<p>Last year 31% of the male applicants were accepted, vs 27% of the females… What percent differential is there in those stats? Even so, BC is a little more than 53% female. </p>
<p>Not as big of a differential as one sees at Wm and Mary, U Richmond, Swarthmore, Connecticut College, and certainly schools like Skidmore and Vassar, but it is a significant difference. I agree the sports scene helps BC as does the Business school, but still when you are looking at accept rates below a third, evey percentage point has impact.</p>
<p>I’m curious as to what the breakdown is this year.</p>
<p>Huh? May I refer you to Simpson’s Paradox for a discussion of the statistics when one has gender-dominant programs. (Cal Stats Prof. Pisani has a wonderful explanation of its applicability.)</p>
<p>And then think about the qualified high school grads…females tend to have higher GPAs, so 53% should not be surprising, at least it is not to me. (A 50:50 ratio at most colleges would indicate clear gender bias to me.)</p>
<p>btw: UC Berkeley, with strong STEM and Eng programs, also matriculates 53% women. Is that a college short on male applicants?</p>
<p>Females have have higher GPAs, right, but they get accepted at 27%. The males at 31%. That 's about 12% difference is it not, in accept rates. Which pool would you say is the better one to be in. Look at the common data sets and the Naviance and you will also see that the females have better stats. There are also more of them applying. It’s a pretty clear bias towards males, but not as bad as at many other Catholic schools where they are really having trouble keeping it close to a 40/60 ratio even. </p>
<p>I don’t know UC Berkeley’s breakdown and whether they even bother with looking at gender for admissions. There are schools that do not worry, because with the law of large numbers, and looking at their pool, they know the chance are good that they will be fine. That isn’t the case at BC. it is specifically named in several articles as a school where some deliberate finnagling needs to be done to maintain the rations. You can tell by looking at the breakdowns of test scores between the genders.</p>
<p>Also look up articles about schools where preference is given for admissions of males, and you’ll see that BC does come up as an example. It’s not as extreme as at some schools as I mentioned earlier but yes, they do give males a bit of nudge in the process, just as schools of engineering more avidly seek females and will give preference for gender there. It’s pretty much known here in this area where BC is a very hot school that the guys have a good 10% margin for admissions.</p>
<p>The NCES navigator has data for Fall 2012 applicants per gender at BC
[College</a> Navigator - Boston College](<a href=“College Navigator - Boston College”>College Navigator - Boston College)
Male applicants 14,642
Female applicants 19,419
So 43% of the applicants are male, and 57% female in 2012. It will be interesting to see if that changes in 2013. </p>
<p>The student body is 53% female and 47% male, and I would guess that they purposely accept males at a higher rate to keep the ratio as close as it is.</p>
<p>Speaking as the parent of both an S and a D, I know that writing an additional essay would have been a lot more likely to discourage my S than to discourage my D from submitting a particular application.</p>
<p>Thanks, Saccchi. It’s been my observation too, that an extra essay would be more likely to discourage a male than a female at that age. I would love to see what the breakdown was for this year. To have a 25% decrease in applications is going to hurt but if the decrease is concentrated among the males who are already about 25% fewer in number in terms of applying looking at previous years stats, can wreak havoc on the numbers. </p>
<p>It was 26% fewer EA apps, not over all, am I right? Overall would be a real problem IMO.</p>
<p>Just checked and found that is an overall decrease. Whooiee. I am now very interested in what is going to happen here. Definitely the year to have applied to BC. The accept rate is going to have to be at 40% or so with those numbers. If there are fewer males applying and BC wants to maintain that ratio, the male accept rate could be as high 50% if the males were the ones heavily causing the decrease.</p>
<p>While it is true that BC is considered by many to be a BU school for Ivy and ND, and that the ability to process over 30k of student applications is utter crazy and overwhelming, BC has another important issue that drastically cuts into the student yield (% of accepted students that enroll). Indirectly, by cutting back on total numer of applications, BC also helps its student yield number, which is quite poor. The cheif reason for this is BC’s committment to wealth distribution. Half of the students pay 57K per year and in effect subsidize the education of the remaining half of the students including the athletes of its awful football program. BC should try improving lacrosse team or perhaps field a competitive fencing program, but that’s a different story. If you own a 250K home and your family income is 150K and with two kids in college, you are expected to dish out 57K for BC. That is utter nonsense!! My child did not attend BC, not because she did not want to attend, but there was greater value at another school. </p>
<p>No school is worth 57K.
