<p>?????????????????????????????/</p>
<p>at a lot of them, yes. check gender balances</p>
<p>Your odds are better as a male; however, you still need the credentials.</p>
<p>The only top LAC's I've heard of that have trouble attracting males are places like Vassar that were all-female colleges in the recent past. (Was Swarthmore also all-female at one point?) </p>
<p>Anyway, the other places wouldn't favor males because there would be no need for it.</p>
<p>If you look at the colleges' Common Data Sets, you can see the breakdown of number of applicants and number accepted by gender, then you can calculate if there is an advantage.</p>
<p>You know, I've heard that there are certain schools where being male is an advantage. In fact, I've heard that there is a small statistical advantage to being a male applicant at every college because there are more young women applying to college than young men these days. </p>
<p>But the fact of the numbers situation out there is that, unless there is a HUGE imbalance between the male and female population (like there is at Sarah Lawrence for instance), it doesn't make enough of a difference in any individual's case to give it much thought. The reality is that there are so many qualified applicants, of both genders, out there that a little boost in this one area is only going to make a difference to the very small number of applicants who are in that very last pile that the admissions counselors consider: the "Gee, they're great but can someone please justify giving this person an offer of admittance over this other one over here" pile. </p>
<p>Basically, as Momwaiting said, you still need the credentials.</p>
<p>"In fact, I've heard that there is a small statistical advantage to being a male applicant at every college because there are more young women applying to college than young men these days."</p>
<p>I don't think this is true at top colleges...</p>
<p>I actually think it IS true even for the top colleges and universities (at least that is what we were told when my older son was applying last year), but that in practical terms it makes no real difference because things are so absurdly competitive up there at the top.</p>
<p>Swarthmore was never a women's college. </p>
<p>There is a small boost sometimes, but I doubt it's really all that significant (except at places like Sarah Lawrence or Mary Washington).</p>
<p>Follow fireflyscout's advice. Some colleges are willing to have gender imbalance in order to enroll the strongest possible class; most, however, have admissions targets for gender, which are pretty easy to figure out if you look at a couple of year's enrollment data. The amount of advantage that this translates into varies according to how unbalanced the applicant pool is to start out with. Former women's schools sometimes have very unbalanced applicant pools even decades after going co-ed.</p>
<p>Looking at the common data sets alone won't tell you the whole story. For instance, I'm sure the Caltech admission rate for women is much higher than for men even though they don't practice AA. This is because women are less likely to apply to Caltech if they are not qualified when compared to men, so a higher percentage of females. This is what they mean by self-selection. </p>
<p>You would have to look at something like the test scores of admitted students broken down by gender to know if it's </p>
<p>BTW, even though females may have a higher graduation rate and high school performance on average, females are not more represented at the top of the bell curve. Since top universities/colleges select from the top of the bell curve, they don't need to gender balance. Do you seriously believe an ivy league college needs to have AA for males to have gender balance? I don't know much about LAC's in particular, but I can't imagine why there would be more qualified females in the applicant pool for places like Amherst, Williams, or Carleton. Unless you want to go to Vassar, I doubt the type of college that a CCer would need help getting in employs AA for males.</p>
<p>There was a recent article in USNWR about admission/gender issue. It was a few weeks ago.</p>
<p>To answer the OP, Carleton's Common Data Set for the class of 2010 shows that males were accepted at a 35.4% rate and females at a 28.6% rate.
And no, I don't buy collegealum314's argument that would imply that Carleton's male applicants were stronger than Carleton's female applicants.</p>
<p>Here's a link to an NPR story that discusses the research on the "male advantage" in college admissions.</p>
<p>Honestly? Is this really a question? Generally speaking, if you're qualified for Carleton, you'll get in. Oh, and being an URM helps quite a bit. </p>
<p>And, by the way, ** what would you do ** if being male significantly HURT your chances? Sex change? </p>
<p>[I don't mean to incite the PC-monsters of CC.com.]</p>
<p>^^I'd go to my state school (Rutgers)</p>
<p>Here's the actual story from U. S. News along with the data. The "admissions advantage" for men at Carleton in the year that they surveyed the data was relatively small, but not insignificant (2% higher acceptance rate for males than females). </p>
<p>Some schools like Vassar have applicant pools consisting only of 20% male (according to parent on CC who relayed info from Vassar admissions officer). This gives male applicants an advantage, because Vassar tries to create a class that is at least 40% male.</p>
<p>I think it is more of an advantage than this board wants to think. As rhe parent of a S and a D I have no axe to grind here. You'd be surprised at the number of colleges at which it's an advantage to be a boy in that the admit rate is higher. I was surprised at the difference at William and Mary, and this comes into play even at Brown (though probably not at other Ivies.) Girls are helped when they are math, science or engineering majors.</p>
<p>This is a real shame at schools like Vassar and Skidmore that used to exist to educate women and now may turn away qualified women to accept slightly less qualified men for gender balance (I have actually seen this operate).</p>
<p>My D responded by targeting women's colleges where interest in the Humanities would not be a liability for her, and she was thrilled to attend Barnard.</p>
<p>It's not only the gender imbalance that makes things tough for girls, esp. at LACs; as the U. S. News article points out, the girl's lane of the applicant pool is usually full of more qualified applicants than the boys' even before you take into account the imbalance in # of applicants.</p>