Alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are preparing to sue the school for allegedly rejecting male applicants in favor of “artificially” increasing the percentage of female students.
The group FairAdmissions@MIT, a nonprofit organization formed by the alumni, is seeking male plaintiffs who, despite having top-tier applications, nonetheless were rejected from the prestigious school.
“The first phase of our program is identifying male college students or recent graduates who had top SAT/ACT scores, great GPAs, strong recommendations, and substantial extra-curricular activities yet got rejected by MIT,” Mark J. Perry, the group’s president, said in a press release on Wednesday. “Our litigation strategy will mirror the successful efforts used by Students for Fair Admissions to end racial discrimination in college admissions. We intend to do the same for sex discrimination at MIT.”
Students for Fair Admissions is a legal nonprofit group that appealed a lawsuit challenging affirmative action at Harvard University to the Supreme Court, resulting in a ruling that declared race-based college admissions unconstitutional.
Perry has filed hundreds of Title VI and Title IX complaints, and he was the subject of a profile last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education that described him as being on a “crusade to end reverse discrimination.”
FairAdmissions@MIT published data sourced from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics dating back to 2001, arguing the numbers show more than two decades of sex discrimination in admissions at MIT.
For example, in 2022, data show 21,588 men and 12,179 women applied to the school. Despite the male applicant pool being 44% larger than the female pool, more women were admitted in that year than men, with 676 female students and 661 male students receiving acceptance letters.
That trend remains roughly the same from 2001 to 2022. In some years, including every year from 2010 to 2020, the acceptance rate for women was more than double the acceptance rate for men.
“More than two decades of admissions data show that female undergraduate applicants to MIT are admitted at twice the rate as male applicants,” according to the alumni group. “Even though year after year twice as many males apply as females, every entering MIT class ends up artificially gender balanced.”
Despite the apparent imbalance, MIT denied that its admissions policies violate federal anti-discrimination law.
“MIT’s goal is to admit and enroll the best students from around the world, and we firmly believe that our admissions and financial aid practices comply with all laws,” spokeswoman Kimberly Allen told the Washington Examiner.
The school’s admissions officers are also almost entirely female. Seven out of 29, less than a quarter of the admissions officers, are men, according to MIT’s website.
The group is looking to use the same blueprint as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in its successful Supreme Court challenge to race-based admissions policies at institutions of higher education.
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MIT has been under fire in recent weeks, as its president, Sally Kornbluth, has faced antisemitism accusations over congressional testimony she gave regarding pro-Hamas protests that happened at her school.
The school, Kornbluth, and other administrators are also the target of a plagiarism investigation launched by hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who was instrumental in the ouster of former Harvard President Claudine Gay over plagiarism allegations. Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, used to be a professor at MIT.