My undergraduate tutition was $1000/yr at SUNY Potsdam, a much better school than BC will ever be.</p>
<p>wealthtax, I too attended Potsdam … I was OOS and spent about $1,500/yr. It really was a great school. Probably not as good of a deal now for an OOS student!</p>
<p>My sister is on the admission committee of a private (and very popular) college. What people don’t take into consideration is that colleges consider the fact that they admitted 10-15 of applicants from your HS and only 1 attended. The others applied just to “see” if they could get accepted. The college takes not and may be as ready to accept as many seniors in following years. One larger NJ HS had 37 students accepted 4 years ago and only 5 said yes. As a result, my sister’s college has become more selective about accepting students from that school. There is nothing wrong with having 2or 3 “safety” schools or “reaches”, but 12+ applications usually signifies greed or insecurity. Please consider the fact that if you apply with NO intention of attending, you take a spot from someone who may really consider this a top choice.</p>
<p>Sry wt, but with just a few key strokes, you would immediately find out that half of students at nearly every private college are full pay. Heck at some privates, more than 2/3rds are full pay.</p>
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<p>Given the above facts, there are thousands that disagree with you.</p>
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<p>Umm, not correct. According to the CollegeBoard finaid calculator, such a student would receive ~$25k in grant aid.</p>
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<p>Congrats on finding a better fit – which includes financial fit for your family.</p>
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<p>And the lowest-ranked, which means one of the less selective of the meets-full-need colleges.</p>
<p>I like Stonybrook and many public universities and they are generally a much better value than BC if you simply want an education. If you want an education related to engineering, then Boston College is certainly not the school to pick (they don’t have an engineering program).</p>
<p>But college is often about a lot of other things.</p>
<p>For some reason, Boston College is big on writing skills, even for men (I work in engineering where the communication skills aren’t always the greatest but they don’t have to be most of the time because the rest of us usually get it). So it may be a good place to attend if you’re looking for other students that can write and can generally communicate.</p>
<p>It’s a very nice campus. I thught that the campus was very nice in the 1980s and then they went and spent huge amounts of money updating a number of buildings which I thought was somewhat extravagant. That said, the grounds are beautiful, the library is huge and nice and I understand that students from other Boston-area universities use it, and I’ve always found the campus to be a safe area.</p>
<p>It is located in Boston and Newton. Newton is a wealthy suburb of Boston and is notable for excellent public transportation. There is one MBTA stop very close to BC and two stops that are about a mile away so it is very easy to get into Boston or Cambridge for work, study or play.</p>
<p>BC was more of a middle-class school when I went there though there were lots of wealthy kids there too. They had a lot of IRC middle-class kids from the Boston area. In more recent times, it feels like a place for the kids of the wealthy. I felt a marked difference in the 2000s in students - looking at their cars, clothes, and electronic devices. If parents want an environment with a lot of other students that are fairly well-off, either for the pool of potential spouses, business contacts or friends into adulthood, Boston College may be a good pick to meet those needs.</p>
<p>Is it worth $57K? It depends on your circumstances and what you’re willing to pay. I offered to pay for BC for our son and he picked a State University instead. I’d say that the state university provided a much better education for his specific major but that’s because BC doesn’t have an engineering program and BC’s version is more business than engineering-focused.</p>
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<p>Bashing wealth is popular today. I think that wealth is generally relative. Espespecially if you have the means to attend college.</p>