Does W&M discriminate against girls?

Colleges and Universities A-Z College of William and Mary
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<p>@wmpllz- I am a girl who has applied to W&M this year, and I am very interested in this debate, regardless of whether I am actively participating in it. </p>

<p>W&M is the only school that both meets my academic and financial standing, and I would be very upset if the reason I didn’t get in was because I am female. </p>

<p>So for the parents here to discuss this topic, whether or not they have kids applying, is of interest to me.</p>

<p>So shove it. If you didn’t want to talk about this topic, then you didn’t have to click on the thread.</p>

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<p>Here’s another very interesting article on why what William and Mary appears to be doing is so bad for women:</p>

<p>[How</a> Colleges Short-Change Women The Quick and the Ed](<a href=“http://www.quickanded.com/2007/07/how-colleges-short-change-women.html]How”>http://www.quickanded.com/2007/07/how-colleges-short-change-women.html)</p>

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<p>@novaparent: At the William and Mary information session, the representative actually told us about the regional quotas: about 1/3 from NoVA, about 1/3 from the rest of Virginia, and about 1/3 from out-of-state. I highly doubt she was lying. As for the rest of your post, I have already stated my views, and I do not care to repeat myself.</p>

<p>@coase: I’ve had several friends (both genders) apply to top engineering schools. All I’m saying is that it was easier for girls to get into those schools than boys with virtually the same scores/grades/qualifications.</p>

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<p>Drama-songbird, with due respect, “quota” is a pretty loaded word that a college admissions representative isn’t likely to use. I don’t think she lied; I think you misunderstood her.</p>

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<p>You’re right. She probably didn’t use the exact word “quota”. But let’s not argue semantics here. She DID say that generally, each incoming class is composed of about 1/3 NoVA, 1/3 Virginia, and 1/3 out-of-state. She made it sound as if the classes were <em>intentionally</em> chosen to be that way. If that’s what the classes really end up being composed of, it doesn’t matter whether the 1/3s-thing is OFFICIAL policy or just an unwritten rule-of-thumb. The end result is the same. </p>

<p>Anyway, it would have been pretty hard to misunderstand something like that. Just saying.</p>

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<p>It’s more than just a question of semantics because “quota” implies a precision and type of discrimination/preference that just doesn’t exist. In fact, more than 1/3 of the entering class is from out of state (as was just reported in yesterday’s Washington Post) and 43 percent of the in state class last year was from NOVA (data that you can find on schev). </p>

<p>What the rep was talking about was targets, not quotas, some of which are dictated by state law (out of state enrollment, for example) that are without question fair and legal. What I’ve been talking about is another thing entirely: an admissions policy across the board where, year after year after year, well over 40 percent of the boys get in while fewer than 30 percent of the girls do. In a fairly recent article, the dean of admissions lamely argued that the difference can be explained because, while female applicants in general have better grades, male applicants on average scored 20 points higher on the SAT. Can anyone seriously argue that a mere 20 points on the SAT should trump better grades, or at least trump better grades so much as to justify this much of a difference in admission rates? Of course not – at most they should simply cancel each other out. In any event, William and Mary can’t have it both ways, arguing on the one hand that it employs a “holistic” admissions policy that takes many factors, academic and non-academic, into account, while arguing on the other hand that 20 points on the SAT can make all the difference, even if a girl has better grades.</p>

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<p>

So you want to tell schools how highly they should rank certain features of an application? Schools are free to use whatever metrics they like when deciding admissions.</p>

<p>Does W&M have a gender selection bias? I’m sure it does, but I doubt it is very significant at all. Keep in mind that universities have a vested interest in diversity of all sorts. Studies show that a racial diverse atmosphere increases learning. Colleges also want to make their school seem desirable. That includes the Male:Female ratio, class size, coed or single sex residences, regional representation, and the like. Some schools have to do different things to alter these to make them how they feel would be in the best interest of their university. Girls understand that more of them apply and less of them get in. Much of this can be explained away by other factors, but it in end they apply nonetheless. We all understand the dilemma when they say that “there are enough qualified applicants from NoVa to fill the entire school.” I don’t really see this as a significant debate at all. The Prima Facie has long been present and open.</p>

<p>

Not much of one anymore =P</p>

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<p>Sorry, here<em>to</em>help, but your post isn’t living up to your name. </p>

