Historically speaking, the MRS degree is one of the most popular degrees sought by university coeds. That degree option is becoming increasingly unavailable. There is a widening gender gap on American campuses. In fact, after the new students arrive on campus this fall, one in four of women will be mathematically unable to find a male peer to go out with.

At colleges across the country, 58 women will enroll as freshmen for every 42 men. As the class of 2010 proceeds toward graduation, the male numbers will dwindle. More men than women will drop out. According to projections by the U.S. Department of Education, the ratio of graduates after four years will be six women for every four men.

American colleges from Yale to Stanford face a man shortage, and there's no end in sight. This is not a problem that is confined to minorities. College enrollment of middle income Caucasians was 57 percent female in 2004. Maine, a predominantly white state, is at 60/40 in college enrollment and is quickly reaching beyond it.

The diversity police are of course, troubled. A 60/40 gender imbalance is utterly unacceptable. Surely there must be structural flaws in a society where one gender enjoys a 28-percent advantage when it comes to graduating from college. Structural flaws necessitate compensating laws, right? So how about a Title IX program to bring the guys along?

Makes perfect sense to me, and history is on my side. In the early 1970s, when the college demographics were roughly reversed at 43 percent female and 57 percent male, federal education laws were reformed with the enactment in 1972 of Title IX, a provision that requires numerical parity for women in various areas of federally-funded schooling. Feminist groups pushed the Equal Rights Amendment through the House and Senate. Universities opened women's studies departments. Most glorious of all, the United Nations declared 1975 the International Year of the Woman. Feminists never tired of repeating that the problem was structural. A system built by men, for men, was blocking women's way.

Hell will freeze over before colleges and universities admit that the current gender imbalance is a problem, let alone that they're addressing it. Stephen Farmer is a typical director of undergraduate admissions. The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, has an enrollment of only 41.6 percent male. Farmer is unconcerned. His comments were reported in several media outlets.

"We really have made no attempt to balance the class. We are gender blind in applications, very scrupulously so." Umm, OK. Affirmative action for men is politically incorrect. Of course, it's also illegal. "My understanding of Title IX is that an admissions process that advantages men would be very difficult to defend," Farmer says.

What should be done? Should the federal government now do an about face, and begin to pass laws favoring masculine education? Perish the thought. And I hope to never see the day when the United Nations proclaims "The International Year of the Man." Statist solutions such as these always create more problems than they solve.

This is an example of the crying need for the separation of school and state. We could do with a little benign neglect here. Instead, the Department of Education continues to be preoccupied with advancing women.

A recent 50-page study called Gender Differences in Participation and Completion of Undergraduate Education by Katharain Peter and Laura Horn focuses not on the shortfall of men that almost every data point demonstrates. Instead, the study concentrates on tiny subpopulations of women who still have so-called "risk characteristics." Did you know, for example, that after age 29, more men than women graduate from college? Shocking but (apparently) true.

Nearly two decades after the Equal Rights Amendment failed by the narrowest of margins, the culture is still in thrall to feminist orthodoxy.