on scholarship, that scholarship would count as a men’s scholarship.

How much further is this going to go?  Are we going to completely eliminate men’s Olympic sports from our colleges and universities to make room for women who never thought about joining a sports program until they got to campus and saw an ad in a newspaper?  Worse yet, at what point do young men decide to stop playing certain high school sports because there is no chance they can play in college?   But at least that will make room for the abundance of high school rowers out there.  The government will be ecstatic.

Subscribe to this comment's feed