A college admissions director’s confession that female applicants are being rejected in order to admit less qualified men is roiling the higher education community and stirring debate about the goals of affirmative action.

In an op-ed piece published last week, the dean of admissions at Kenyon College of Gambier, Ohio, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, expressed her misgivings about a developing gender-based double standard at many colleges and universities, particularly liberal arts schools.

“The standards of admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men,” Ms. Britz wrote in the New York Times. “The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants?”

Ms. Britz fretted about the message the disparate treatment sends to young women, but she ultimately excused the practice as dictated by “the demographic realities” of surging numbers of applications from women and less robust growth in men’s interest in liberal arts.

Ms. Britz, who was traveling yesterday, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment on her article, “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected.” However, the Kenyon College Web site posted a series of pages related to the op-ed piece, including statistics and a somewhat defensive “personal statement” from the dean.

“It’s caused a little bit of a stir,” a professor of psychology and women’s studies at Kenyon, Linda Smolak, said in an interview.

“People are of mixed minds about it. People are glad Jennifer brought it out in the open and said, flat out, that qualified women aren’t getting in,” Ms. Smolak said. “That makes me mad at some moments because I know how hard we struggled.” She noted that Kenyon was all male until 1969.

Ms. Smolak said female students are aware that they outnumber male students on the campus, by a ratio of 55% to 45%, but most of the women were unaware that the admissions office had to put a thumb on the scale to prevent an even more skewed result. “The women students are just sort of dumbfounded,” the professor said.

A leading campaigner against affirmative action, Ward Connerly, said he was outraged that colleges were now using arguments about diversity to deny admission to some women. “Obviously, I’m appalled at the idea that women are being discriminated against in the interest of preserving these magical figures of balance,” he said. “We can’t try to orchestrate a mythical balance between men and women, and blacks and Asians, and all of that.”

Mr. Connerly, who campaigned against affirmative action as a member of California’s Board of Regents, said the arguments to use gender to penalize women were weaker than those for race-based measures. “With race, you can always hide behind the notion of making up for the past. Here, you can’t do that. It’s pretty clearly just social engineering,” he said.

Nevertheless, Mr. Connerly said Kenyon should be free to do as it wished, because it is not a state-sponsored school. Indeed, the federal law governing gender discrimination in education, Title IX, does not apply to admissions practices at privately run undergraduate programs.

In her op-ed, Ms. Britz said the concern driving the preferential admission of men was that experts have found a tipping point, apparently in the vicinity of a 60% female student body, that leads to fewer applications from both men and women. She also noted that dance partners can be hard to come by as the gender breakdown becomes more skewed.

The vice president of the National Women’s Law Center, Jocelyn Samuels, said she was skeptical about the arguments being put forward for giving men an advantage in the admissions process. She said that most arguments for the value of diversity in education call for the presence of a “critical mass” in order to ensure that the perspectives of members of certain groups are represented in discussions and other activities. “People would be hard put to say there is not a critical mass of men on the nation’s campuses,” Ms. Samuels said in an interview.

Ms. Samuels said at a state school the law would require “an exceedingly persuasive justification” for the use of gender in admissions. “Having enough kids to have a balance at winter formals” would probably not meet the standard, she said. “From both a policy and a legal perspective, I think an institution needs to have weighty and considered reasons for considering race, gender, and national origin.”

Mr. Connerly said women’s groups, who have traditionally supported aggressive affirmative action, were now in an awkward position to complain about the limits on admission of women. “They’re in a very tough spot,” he said.

In a new posting of “frank answers” on its Web site, Kenyon College insisted that it has “neither a formal nor an informal policy to seek gender balance in our admissions practices.” The school acknowledged that admitted women outscore men on the reading SAT by 24 points, but noted that men outscore women in math by 10 points.

A professor of education at American University, David Sadker, said that for decades many colleges used gender based double standards to make sure men were a clear majority. “Schools used to shoot for 60% males, and have a B average for males and an A-minus average for females,” Mr. Sadker said. “The intent was to give education to those who would use it and need it the most, i.e. males.”

Mr. Sadker said the admissions debate underscored the need to determine why men of college age appear to be less qualified than women. He also said the lower performance of men is due in large part to the difficulties facing black and Hispanic men. “The one group that’s missing is really boys of color,” he said. “Elementary and secondary schools are just in so much distress.”

Mr. Sadker said he finds it curious that admissions preferences based on race and gender generate intense anger, but preferences for athletes and the children of alumni and donors, are widely ignored. “I just think it’s ironic,” he said.