<ol>
<li><p>Schools are not, in fact, free to use “whatever metrics they like when deciding admissions.” They’re obligated to follow the law – and, for all the reasons that I’ve outlined before, I think there’s good reason at least to wonder if they are – and beyond that it would just be nice if they told the truth. William and Mary is free to use whatever legal metrics it wants as part of its “holistic” process, but it should be clear and consistent in telling applicants what the metrics are. To say, on the one hand, that small differences in test scores don’t make a big difference, but then go on to justify huge disparities in admission rates for boys versus girls by pointing ONLY to small differences in test scores (while acknowledging at the same time that girls’ grades are better!) is, for want of a better word, completely lame. </p></li>
<li><p>Sure, “girls understand that more of them apply and less of them get in,” because this is a FACT and girls aren’t stupid. But this doesn’t mean that girls – or all girls, at least – think that it’s fair. </p></li>
<li><p>That “there are enough qualified applicants from Nova to fill the entire school” is irrelevant. Sure there are, but there are also enough qualified applicants from other regions in the state as well as from out of state to fill up the class. William and Mary could not fairly fill the class with Nova kids at the complete exclusion of other applicants, because the distinction between the nova pool and the other pools are not as clear cut as you suggest. </p></li>
<li><p>Finally, you may dismiss this as not “significant debate,” but the fact that there have been numerous articles in the national press on this very subject (many of which identify William and Mary as the most obvious example of apparent gender bias in state college admissions in the entire country), and the fact that this thread has already been viewed nearly 1100 times is pretty good evidence that many others think it is.</p></li>
</ol>

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<p>Personally, I take it as a given that most every school seeks to have a representative and diverse student body for the best experience for those that attend. When some particular segment applies in numbers far out of proportion to what’s representative of society at-large, then there’s almost certainly going to be some “bias” in selection. I’m quite sure that UVA, for example, could be filled with rich, white kids from NOVA suburbs - but that’s not considered healthy or desirable for the school in the long run. </p>

<p>If you want “fairness”, why not a lottery? Just choose applicants regardless of race, sex, income, scholastic achievement, SAT scores, just put their names in a hopper, and whoever gets their name drawn is in. That’d be “fair.”</p>

<p>It would also be destructive to the quality of the school. </p>

<p>No part of college admissions is completely “fair” - do you think every legacy admitted to Harvard is the best-qualified to be there? </p>

<p>W&M would seem easy to pick on because of the large disparity in the ratio of M:F applicants. Yet Virginia Tech shows similar disparities in the opposite direction, where men outnumber female applicants, yet females have greater admission percentages. </p>

<p>So, I have to ask, have you started a thread on the VT forum asking “Does VT discriminate against boys?”</p>

<p>If not, why not? Are you discriminating in what you care about?</p>

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<p>Squiddy, fairness doesn’t mean having a lottery. It means not taking gender into account. As the dean of admissions at NYU has said, colleges shouldn’t be engaged in social engineering – the best person should win, not the best man. </p>

<p>As for Tech, I’d be happy to start a thread if the numbers supported it. But they don’t. Female admit rates at Tech are in the high 60s, while male rates are in the mid 60s – a minor difference of only a few points that’s probably largely due to the fact that (1) more boys than girls are applying to the more competitive engineering programs than the liberal arts program, which sees the reverse and (2) Tech admissions are more by the numbers and less “holistic” than William and Mary’s (Tech doesn’t even require essays or recommendations, I don’t think), and girls generally have better numbers than boys.</p>

<p>William and Mary’s admit rate for boys is consistently in the mid 40s while for girls it’s in the high 20s. You won’t find another state college in America that even comes close to such a gender disparity. Find me one and I’ll concede your point.</p>

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<p>1) The law doesn’t state that the SAT score should be weighted equally to the GPA, nor anything even remotely close to that. There are no guidelines, that I know about, for admissions other than to say that race can and should be taken into consideration and that no more than 1/3rd of a class may be from out of state.</p>

<p>2) By extension do NoVa people think it is fair that their technically superior applicants are not admitted due to the desire to have more students from underrepresented south-west Virginia?</p>

<p>3) I do believe evidence would show that you are incorrect.</p>

<p>4) There is a lot of things in the national press. I hear people talking about other minutiae, but not this.</p>

<p>5) How about you address my points about vested interest? Do you think that the admissions office thinks that W&M would be a better school if they restricted themselves to a quota based on the number of applicants of a certain gender?</p>

