I don’t understand it. Are boys just not going to college these days?
Some common jobs that attract men much more than women require less or no college in the sense of “college” commonly discussed here (although they may require their own post high school education). For example:
- Construction trades like electrician, plumber, carpenter.
- Enlisting into military service.
- Police officer.
- Firefighter.
- Vehicle or aircraft mechanic.
- Illegal or criminal jobs like theft.
True.
@SherieAmour Just a guess, but perhaps boys tend to have lower GPAs than girls, on average. (I haven’t seen any data. This came up in the Jeff Selingo thread.) GPA is an important factor for admission at even mildly selective colleges.
Some would argue that the key measures of success in high school grading and subsequent college admissions (constant focus, diligence in turning in homework) advantage girls over boys. Potentially the current shift to downgrade reliance on one-off testing could further benefit girls over boys in the next few years.
https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occupations-since-1950/ has a chart showing “Male and Female Occupations in 2015”.
The occupations on the male end appear to have fewer ones where a bachelor’s degree is required or common compared to the ones on the female end (although there are still plenty of occupations on the female end where a bachelor’s degree is not required or common).
My daughter attends an all-women school, LOL. She knew what she was signing up for. That said, when she was looking at schools, the majority that she was interested in (SLACs) were skewed toward a female majority.
As part of the college search for my two oldest kids, we put together a spreadsheet in Excel that listed data for all of the schools they were interested in. One of the columns was for sex ratio, and like all of the data in the spreadsheet, the ratios were color coded: green for the ideal value (sex ratios between 50/50 and 55/45), yellow for less desirable values (between 55/45 ad 60/40) and red for values that we had concerns about (60/40 or worse). Since most of the schools on the lists (including the ones they wound up attending) were in the green category, neither kid said much about sex ratios during the application process, but from the few comments they did make I suspect it would have been a tie breaker if the choice had come down to a green school and a red one. And believe at least one school was dropped from the list entirely because of a 70/30 ratio.
Chiming in late to say that when I was in high school I was painfully shy and certainly never had a boyfriend. So the sex ratio of the school was important to me b/c I figured I’d tilt the odds in my favor. Of course, that was back in the day when there were more boys than girls going to college. (And, the school I attended had a ratio of 60-40, with more men). Worked for me 
In my earlier post, I mentioned that at highly selective colleges the overall average gender balance was 52% female / 48% male – both among applicants and entering students. If you look at all 4-year colleges, rather than just selective ones, then the numbers are similar – approximately 52% female / 48% male, as summarized below.
High School Graduates – 49.8% female / 50.2% male
Recent Grad: 2-Year College Enrollees – 50.9% female / 49.1% male
Recent Grad: 4-Year College Enrollees – 51.6% female / 48.4% male
I expect you are referring to specific colleges on your list that have larger discrepancies, rather than the overall average. Many colleges are far off from this average – some with gender skewed towards women and some with gender skewed towards men. Colleges that are not highly selective have limited options to try to balance genders, so the college gender balance tends to follow the application gender balance.
In general, colleges with a large portion of students enrolled in engineering/CS are skewed in towards of men, unless they are selective enough to balance genders during admission. Military and maritime schools also have a severe skew. Examples include:
Florida Polytech – 87% male
Virginia Military – 87% male
Mass Maritime – 86% male
LACs without much engineering/CS, religious colleges, and colleges with high URM enrollment tend to be skewed towards women, unless they are selective enough to balance genders. Nursing schools often have a severe skew towards women. Examples include:
St. Elizabeth Nursing – 95% women
Hebrew Theological – 80% women
Sarah Lawrence – 73% women
Howard – 69% women
As I mentioned in my earlier post, the total number of recent high school grads entering college has a decent balance between genders (source = https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_302.10.asp?current=yes ). The overall average at 4-year colleges appears to be 52% female / 48% male.
It’s not that the males are not enrolling in college. Instead it’s more male students who do enroll are less likely to complete college and graduate after enrolling, and average longer times to graduate. These effects are magnified among URMs Some example stats are below.
