I’ve got a Junior Son and Sophomore daughter who typically test along the same lines at the same ages.
Freshman year, they both got mail from the same group of colleges, TCU, RPI, Rice, etc. It’s clear there is a group of colleges that target freshman.
But this year, my sophomore daughter has gotten mail from multiple schools that have never contacted my son. Like today, she got a letter from Oregon saying she would likely qualify for a merit scholarship from them and they would like to send her more information on their honors college. I’m pretty confident Oregon has never sent anything to my son.
It doesn’t bother me, we’re getting more calls, mail and emails from colleges than we need.
I was just curious if it was a difference in how colleges recruit between genders. Anyone have an idea?
Typically, it is harder for females to get in than males as more women apply to college every year than men. There are exceptions at some schools and for some majors, however.
Women are underrepresented in STEM and men are underrepresented in LACs and other colleges without an engineering school (which are a lot of them, as you can imagine).
if you are a woman planning pursuing a STEM type degree you have a big advantage in terms of acceptance and merit $$ at tech type schools that have been predominantly male skewed.
Nothing wrong with that, I think a balance is worthy goal.
I always felt the heavy STEM tech schools recruited woman more. It seems they are all clamoring to increase the amount of woman on campus. I am sure they flatly deny this.
@MassDaD68 they don’t flatly deny it all. In fact if you attend any info sessions at the tech schools or big schools with emgineering/stem you’ll hear the admissions people basically begging the girls to attend and telling them how they are really trying to encourage a 50/50 ratio.
There are more (US) women heading to college than men. It is generally harder for women to get into college than men, with the exception of STEM schools or certain majors. Not STEM in general which includes many majors women are well represented in.
^ Right. These days, women are really underrepresented only in engineering, CS, math, some of the hard sciences, and maybe some quantitative fields (though I think women are reaching parity or better in some of those as well).
It depends on the school. Many small liberal arts colleges have many qualified women applicants and seek more qualified male applicants. Others school (or STEM departments) in large school have fewer women applicants and seek more women. So, the answer is not the same for every school. Best of luck.
I’d guess it has more to do with changes to their marketing strategy and budget between your two kids, and maybe differences in their stats that caused the difference.
What does it matter? All that mail is just marketing hooey. It doesn’t mean a thing in terms of whether a kid is more likely to get accepted. To call it “recruiting” is quite a stretch.
Great thoughts. Both are undecided on major, but I had wondered if it might be a related to trying to attract more women to STEM.
My son is planning to major in something in STEM, possibly Physics.
My daughter most likely won’t do anything STEM related, but on paper, she could look like a good STEM candidate.
I just found it interesting because I was pretty sure there were more women than men currently applying to college, and since their stats are almost exact on test scores (she was one point behind his 10th PSAT selection index this year for instance), so it seemed like she would be getting the exact same mail he got last year.
The only difference I could see was gender.
I was just wondering if other people had noticed the same thing.
There are far more woman-only colleges than men-only colleges. Sweet Briar is a heavy recruiter - if I’d been saving Sweet Briar material I could paper the downstairs bathroom.
iI would not put much stock in marketing mail or amounts received. Maybe your daughter’s address is on an additional marketing list. When my kids were applying to college I encouraged both to opt out of receiving marketing mail. Who reads stuff on paper, especially millennials? It all looks the same anyway. (And guess who pays for all that glossy mailing - we all do with our tuition dollars!!)