<p>Interesting to me is the fact that while more women than men are going to college, there is still a large income gap favoring men.</p>
<p>However, it has narrowed, and with the college trend it may close one day.</p>
<p>Speaking of Take your D to Work day–role models are important for both sexes! I don’t know why we concentrate on one or the other; as the pendulum swings one of them always gets neglected. And young men are particularly at risk if they grow up in a fatherless household, which is more common than a motherless one. So why are we neglecting our boys?</p>
<p>I remember trying to find a summer program for my son in CS or engineering that fit into his schedule. Many of them were only for “Women in Engineering.” What, do they use pink calculators?</p>
<p>
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<p>I agree.
In that age group, most young people, males and females are still in a discovery stage in their lives, still not sure of who they are, what makes them happy, what goals they want in life. Until they’ve found these answers(usually not while in college) they don’t make stable mates.
I am just surprised so many parents expect their children to have postgraduate education but yet want their children to have found “the one” in college.</p>
<p>I was scrolling through College Navigator’s stats yesterday and was surprised to see that at many Midwest LACs on our list there was a higher ratio of girls AND a slightly lower rate of male acceptances. So much for theory that admissions rates usually favor males.</p>
<p>Do believe that a skewed ratio male:female greater than 40/60 (or 66/33, found at engineering schools such as Rose-Hulman and IIT) significantly impacts on-campus student satisfaction with their social lives.</p>
<p>cbreeze–maybe, but they should be able to have “practice” relationships. Healthy one-on-one relationships of more than one night’s duration. There is a lot of “playing around” going on, sad to say.</p>
<p>Denison has interesting information posted on its website concerning student achievement, including analysis of semester grades by grade and gender. Female students are doing significantly better. Same conclusion can be reached from College Navigator’s data on graduation rates, also noting significantly different male/female rates at many institutions.</p>
<p>I took a lot of gender studies sort of classes, and though this is only reflecting a sample of primarily (though not entirely) female upperclassmen at umich, I remember being extremely surprised at the number of my peers who simply don’t believe in marriage at all anymore. And these weren’t uber-liberal feminist type kids who were majoring in womens studies, these were mainly political science and sociology students that I took these classes with. I participated in a discussion about whether or not the concepts of marriage and monogamy are antiquated, as part of a political theory course, and was in the minority of students expressing a desire to get married sometime in the future. I think a lot of my generation is jaded by the divorce statistics and that is contributing to the culture of putting off marriage, sometimes indefinitely, in addition to the factors we are already discussing. I think THAT’s very sad, and I hope that isn’t really as big of a factor as it seemed like it was in my particular peer group at school. I think my generation is terrified by the failures of the older generation in marriage.</p>
<p>Love it, limabeans! post #39
I have a senior D who has always been the “pleasure to have in class” golden child. Freshman S has suffered from the early elementary expectation that boys toe the line with fine motor and energy levels. He’s also tall, so teachers and coaches always expected him to act a couple years older that he was. At 15 he is finally now coming into his own and performing academically about on par with ability. He had to turn in his registration for next year today and came in to our room after I’d gone to bed with the form (forgot or course) to sign. He’s chosen AP Bio, AP World History and is doing precalc sophomore year - suddenly an academic. He also said that he’s thinking about doing the district CC dual enrollment program Junior and Senior year. If you’d asked me a year ago, though, I wasn’t so sure how it would go with focus, follow through and motivation. He’s blooming later than sister, but just in time it seems. Also I’ve noticed that this year for the first time his backpack doesn’t look like a bomb went off inside or there are rats at the bottom chewing on all the papers.</p>
<p>I’m reading some of these posts with great hope. I have a 13-year old son who is bright, kind, witty and an incredible musician. Alas, he has not yet fully matured in terms of organization and time management.</p>
<p>Men don’t naturally flock to campuses with a preponderance of female students. Former women’s colleges have to work hard at turning their schools into true coed campuses. [Women’s</a> Colleges Learning How to Get a Man - New York Times](<a href=“Women's Colleges Learning How to Get a Man - The New York Times”>Women's Colleges Learning How to Get a Man - The New York Times)
And the service academies have been trying for decades to increase their female enrollment, with only limited success. </p>
<p>But it is really interesting to observe how the attempt to keep campuses attractive for female students (by having just the right number of male students) is actually working against some female applicants who may be turned down in favor of “less qualified” males.</p>
<p>zoosermom - S15 is also a bright, funniest person I’ve ever met, musical, could sell ice to the Eskimo, Mr. Sunshine; but he had a hard time with rollercoaster grades and effort in middle school. Someone somewhere posted that an advantage of college is that grading for kids like this is that it is often a couple midterms and a final. That will be perfect for him as he was alaways Mr. A+ test, but rats in backpack ate my homework.</p>
<p>Again, I have seen amazing maturity in the past year, so I’m hopeful. At q3, I wasn’t at all sure. Much of it I attribute to his sport - rowing. He has a coach this year (woman) who is hard as nails, but gets boys, and coaches with a very straight forward work = reward formula that clicks for him. He likes clear assignments and goals that cut to the chase. It has helped him to set goals in the rest of his life. His band director is very much the same and he’s having good chemistry with his outside band, so finally things are pretty smooth. Traditionally the As slip 3rd and 4th quarter, so the trick for him will be not to slide as the year draws down.</p>
<p>
Self? Self, is that you?</p>