<p>6) It seems to me that holisticity (or lack therein) would drive numbers the other way for Tech. There is a glaring disconnect in your logic.</p>

<p>7) What are you trying to argue, anyway?</p>

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<p>

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<p>there is no data that shows W&M is holding female applicants to higher standards.</p>

<p>If W&M finds 4000 more male applicants who have a 2.7 GPA and 1000 on their SATs to apply next year, would you say that the standards for males went up because their acceptance rate went down? I wouldn’t.</p>

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<p>C’mon, Soccerguy, you’re smarter than that. You’re assuming that William and Mary’s female applicant pool is not only much larger, but also much less qualified, than the male pool - that thousands of women are applying to William and Mary with 2.7s and 1000s - and you don’t have to see the numbers to know this isn’t true. William and Mary simply does not have the kind of reputation that leads large numbers of subpar students of either gender to apply. Rather, it has the kind of reputation and programs that lead large numbers of very smart women to apply, but smaller numbers of smart men. This presents a gender balance problem to the admission committee, which (unlike U-Va, UNC, and other competitor state schools) they handle by putting not only a thumb, but a fist, on the scale in favor of men.</p>

<p>Here<em>to</em>Help, I can’t say I disagree with much of your post because it frankly doesn’t make any sense to me. But I can say that I disagree with your point 6. Schools that don’t practice holistic admissions and go largely if not solely by the numbers are going to admit more women than men because girls generally do better in high school than boys. This isn’t my opinion, by the way – it’s a fact.</p>

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<p>Great. Ignore arguments. That’s a great way to find the truth in the world. And you are extrapolating data in a fashion that is unsupported, just as soccerguy is. The only difference is that soccerguy is doing it to show that we don’t know the actual values, and that there could be great variability within the applications that you fallaciously assume away. And just because someone doesn’t release numbers doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy, if that wasn’t obvious.</p>

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<p>Having read the back and forth here - and drama-songbird, you write very well for a HS student - I went back to the very start:</p>

<p>novaparent:
From looking at the common data set for the last several years it seems like a lot more girls apply to William and Mary than boys but not a whole lot more girls get admitted. Why is that? It’s the same pattern, year after year after year. Are they discriminating against girls to make sure there’s a decent gender balance in each class? </p>

<p>NP, it’s clear in your original post that you already decided what the answer must be, and it appears you’ve shown no interest in other points of view. </p>

<p>Let me propose one you don’t seem to have considered: as a public Ivy and a top-notch LAC, W&M does a very good job of marketing itself to HS girls and their parents. That drives up the female applicant pool. Given a fixed count on the number of students accepted, that in turn drives down the overall female acceptance rate.</p>

<p>That is, you are blaming W&M for being appealing to women.</p>

<p>As a W&M parent, here’s why my DD found it so appealing -
its academic rigor - she’s a student first
the arts programs - she’s already performed in a concert there
the professors - all full professors for instructors in her first semester
the area - loves CW
the sense of safety on the campus
the diversity
the location
the group - being surrounded by other girls like her
the cost, even as an OOS, was significantly less than any Ivy.</p>

<p>Are all girls like that? Of course not. But they find each other at W&M and then they tell their Facebook friends in HS about this place. That drives up the demoninator in your equation, which drives down the overall acceptance rate. </p>

<p>Now, you are free to interpret the ratio as a problem.<br>
But in so doing, you are missing the entire point.</p>

<p>Best wishes in your college search. I hope your daughter finds the place where she can best succeed and excel.</p>

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<p>

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<p>Maybe that’s the problem - you think admission is a contest to be won. It’s not. </p>

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<p>Depends on your pov - it would give the kids who grow up in poverty with uncaring or absent parents, attend failing schools where most of the student body are behind grade-level, and who hold full-time jobs while in high school to help put food on the family table - a lottery would be <em>more</em> than fair to them. Such a kid certainly can’t compete with a rich, white, suburbanite from Langley or Stone Bridge with their SAT tutors and PSAT Prep Courses. </p>

<p>Admission to a particular college isn’t about “fair”, it’s not a prize to be won, and schools need to be left to make their own judgments about what will make up their “best” matriculating class. </p>

<p>You mention “social engineering” - and truth be told, I mostly agree with you, that my instinct is that admissions <em>should</em> be “blind”, and not based on anything other than achievement, that race, sex, national origin, none of these should be considered in admissions. </p>

