My D will be applying to several techy schools (in EE) where the m/f ratio is around 70/30. I imagine the schools would like to see more balanced ratios. Do schools try to fix this problem by admitting more women, offering them higher merit, or a little of both? Or maybe they are gender-blind and hope it will all work out in the end. I’d love to know the arcane arts involved in making these decisions.
At UW-Madison, women in engineering majors are eligible for scholarships that go to students who are underrepresented in engineering.
My daughter was in a huge minority of women engineering students at her school. She didn’t get a dime in additional aid. So on that YMMV by school.
Many schools will give an edge to female engineering applicants wor admission, but not all. Again YMMV depending on the school.
Olin and rpi I think.
Olin admitted 114 students for the Class of 2020, 57% of which were female.
http://www.olin.edu/news-events/2016/olin-offers-admission-the-class-2020/
There isn’t a cut and dry answer. Some assume that girls will be offered a bunch of money if they choose eng’g. Some schools may offer a bit of merit to encourage enrollment, but I doubt it would be much. Those schools pretty much accept that they will be lopsided. Schools know that the male/female ratios in eng’g will be lopsided for a long time, maybe forever…simply because of interest.
I was surprised when an aquaintance’s DD applied to Georgia Tech with a 35 ACT, NMF, and Val of her class…and got NOTHING from GT. She went to Bama for nearly free.
If you’re looking for large merit, then apply to the schools that give it for your DD’s stats.
Thanks for the input! Now I’m thinking “possibly but it may not be much and don’t count on any.” I’ll just look at gender-based merit as a nice extra if it materializes. At most of D’s schools (current list of 14) she is very near or above 75%. Three of those are safeties in terms of admissions and cost, so panic is averted. A few she is around 50% and a couple of reaches around 25%.
At my school you get a $20,000 scholarship. But we’re extremely lopsided.
You are me last year. I don’t think D got better merit scholarships for being female. As you research, this is one of my favorite sites for a break-down of a variety stats for JUST engineering students:
Not-so-fun-fact: a little over 19% of undergraduate engineering degrees are awarded to women. This number has remained steady for at least a dozen years.
<<<<
At my school you get a $20,000 scholarship. But we’re extremely lopsided.
<<<<
@CourtneyThurston Is that automatically given to every female that enrolls??
At Florida tech (75% male/25% female) the merit money is given by gpa/scores/rank, and I don’t think it matters one bit if you are female or male… There might be more need based money for females, but I doubt it. I really don’t think they give much if any of a push on admission either. You either have the stats or you don’t.
There is also the Society of Women Engineers which gives scholarships, and you can apply from high school through grad school.
I don’t know if schools that are lopsided care all that much about the imbalance. At DD’s school, it seems they just let things work themselves out. It is pretty racially balance with 30%+ international student, about 60% white (and many of the international students are white), about 30% of domestic student from Florida. It just works out. Colorado school of mines was only 10% female for many years, and is higher now, but I don’t know that there is any push to make it more balanced. The service academies are pretty unbalanced and it’s been that way for 40 years.
@twoinanddone, I do wonder if it would be different at private schools than publics. My understanding (could be wrong) is that publics focus more on stats than privates. Luckily D is looking mostly at schools where her stats are very good. The racial balance at your D’s school is nice. Most of the tech schools we visited were very white.
Anyway, I hope more girls will go into STEM fields with or without a possible merit incentive. We just need to start encouraging them way earlier than college!
@mom2collegekids Yep
Florida Tech is private, Colorado School of Mines is public. Both seem to treat everyone the same.
Private schools can do whatever they want with their private money.
I thought about asking DD to apply to Clarkson and Illinois Inst of Tech to get some more data points on this. She was willing to apply, but we decided against it for various reasons.
It did seem like a 4:1 m:f ratio at a private school resulted in some fairly aggressive aid. Not so much at a public also with a 4:1 ratio. I’ll always wonder about Clarkson and IIT, though.
@50N40W, aggressive aid would sure be nice! D had IIT on her list, but removed it because it had so many grad students. She’ll definitely apply to Clarkson. We visited and both really liked it as a possible fit for her. I think she should get nice merit aid there anyway based on her stats.
@snoozn, Don’t know what your limits are, but Rose Hulman seemed eager to address the imbalance.
edit: DD preferred UAH & MI Tech to Rose. Neither offered her anything extra special, but both were pretty good. I’ve worked with a lot of Tech and Rose grads and a couple from UAH. I’m comfortable with her decision.
You might look at New Mexico Tech, which used to have the same sort of issue. Don’t know if they’re trying extra hard to correct that.
My D applied to Rose Hulman and my S went to MiTech. Rose tried but in the end was not affordable. She probably got more aid than if she was male but it was still pretty (very) expensive. D did not apply to MTU but S (and his fiancé) loved their time there. And have really great jobs.
We found that D was accepted to schools she probably would not have been had she been male but that she wasn’t offered any (or much) more scholarships. We found for our family, she was accepted to a school that meets need and that was our best option.
@50N40W and @deb922, Rose-Hulman is on D’s list and I’m pretty sure she’ll apply. I hate their website though (at least the ECE dept). They have a concentration area that sounds like it might be good, but well under half of the faculty members have links that show anything about their research area interests. I think D will just have to email the dept head… Mini-rant over. MI Tech was on the list and taken off for reasons I don’t remember. I’m not sure we ever looked at NM Tech, so I’ll check that out.