I’ve been looking at this New York Times op-ed, “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” by the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, trying to figure out what to excerpt to pass along the gist of the article.

I’ll so my best, but if you’re registered with the NYT, or can stomach registering, I recommend you read the whole piece.

The piece is a heartfelt examination of the difficulties women face in gaining admission to colleges today.

Last week, the 10 officers at my college sat around a table, 12 hours every day, deliberating the applications of hundreds of talented young men and women. While gulping down coffee and poring over statistics, we heard about a young woman from Kentucky we were not yet ready to admit outright. She was the leader/president/editor/captain/lead actress in every activity in her school. She had taken six advanced placement courses and had been selected for a prestigious state leadership program. In her free time, this whirlwind of achievement had accumulated more than 300 hours of community service in four different organizations.

Few of us sitting around the table were as talented and as directed at age 17 as this young woman. Unfortunately, her test scores and grade point average placed her in the middle of our pool. We had to have a debate before we decided to swallow the middling scores and write “admit” next to her name.

But here’s the kicker.

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

We have told today’s young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How’s that for an unintended consequence of the women’s liberation movement?

The piece goes on to look at some related issues, such as why colleges strive for gender balance in their admissions, and asks

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges?

This is mind-boggling stuff, and what’s more, it’s only the beginning. It will be years before we fully understand what the hell’s going on, and years more before we can temper it. Which means that a whole generation of kids will grow up in a world so warped we won’t even know how to help them cope with it.