<p>But I’m pretty certain that W&M, like most, believes that a balanced admissions class is necessary, and that admitting females in proportion to their applications numbers would result in even greater imbalances as males would perceive it to be a “girls school.” As the imbalance got worse, soon many females would stop applying as well as they don’t want to attend a “girls schol”, and as applications drop, so does quality. Soon the College is a second-rate “girls school” - is this the result you’re after?</p>

<p>A balanced admissions class is clearly necessary for W&M’s future, despite any possible inequalities that may occur* - W&M needs to plan for existing long after the class of 2014 has graduated. W&M’s only “sin” is that they are trying to achieve a balanced class despite the fact that, lately, female applicants badly outnumber male applicants. This may not be true in 10 years time, the situation may be reversed. </p>

<p>The alternative, which is what you seem to be heading towards, is to try and legislate admissions, such as the moronic proposal in the GA that anyone who earns a 4.0 GPA would be automatically admitted to the Virginia public college of their choice. Which ignores the fact that a 4.0 is the new “B”, with students graduating with 4.4 and 4.5 GPA’s these days, and that a 4.0, by itself, doesn’t mean much (a student can get a 4.0 average never having taken a “Honors”, IB, or AP-level course.)</p>

<p>The basic problem here is that, even if you’re right, any alternatives you can name would almost certainly yield a result that would be worse than the situation you think exists. Just like the various populist legislative proposals put forth, like the “4.0” bill, or the “Increase in-state admissions percentages” bill, such meddling can usually be shown to make the situation worse, not better.</p>

<ul>
<li>There’s no direct evidence of any discrimination, but I’ll just agree with your assumption that it does, because it doesn’t change my position.</li>
</ul>

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<p>shuffler, you argue that

</p>

<p>That makes perfect sense. Alas, it does not address novaparent’s point, which is not about the level per se but the difference. In order to counter her claim you would need to argue that W&M’s marketing attracted a disproportionate number of weak female applicants. Then, the difference in acceptance rates would be explained by a weaker female applicant pool. </p>

<p>We all comprehend the arguments in favor of gender balance. A 70-30 ratio would be less attractive to many students, male and female alike. Some people think that should not be considered in admissions, but many think it should. Some people think that W&M is lowering standards for male applicants, but many think they are not. Of course, if W&M continues to beat UVa in football, these issues may soon be moot. </p>

<p>Here<em>to</em>Help, I missed several of your points, too. Perhaps if you quoted the passages to which you were responding your points would become clearer.</p>

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<p>coase:
In order to counter her claim you would need to argue that W&M’s marketing attracted a disproportionate number of weak female applicants. </p>

<p>I think you need only assume that the distribution of the female candidates (in terms of the strength of their application) is the same as the distribution of the strength of the male candidates.</p>

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<p>Shuffler, I am hardly “blaming William and Mary for being appealing to women.” What I am blaming William and Mary for is being a college that is attractive to women but which tilts the scale in favor of men under the guise of holistic admissions. And, again, just so we are clear, this isn’t about my children, all of whom have graduated and have attended or are attending their first choice colleges (and none of whom was particularly interested in William and Mary). My only interest in this subject is as a Virginia taxpayer and citizen who questions William and Mary’s bizarre admissions statistics, which appear to point to a potentially unfair and illegal advantage for men. </p>

<p>Can anyone offer an alternative thesis as to why William and Mary stands alone among selective state colleges in its region (UNC, JMU, UVA, MW, and St. Mary’s of Maryland) in having grossly disproportionate admission rates for women versus men? I’d be real interested in hearing one.</p>

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<p>If the distributions of quality are the same for male and female applicants, and if admissions decisions are based solely on this quality measure, the acceptance rates for males and females will be identical. (Of course, “quality” may not be well-defined, but that is a separate matter.) You would then end up with a pool of admits whose male-female ratio is exactly equal to the applicant pool male-female ratio. For instance, if there are two female applicants for every male applicant at each quality level, you will end up with twice as many female admits as male, no matter where you draw the line. If even more females apply and the new applicants have the same distribution of quality, the female acceptance rate and the male acceptance rate will fall by the same amount. </p>

<p>This has been a central bone of contention on this thread. novaparent has argued that there is no reason to believe that the quality distributions are different, and argues that the acceptance rates should therefore be the same. Other posters have argued that there is no reason to believe that the distributions are the same or, if they are, the acceptance rates should differ anyway.</p>