<p>My husband keeps telling me that it will fall into place and we should be glad he’s got a good heart, which we are. I guess as long as I can listen to him play I can forgive the boy almost everything.</p>
<p>My younger son is one of those boys who just didn’t care about grades until his senior year in high school (when I think he realized he would have better college choices if he got it together with his grades). He has totally turned things around in college and is now a top student so there is hope. Many B’s in high school that would have been A’s if he had just turned homework in. The notebook checks that really bothered him . He actually told me a story about a class he was in- a girl in the class told kids before class began that she planned to ask the teacher to do a notebook check to get credit. He pleaded with her not to ask the teacher about it because he didn’t have his notebook with him. She did it anyway, which seems pretty mean. There were kids in his class who were quite competitive and he was just not into any of that OR homework and notebook checks either. Lots of boys just don’t seem to be into that kind of thing. Now, spending time in sports, video games and hanging with friends-that’s another story!</p>
<p>With a few notable exceptions, many of the better public universities are close to 50-50 gender balance, including schools with top engineering programs. The following publics all have top-25 undergrad engineering programs (listed in order of US News undergrad engineering ranking, highest first).</p>
<p>School F/M</p>
<p>UC Berkeley 53/47
Georgia Tech 31/69
Illinois 45/55
Michigan 49/51
Purdue 42/58
Texas 51/49
Wisconsin 52/48
VaTech 42/58
Penn State 45/55
Texas A&M 47/53
UCLA 55/45
UCSD 51/49
U Washington 52/48
U Maryland-College Park 47/53
Minnesota 52/48</p>
<p>No doubt the engineering programs themselves are heavily male, but it’s not as if the engineers live on another planet, or even in major-segregated dorms. On most campuses there will be a lot of mixing and mingling of students from different majors. Where you see gender imbalance is in tech-heavy schools (not necessarily even in the best tech schools, but in schools where tech predominates) which tend to skew heavily male, and in LACs which tend to skew somewhat female though in many cases only mildly so.</p>
<p>Yes on how tough it is to change all female to coed. The former RMWC now know as Randolph College had a very tough transition and it has taken 3 years for them to just get out of the woods as total enrollment took a big drop when they went coed. They celebrated getting just a small increase last Fall after several years of total decline. They added several males teams and most males seem to be playing a sport. Maybe in 10 more years the balance will be achieved and the total grown back to a level that can be maintained. 500 students was not going to do it.
[Area</a> colleges report rising enrollment | The News & Advance](<a href=“http://www2.newsadvance.com/news/2011/sep/11/area-colleges-report-rising-enrollment-ar-1299762/]Area”>http://www2.newsadvance.com/news/2011/sep/11/area-colleges-report-rising-enrollment-ar-1299762/)</p>
<p>My oldest always has a boyfriend and if she doesn’t, she is dating a few guys. She stays friends with the guys she breaks up with, and she likes men, just in general, though she is considered a “tease” because she won’t “have sex” or one night stands. She finds a lot of the “hot” guys very disatisfying conversationalists and always picks guys who are funny, smart, witty, nice and nice. Good looking, up to a point, though the type of guys all the girls swoon all over do always want to take her out. She finds that whole thing to be a turn off.</p>
<p>A lot of her friends have trouble finding boyfriends and say, “There just aren’t any nice guys out there.” My daughter says, "Yes there are. You just leave them all in the “friend zone.’”</p>
<p>So, some of the girls really need to grow up, too, imho, though I haven’t heard any girl say they wanted to get married any time soon, if ever.</p>
<p>ON a side note: My younger one hates busy work and gets a’s and b’s on tests but never hands in her homework. I don’t know why on earth a thing that used to be used to give the people who had trouble taking tests a “boost” has now become the “way we grade.” Honestly. If you can master the material without doing all of the homework, why is this a problem??? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>When first looking at colleges, my D put a lot of emphasis on a college having a close to 50/50 ratio - and she’s a very pretty girl who has never had a problem finding a date. She just thought boys were easier to get along with and a college full of girls would be too girly for her. Now she’s a sophomore at a college that’s 60/40 and she loves it. She also loves the sorority she pledged, so perhaps she’s decided being girly isn’t all bad :rolleyes:. Our neighbor’s son wouldn’t even look at D’s school, dismissing it out of hand as “a girls’ school” because it’s 60% girls. 
</p>
<p>My S recently graduated from Lafayette. As the rare LAC with a strong engineering program (I think at least 25% of the students are engineers) their ratio has balanced around 50/50 for as long as I can remember. An admissions officer there told me, “We’re lucky. We’ve never had to consider gender when making admissions decisions. It just always seems to work out on its own.”</p>
<p>EDIT: My father told me I should go to a selective college because odds were that I would meet my husband there and I’d have a better chance of meeting a good guy at a selective college.:rolleyes: I thought he was a neanderthal for saying that - but as it turned out, H and I met in college. Neither of us seriously expected our kids to meet their spouse in college though.</p>
<p>When looking at my son’s high school’s Naviance graphs, I have sometimes wondered what the difference was between two students with the same data point (GPA/SAT) when one was rejected and one was accepted. </p>
<p>Aside from obvious things like course selection, recruited athlete, and legacy, I think that in a male-heavy school maybe the girl was accepted but not the boy with identical stats and vice versa.</p>
<p>I have certainly considered whether my son should chose his reach schools from those that are female-heavy.</p>
<p>good point, delamer.</p>
<p>I remember when one of my sons was a senior, 4 kids applied to MIT. The two girls got in, the two boys did not. They seemed to have similar stats, all highly qualified. We all thought at the time that the girls had an edge just by virtue of being girls.</p>
<p>Funny - I know of a similar situation with MIT, only the girl was also a URM and the boy was Chinese-American. So probably not just gender in that case. The boy ended up at an Ivy, so he certainly had good options :)</p>