Schools only have to meet ONE out of the three rules to be declared compliant with Title IX. Having the same ratio of male to female students as male to female athletes is the easiest to set up and the easiest to prove, and therefore the most often used rule to follow.
Title IX is one more example of the mind set that you can force someone to change a core belief. It's also an example that people can believe anything they want to. The rise of women's sports can be attributed to more advertising for women's sports, and therefore making it into a more colleges want to profit while the profiting is good.
Title IX has proven that it can kill men's sports that actually have decent players and replace it with "filler" woman's sports, such as when UCLA dropped a men's gymnastic program that contained an Olympic contender and opened at the same time a new women's gymnastics team and a women's soccer. UCLA cited financial reasons, which leads someone to wonder how exactly a women's team without an Olympic contender could be more of a money maker than a men's team with.
But really, this entire post is because the dude above me got one of the basic laws about title IX wrong. Schools have to follow 1 guideline, not 3.