Suppose you’re the head of a school whose students belong to two ethnic groups, the Alphas and the Betas. The Alphas get better grades and are more likely to graduate. They dominate the school newspaper and yearbook, the band and the choir, the debate team and the drama club — virtually all extracurricular activities except for sports.

How much time would you spend worrying about the shortage of Alpha jocks?

Not much — unless, of course, the Alphas were women, the Betas were men, and you were being sued for not complying with Title IX. Then you would be desperately trying to end this outrageous discrimination.

When Title IX was enacted in 1972, women were a minority on college campuses, and it sounded reasonable to fight any discrimination against them. But now men are the underachieving minority on campus, as a series by The Times has been documenting. So why is it so important to cling to the myth behind Title IX: that women need sports as much as men do?

Yes, some women are dedicated athletes, and they should be encouraged with every opportunity. But a lot of others have better things to do, like study or work on other extracurricular activities that will be more useful to their careers. For decades, athletic directors have been creating women’s sports teams and dangling scholarships and hoping to match the men’s numbers, but they’ve learned that not even the Department of Education can eradicate gender differences.

At the University of Maryland, the women’s lacrosse team won national championships year after year but still had a hard time getting 40 players to turn out for the team. The men’s team had no such trouble, because guys were more than willing to warm the bench even if they weren’t getting a scholarship, but the coach had to cut the extra ones to maintain the gender balance. The school satisfied Title IX, but to no one’s benefit.

On or off campus, men play more team sports and watch more team sports. Besides enjoying the testosterone rushes, they have a better chance of glory — and of impressing the opposite sex. Thirty-four years after Title IX, most women’s games still attract sparse audiences. Both sexes would still rather watch men play games, especially football.

College football is such a mass spectacle that it can’t really be compared with other sports. It’s more of a war rally or religious revival. But football’s unique popularity unfairly penalizes men because colleges fear flunking the “proportionality” test, which is the safest way to comply with Title IX. If the school doesn’t have enough female athletes to offset the huge football squad, it has to cut other men’s teams — or get rid of football, as some schools have done.

Lately, though, as colleges have struggled with the declining number of men on campus, a few small schools have dared to start football teams. They argue that even if they end up with more male athletes, they’re still being fair because more men want to play sports. It’s not clear if this approach could survive a Title IX lawsuit; advocates for women’s sports complain it’s still discrimination. But the results on campus are already impressive, as Bill Pennington described in The Times yesterday.

The new football teams have helped attract a lot of male and also some female students, boosting enrollment and tuition revenues. The teams have provided publicity and excitement, bringing in donations from businesses and alumni. Most important, the chance to play football has attracted boys who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to college.

“We kind of trick them into seeing that getting an education is the real benefit,” said Mike Kemp, the coach of the football team started five years ago at Utica College in upstate New York.

Besides attracting boys to campus, football and other sports help them stay in school. Provided they’re not at a school that lets jocks get away with anything, a good coach can provide them with the discipline — mandatory class attendance, supervised study periods, required grade-point average — that male students seem to need more than female students.

I’m not suggesting that sports are a panacea for male education problems. Men are lagging behind women on campus for lots of reasons: less motivation and self-control, poorer academic skills. No matter what happens with Title IX, women will deservedly continue to outnumber men on campus and dominate the honor rolls.

But because they’re now so dominant, they don’t need special federal protection in the one area that men excel. This playing field doesn’t need to be leveled.