From now on, if colleges drop men's teams, the guys shouldn't have Title IX and women to blame.

In a long-awaited decision, the Department of Education tweaked Title IX regulations last week while reaffirming the landmark 1972 law requiring gender equality in sports. The changes should free colleges from viewing Title IX as implicitly demanding quotas.

The revisions, clarifying a seven-year-old interpretation of Title IX, appear minor. Fears that the Bush administration would gut the law proved greatly exaggerated. If Title IX were ever in danger, a groundswell of support by women's activists changed the administration's mind.

The real test of the administration's commitment to equity will come in coming months, with enforcement. The administration must now distinguish between giving schools more flexibility and creating opportunities to wiggle out of the law.

Until now, the burden of proof for meeting Title IX was to show numbers. If 54 percent of students were women, women athletes and their share of the budget should be roughly proportional.

That standard has fostered a huge growth in women's sports -- a tenfold increase over 30 years at the college level. But it also has led schools, fearing lawsuits, to overreact or to twist numbers. Some colleges eliminated viable men's programs, like gymnastics, swimming and wrestling (down 60 percent in colleges since the 1970s), instead of marketing women's sports better; others bloated the enrollment in minor women's sports, like crew, to match numbers in football.

The new ruling states that the feds will look unfavorably at schools that drop programs to meet Title IX. It also says that the government will give equal weight to two other measures of compliance already on the books. A school could document a history of trying to boost women's sports. Or it could demonstrate that it is meeting women students' desire to play sports, perhaps by conducting surveys of their interests.

While reasonable, these criteria are more subjective and could make compliance harder to measure. The Bush administration must clearly spell out and give examples of good-faith efforts.

Despite progress over three decades, women's athletics still lag behind. It was reassuring that the Bush administration broadly endorsed Title IX and that it recognized men's sports should not be caught in the backdraft.