<p>Many universities have a clear majority of women in the student body. For example at UNC and UVA woman make up 55-60% of the population. There was an article a while back (NY Times as I recall),indicating the most under represented demographic in college pools vis a vis the national population at-large was the white male. For example at UCLA Asians makes up more than one-third of the campus population, while they are no where near that concentration in U.S. society at large. The bottom line for the article was that universities are actively looking to increase their number of acceptances of white males, who in turn seem less and less interested in going to college.</p>
<p>seems like a very lame point to consider as an advantage…:D</p>
<p>^right, and if you’re not a white male, the cost of becoming one is probably prohibitive.</p>
<p>If you look at admission stats, the percentage admitted for males does tend to be a bit higher at schools which have a majority female population. Schools try to balance the female/male student ratio because if it gets too lopsided, both the females and the males can view it as a negative.</p>
<p>My older child (female) attends an all-women’s college. Now my S is applying. We’re hoping the fact that he’s male and applying to schools where they have more females will help him.</p>
<p>Same principle with schools that look for female engineering majors to balance out the student population, since it tends to be heavily male.</p>
<p>We are also hoping geographic diversity helps out - for schools that want to show every state/region is represented, being an applicant from a state/region that is not well represented may prove to be an advantage.</p>
<p>Of course, gender and/or geographic diversity are not enough - GPAs/test scores/etc should be in the range to be admitted. But when schools are building a class, I think those elements could be a factor/advantage.</p>
<p>but as you say, maybe as a final cut between equally qualified students, the demographics can be a swing factor. I know for a fact from talking w/an Admissions counselor at a private East Coast university they were dying to get applicants more the West Coast, particularly California. I’m not judging the process as everyone accepted should qualify on merit. However, there are so many applicants, especially this year, and many of them meet the qualifications by a great margin. There has to be some way for Admissions to make the hard decisions, and I suspect normalizing the demographic and geographic mix is one of them.</p>
<p>These issues have been debated on the William and Mary site. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-william-mary/805043-does-w-m-discriminate-against-girls.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-william-mary/805043-does-w-m-discriminate-against-girls.html</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-william-mary/601571-chance-my-son-please.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-william-mary/601571-chance-my-son-please.html</a></p>
<p>It helps being male if you apply to Kenyon:
[To</a> All the Girls I’ve Rejected - New York Times](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23britz.html]To”>Opinion | To All the Girls I've Rejected - The New York Times)</p>
<p>I’m sure this essay reflects this situation at other colleges, too. Especially co-ed schools that used to be all-women (Vassar, Goucher, Skidmore etc.).</p>
<p>^ I think this is the case at many LACs which tend to get a lopsidedly female applicant pool but try to keep at least a rough gender balance in their entering class. Translation: it’s easier for males to get admitted.</p>
<p>Example: Middlebury had 4,652 female applicants for the fall of 2010, but only 3,332 male applicants. The admit rate for girls was 15.8%, and for boys 19.2%. That’s a substantial difference. It was both harder for girls and easier for boys to get accepted than the school’s average 17.2% acceptance rate would suggest.</p>
<p>Bowdoin had 3,436 female applicants and only 2,582 male applicants. Its admit rate for girls was 17.3%, and for boys 22.8%, as against an average acceptance rate of 19.6%</p>
<p>At Swarthmore, 3,595 female applicants to 2,446 male; 14.3% female acceptance rate, 18.8% male.</p>
<p>And yes, the imbalance is more extreme at formerly all-female and now coed Vassar, which had more than twice as many female applicants in 2010 (5,414 female to 2,408 male) and had a 19.5% female acceptance rate and a 32.9% admit rate for males. Yet despite such extraordinary gender favoritism, Vassar still ended up with about 35% more females than males in its entering class.</p>
<p>I’m sure it helped my son at Vassar. And he didn’t help them as he chose to go elsewhere. 
I think it made less difference at American, where he was at the top of the applicant pool, but they also need more men. </p>
<p>And of course many engineering schools will take women with slightly lower stats (especially since they often have better grades once they matriculate than men with similar stats.)</p>
<p>I suspect that at any selective school that has 50/50 males and females, it’s an advantage to be male–unless it’s a school like MIT. It may be an even bigger advantage at someplace like Vassar, of course.</p>
<p>I don’t think it helps if you’re applying to the engineering college within a university. And it may not help in a business program, either. But in liberal arts, yes, probably.</p>
<p>A boy I’m close to who has a couple of weaknesses in his application is applying EDII to Vassar. Hopefully his gender will help.</p>
<p>Yes, I think most guys do have an edge. It gets even better once accepted. (That’s what my son tells me.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Obviously, not much has changed regarding the perception of male Vassar applicants/students from my high school days in the early-mid '90s. Only difference is that the stigma associated with that perception was such that most male students ended up being deterred from applying. </p>
<p>Not only would male students be assumed to be doing so because their stats would have otherwise precluded them from applying to that tier of LACs, but also teasing that the male students were applying there “mainly for the girls/women” and the wildly favorable F:M ratio. This teasing continues to this very day…15+ years after our HS graduation. </p>
<p>It also doesn’t help that Rick Lazio…the swarmy self-promoting Long Island politician was a graduate and is widely considered an intellectual lightweight with many neighbors and like-minded friends.</p>
<p>Interesting – just came across this thread as I was wondering the same thing. </p>
<p>I was just looking at an Ivy the other day and noticed that the girls admit rate was a few percentage points lower that the admit rate for boys (roughly 1 in 9 vs. 1 in 8) - not as dramatic as some LACs listed, but still a distinct advantage for boys (assuming there is not another explanation, like higher test scores for boys in the candidate pool, etc.).</p>
<p>Its quite clear that at the right tail uber selective schools, (HYPS) when viewed through the SAT prism, its an advantage to be female.</p>
<p>The grade prism may be different.</p>
<p>Do I have better chances at Swarthmore, Amherst and Middlebury since I am an Asian male? I heard some LACs are looking for more Asians.</p>
<p>1994dog, yes it is a definite advantage to be male and asian when applying to small LACS in the Northeast. You still need to have the stats, EC’s etc.</p>
<p>I’ve no doubt being male and asian got my son accepted into Bates and every other school he applied to. He also got into SUNY Binghamton where it wasn’t an advantage so it’s not like he wasn’t a qualified candidate to begin with but the LACS are all trying to become more diversified because the student body has demanded it. No one wants to be at a school where everyone is cut from the same cloth.</p>
<p>At [College</a> Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/]College”>College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics) you can see the different acceptance rates for male and female applicants. </p>
<p>Also see this thread: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/798055-male-female-lac-acceptance-rate-differentials.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/798055-male-female-lac-acceptance-rate-differentials.html</a></p>
<p>At some schools with larger female populations, it can provide an admissions advantage for male applicants, as the colleges want to avoid having too uneven of a male/female ratio.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Isn’t that just about every school out there? The only difference is some schools care and some schools don’t care.</p>