Average 4-year College Graduation Rate at 4-Year Colleges
Overall – 48.4% Female / 38.2% Male
Black – 28.0% Female / 18.1% Male
The reasons for the difference in graduation rate are multifaceted. One factor is that in general women average superior academic performs at all levels, ranging from elementary school to college. This superior academic performance is reflected in being less likely to withdraw for academic reasons. Another factor is men feeling more societal pressure to withdraw from college for financial reasons, such as feeling pressure to focus on job over college. Another factor is men are more likely to pursue engineering and other programs that average longer graduation times (for both genders).
I do love this quote!
This seems relevant:
Related to @ucbalumnus’s post - the price that women who want to work pay for not having a degree is likely higher. While the pay difference is smaller for women and men without degrees, a woman with a degree is more likely to actually work. So while 72% of all men who did not finish high school, and 82% of men who did, but do not have a college degree, are working, the numbers for women are 39% and 63%. For people with bachelor degrees, it’s 91% of the men versus 83% of the women.
So it seems that, even in the 21st century, education is often the key to financial independence for women.
Unfortunately, the wage gap just increases with educational attainment.
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Some thoughts. First, I think that on the whole over the past 20-30 years we have encouraged young women to go to college more than we have young men. In areas where women are in the minority we see groups specifically designed to to encourage women in specific fields (the Society of Women Engineers for example). I don’t see those types of organizations for men as much.
Second, I think men are choosing other careers rather than going to college. The aforementioned trades is one. Another is the military. Men are not as interested on the whole as women to consider liberal arts degrees as they are no longer considered a general pathway to employment like they were in the 60’s and 70’s. Many of these opportunities are available to women, however, on the whole they are not paths that interest many and they on not encouraged to take those paths.
There is a lot that’s been written about how the male-female ratios (note that these stats don’t necessarily speak to gender and also doesn’t equate to sexual orientation) can significantly impact heterosexual dating culture on campuses.
Apparently, on campuses where there are significantly larger numbers of women than men, hook-up culture is dominant vs. campuses where there are larger numbers of men on which there tends to be more coupling/long-term relationships.
Your daughters were fortunate to find boyfriends with similar interest in being part of a couple, etc - that may be separate and apart from the general dating culture, however.
As others noted, there are more women than men at most colleges and that’s also written about a lot. In one article I read, they showed a table looking at enrollment historically. The last time there weren’t more female college students than male is in the late 1970s.
In terms of schools where there are more men, yes to military institutes but also in the engineering and science centric schools. CalTech is a good example, but so is far less prestigious Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
Partial list of schools w/high percentages of male-to-female students:
MIT
Caltech
Purdue University (main campus)
Georgia Tech
Berklee School of Music
Juilliard School
Bentley University
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Arts
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rochester Institute of Technology
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Illinois Institute of Technology
Wentworth Institute of Technology
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Colorado School of Mines
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Pennsylvania State University - Wilkes Barre
Missouri University of Science & Technology
Florida Institute of Technology
New York Institute of Technology
Milwaukee School of Engineering
University of Chicago
Rice University
University of Notre Dame
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
UC Santa Cruz
Pennsylvania State University
Virginia Tech
Case Western Reserve University
Texas A&M University, College Park
University of Texas at Dallas
Oregon State University
University of Maryland, College Park
California Polytechnic University - San Luis Obispo
Drexel University
Clemson University
Texas Tech
University of Utah
University of Maine
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Iowa State University of Science and Technology
Kansas State University
University of Colorado, Boulder
Oregon Institute of Technology
Even numbers
Yale University
Princeton University
Ohio State University
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
University of California, San Diego
Arizona State University
Carnegie Mellon
Santa Clara University
Almost even numbers
Columbia University
Dartmouth University
Harvard University
Stanford University
Northeastern University
That said, my understanding is that there can be problems for women at these kinds of schools - sexist attitudes that they constantly need to push against that’s less of a thing at say a liberal arts school.
Plus, I always keep in mind that the ratio says nothing about availability. A friend who attended Carnegie Mellon let me know that in his opinion many of his fellow guy classmates weren’t actually “dateable.” And I’m also aware that some portion of the men at a school will not opt into dating at all for cultural or religious reasons and have other means of finding a partner.