<p>We've noticed that some schools are now approaching 70/30 female/male percentages. D definitely does not want to go to a school with that much "competition". Have the imbalances at some schools affected your S or D's decisions to consider those schools?</p>
<p>Not for my sons :-)</p>
<p>
Definitely “advantage boys” mom of three!</p>
<p>My S1 is at a school with a 50/50 ratio. However, I’m now starting to think about schools for my S2, a h.s. sophomore who is most likely going to go into engineering. Yikes…those schools are 70/30 in favor of the guys and not sure how I would feel about him going…not sure yet what he would think yet either…he’s really too young yet to form an opinion, but it’s too bad that these schools which have awesome engineering programs, lack in the “social” balance of guys to girls.</p>
<p>Yes, I will research carefully. Gender imbalance will make it more selective than it should be.</p>
<p>Check out Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering which has a 50/50 ratio. All of the students are bright and interesting and the curriculum is amazing.</p>
<p>
At least some states have flagship universities with engineering and more or less balanced f/m ratios. Penn State and Ohio State are 2 of the largest “engineer mills” in the country. Can’t really go wrong there.</p>
<p>"Not for my sons 
"</p>
<p>So true. There are so many young women well prepared to enter college. What’s up with all the boys that don’t do there homework?</p>
<p>glido–We can go there if you want. You can argue that the system seems set up to reward good students who do their homework (mostly girls) and get the grades, while smarter kids (boys?) can’t get a grip. I made my boys do the work, the way the teacher wanted it, <em>grr notebook checks</em> but some kids never get the message. </p>
<p>Or you can argue that years ago, sons of white privilege got into good colleges because of who they were and who they were connected with, despite having mediocre grades.</p>
<p>Anyway, to address the subject at hand, Rose Hulman was one great engineering school my sons didn’t look at because it was mostly males and in the middle of nowhere so there was no “girls” school nearby.</p>
<p>GA Tech is approaching balance as well, plus it is in a big city with several other colleges.</p>
<p>To the original question, it wasn’t something that was on our radar screen, but we were looking at only big State Us, for the most part, and so even if the imbalance is there, there are still 10s of thousands of students of each gender.</p>
<p>NC State University is an engineering school with a 50/50 balance in a fairly large city and there are two all female colleges within a couple of miles of campus. It’s a great place to be a male engineering major.</p>
<p>Most of the schools we have looked at seem to have a 55/45 split. One school has a 70/30 split. Somewhere there has to be schools where the opposite is true, aren’t there? I do agree, for the guys out there, the numbers are pretty good.</p>
<p>It seemed to me the tech schools had few girls, the liberal arts schools had few boys. S is a prospective engineer major and he didn’t look past the first few tech school after he saw it was primarily boys there.</p>
<p>He found a school with engineering that was 50/50, the key is to not just look at techs.</p>
<p>Not sure what we’ll do for our dd - she won’t be happy with the reverse.</p>
<p>But I totally agree that schools in general favor a girls personality more than a boys. Especially in the lower grades. The things to boost kids grades like notebook checks and extra credit posters and extra book reports did him no favors.</p>
<p>Along with looking at the overall stats for a school, look at the individual programs as well. I know in the program S is looking into, its pretty close to 100% male everywhere, even at schools with a high percentage of females. Most of of the classes in his major will be all male, maybe one female.</p>
<p>There are a handful of techs with better numbers - MIT, Olin, the engineering school at GW (as well as the overall school). More common are places like CMU - overall is 60/40 (but you’ll have to make friends outside of engineering and comp sci to find the women). Similar stats for Lafayette, Columbia etc. Except the whole school numbers are more even.</p>
<p>My criteria before even looking at a school was no more than a 60/40 split females to males, anything more than that was not even considered. There are at least 50 great colleges for each kid and you need to weed them out somehow so why not start with that?</p>
<p>I recall the engineering students commonly dated the nursing & conservatory students. (The conservatory had guys but many of the nicest ones were, disappointingly, gay.) </p>
<p>Well, disappointing to ME. ;)</p>
<p>Gender imbalance is a problem at the LACs. Not only are there more females at LACs, there tends to more males not interested in girls. Dd may never find a guy at college. Now the guys have their pick.</p>
<p>The gender imbalance isn’t just at small LAC, it’s pretty much everywhere. I just looked at 20 major state universities and only 1 had a 50/50 split, the rest were closer to 60/40 women/men except Purdue which had close to a 40/60 split women to men. Statistically there are more females than males, but not that many more. It used to be 106 girls born for every 100 boys but that was information from about 10 years ago. It probably hasn’t changed much though.</p>
<p>I went to an all-girls high school, so I refused to look at a school that had more than 60% girls. I was sick of them by that point!</p>