In a move certain to infuriate the left, Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos has created the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant, “a scholarship exclusively available to white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education on equal footing with their female, queer and ethnic minority classmates.”
The grant plans to disburse 50 grants of $2,500 to poor, young white men who need that last push to get them to college and who can’t make up the shortfall with loans or other sources of income. The grant does not entail an enormous cash gift, but rather prefers to be seen as a stepping stone, as frequently the opportunity for a student to attend college is based on amassing just a few thousand dollars.
Beyond the practical application of offering needy students the financial wherewithal to attend college, the grant will also heavily focus on the network created between prospective students and their mentors, and among students with other students. The founders of the grant plan to do advocacy work or release policy or research papers based on the results of the grant.
Applications will open later in 2016; they will be comprised of video essays, written essays, and financial assessment, thus ensuring that the grants are means and ability tested. The first grants will be issued in time for the start of the 2016-17 academic year. The grant’s website is intended to “remain the most up to date source of news and updates as we make more decisions and develop criteria.”
The purpose of the grant is not to channel students toward certain majors in order to rectify imbalances in any profession; the purpose is simply to “level the playing field for an underprivileged group across the whole sector.”
Yiannopoulos, in typically blunt fashion, asserted:
I understand that our focus on white men will strike some people as controversial or even offensive. Good. It’s time to re-examine the facts, because they don’t support the current media narrative that women and ethnic minorities are some kind of oppressed victim class. If there’s a patriarchy, it’s not doing a very good job of protecting male interests, is it? It’s men who need the help now — and we’re going to give it to them.
Although there will be some who dispute the claim that young white men are in need of help, the data clearly supports such a claim. According to an article in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, the need for young men to improve their financial state is paramount in reducing crime:
Public policy reform over several decades has succeeded in systematically impoverishing and worsening the social and economic conditions of poor, single young men. That this group is the most prone to criminality and criminalisation, while being pushed further into the margins of the licit and illicit economy, has been a central feature of long-term and growing crime trends. The article argues that successive governments have been unwise to neglect the poverty of unemployed, single young men into young adulthood. Their comparatively unfavourable treatment (as the most ‘undeserving’ of the ‘undeserving poor’) has impoverished a group renowned for being crime-prone.
Evidence that men have been relegated to a back seat behind women regarding obtaining a college education abounds; The Journal of Higher Education reported, “Women’s advantage in college graduation is evident at all socioeconomic levels and for most racial and ethnic groups.” A 2008 study added, “Females are now more likely to complete upper secondary education than males in almost all OECD and partner countries, a reversal of the historical pattern. Today, graduation rates for females are below those for males only in Switzerland and Turkey.”
A Brown University study stated:
In 1940, only about five percent of women and seven percent of men completed a bachelor’s degree by ages 26-28. By 2010, 36% of women and 28% of men in this age range had completed a bachelor’s degree … By 2009-10, women received more doctoral degrees (81,953 versus 76,605). … By 2020, females are expected to comprise at least sixty percent of tertiary students in Austria, Canada, Hungary, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
A 2013 study from the House of Commons in the UK of NEET (not in education, employment or training) young people found that the preponderance of young women who were NEET were not interested in finding a job because they were taking care of their families:
Gender Women made up 52.6% of 16-24 year olds classified as NEET, in Q3 2013. 565,000 women aged 16-24 were NEET compared to 508,000 men. Most women who are NEET are inactive, but most men who are NEET are looking for and available to start work. Around 70% of women who are NEET and inactive reported that they are not looking for or available for work because they are looking after family or home.
The grant has currently raised the bulk of the first year’s $125,000 total sum but is still accepting offers of any sum from prospective donors; interested parties should write to donor@privilegegrant.com
The website for the grant is privilegegrant.com. It can be found on Twitter at @privilegegrant.