How are Hispanic, Black and American Indian students doing in college? The American Council on Education, which bills itself as "the major coordinating body for all of the nation's higher education," has just released its 24th annual report on the subject, titled Minorities in Higher Education. It provides valuable information, but the interpretations of the data do as much to obscure as to illuminate the central issues.

The fifty pages of tables provided in an appendix reveal that these students, designated as "underrepresented minorities," made enormous progress in our colleges and universities in the 80's and 90's, and that these advances have continued in the past decade. For example, total white enrollments in institutions of higher education rose by just 12 percent over the decade 1997-2007. The figure for African Americans was 49 percent, by contrast, and for Hispanics 67 percent. When we distinguish undergraduates from students in graduate or professional schools, the picture looks the same, with minority numbers rising much more rapidly than white rates of gain, though of course from a much smaller base. The same is true when the measure is degrees earned at various levels from Associates to Ph.D.'s.--with some exceptions we will consider later.

Unfortunately, though, few readers are likely to examine the data for themselves, and most will content themselves with reading the Executive Summary, or perhaps just a news report. If so, their understanding will be limited. The authors of the report are reluctant to be bearers of too much good news. They plainly do not want to induce complacency, because they want us to believe that institutions must do much more to provide "greater access" to higher education for these groups. At the same time, though, they are much too optimistic about what colleges and universities can do to overcome the huge racial gap in achievement because they are unwilling to acknowledge that it appears long before students have even begun to contemplate college.

The report employs two strategies for obscuring the gains so clearly demonstrated in the statistical appendix. First is the "yes, but look at how much males are lagging behind females" gambit. When one of their measures shows progress for a minority group, the report is quick to qualify the point by noting that the gains have been concentrated in the female segment of the group. Women are doing better, they concede, but males are doing worse. We still have much work to be done to attain equity, they believe. Apparently we need not just racial balance, but gender balance within each racial group.

As everyone knows, though, a skewed sex ratio in college enrollments is not at all peculiar to racial minorities. For much of our history, college men outnumbered women by a large margin. But over the past few decades, women have caught up and then moved steadily ahead. Among all students enrolled in an institution of higher education in 2007, just 43 percent were male, 57 percent female. Among whites, males made up 44 percent of the total, and among Asians 46 percent. For Latinos it was 41 percent, for blacks just 35 percent. The growing imbalance in the sex ratio of college students is not a problem confined to minorities, if it is indeed a problem.

The report provides no recommendations about what might be done about this pattern. The higher education establishment today is eager to engineer greater "gender equity," but its views of equity are curiously one-sided. It is exclusively concerned about increasing the numbers of women in every area in which they are "underrepresented," not in correcting the opposite gender imbalance in overall enrollments. Thus the crusade to end the continued dominance of males in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (two thirds of the bachelor's degrees in STEM fields still go to men. Perhaps the shrinking male presence in higher education indicates that our colleges and universities have become less welcoming places for males. Should there be attempts to change campus culture somehow to make it more male-friendly? Should men perhaps receive admissions preferences to foster greater gender diversity? This is the favored remedy for "underrepresented" racial minorities, after all, and males are certainly becoming more underrepresented with each passing year. The report is attentive to gender differences when it comes to minority populations, but fails to examine the broader context and to consider possible remedies.