I was looking at the Common Data Set for some of the schools my son is thinking about applying to and came across the following 2017-2018 stat for CMU, which surprised me:
Number of Male Freshman applications: 12,735
Number of Female Freshman applications: 7,762
Number of Male Freshman acceptances: 2,132
Number of Female Freshman acceptances: 2,418
That’s right, CMU received nearly 5,000 more applications from males than females but actually admitted more females than males. I understand that schools are looking for gender balance, but I had no idea that it was that much of a disadvantage to apply to CMU as a male. In any event, something to keep in mind if your son or daughter is interested in CMU.
It might have something to do with the how they do their acceptances. You have to apply to each school separately so I would imagine that more males would be applying to the CS, business, and engineering schools, while the females would be applying to theater and humanities. Females always have an advantage in the male-dominated majors so maybe that somehow evened out in the end. There was a difference of 5,000 applicants but only 300 acceptances. Don’t forget that the CS school is one of the best in the country - it rivals MIT, but there would be many more males than females applying.
The difference in acceptance rates between males and females can be quite different at “techy” schools. It can flip the other way for “artsy” schools.
CMU 17% vs 30%
MIT 6% vs 13%
Harvey Mudd 9% vs 20%
Olin 7% vs 19%
Caltech 5% vs 15%
It is easier to extract this type of data out of college navigator
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=mellon&s=all&id=211440#admsns
CMU admits by school so there can be a large variance in that dimension as well.
The School of Drama has a 3% admit rate, but they do not break it down by gender.
https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics
Yes, I know that females applying to STEM-heavy schools generally have an advantage over males because they make up a smaller percentage of the applicant pool and schools want gender balance. And yes, the Carnegie Mellon stats might be skewed a bit because more males apply to the more selective computer science and engineering schools. I think what surprised me was the scale of the disparity. 5,000 more male applicants than female out of a total applicant pool of 20,000, and you end up with more females being accepted than males. It seems to me that CMU has decided that it will do whatever it has to do to end up with a 50/50 gender split. Nothing wrong with that, but something applicants should be aware of.
I would not assume that this means the female applicant pool at CMU is weaker than the male applicant pool. Two top engineering schools we toured last year pointed out that their freshman female class scored slightly higher in the math sections of the SAT/ACT than the males. I know that in general female test takers tend to score lower in quantitative and higher in verbal sections, but I suppose their point was that top scoring math girls tend to apply en masse to their program (fewer, but very strong applicants.) Or maybe there is a difference in scores between the applicant pool and who ended up enrolling male vs female, idk.
I can tell you that my daughter would only apply to programs that had numbers approaching gender parity, so it wouldn’t surprise me if those handful of schools attracted nearly all of the top female applicants.
Still, obviously, a girl applying to a male-dominated program gets an admissions boost. Just like the boys who apply to nursing programs get a huge boost without necessarily sacrificing incoming scores and grades.
I agree that often the women who are willing to apply to a techy environment will often be the strongest math and science students. When my son was applying to CS at CMU way back in 2007 they said that they got fewer female applicants and they had less CS experience so at that time they had to look for other signs of promise like really high math SATs and math SAT subject test scores. I’ve gotten the impression that many more girls are taking at least some computer science in high school, but I know most colleges know that it’s a better atmosphere if the m/f ratio is not too skewed.
It does work both ways. My younger son who was not a math guy had better odds at Vassar than women did.
Schools such as CMU have a very large number of highly qualified female and male applicants. I just think a highly qualified male is more likely to be rejected than a highly qualified women. It does not, however, mean that by any metric, the females accepted are less qualified as compared to the males accepted.
Women make up a larger proportion of students in computer science and engineering at CMU than at most other CS and engineering programs. Here’s a link to a story about how the CMU culture encourages women to enroll: https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2016/september/undergrad-women-engineering-computer-science.html
A quote from that story: CMU has “a self-reinforcing culture that has earned CMU the top spot in recent “Steminist” rankings, and helped build balance between the sexes in fields that have stubbornly resisted the best efforts of higher education leaders and policymakers at the highest level.”
The arts and humanities only represent about 1/3 of the undergrad population at CMU.
2/3 of the population is math/sciences plus engineering and business.
Biology only represents about 1/5 of the math/science population - which is unusually small
The balance of the CMU population is skewed heavily towards majors that are not popular with women, so they have to recruit heavily to overcome the effects of “self selection” to achieve gender balance.
The quality of the recruited female applicant pool could actually be higher than the self-selected male applicant pool, but it may not suffer as much from the seemingly “random effects” that result from having a large pool of applicants with similar qualifications.
Women often apply to colleges/jobs when they definitely have all the qualifications.
Men often apply with just some of them.
So it could be that a higher percentage of women are qualified.
https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified