<p>"When admissions officers gather to create a freshman class, there is a large elephant in the room, wrote Jennifer Delahunty Britz, in The New York Times last week: the desire to minimize gender imbalance in their classes. Britz, the admissions dean at Kenyon College, wrote that her institution gets far more applications from women than from men and that, as a result, men are “more valued applicants.” Britz discussed a female candidate who was considered borderline by the Kenyon team but who — had she been a he — would have been admitted without hesitation.
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<pre><code>* Validation for Women’s Colleges, July 14, 2006
* New Arguments on Affirmative Action, June 21, 2006
* Closed Doors, June 19, 2006
* New Take on the Gender Gap, April 26, 2006
* The Missing Black Men, Dec. 5, 2005
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<p>Why is it important to favor male applicants? “Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive,” Britz wrote.</p>
<p>The gender gap in undergraduate enrollments is, of course, no secret in academe. Women are solidly in the majority (about 57 percent nationally) and their percentages are only expected to increase in the years ahead. The gender gap first started to show up — more than a decade ago — at liberal arts colleges, with educators guessing that men preferred larger institutions or the engineering and business programs more prevalent at universities. But recently, the gap has started to show up at flagship public universities, too: Some board members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were so stunned in May to learn that this year’s freshman class would be 58 percent female that they asked if it was time to institute affirmative action for men.</p>
<p>Chapel Hill isn’t going that route, but Kenyon is. And while Britz’s column stunned many applicants and parents and frustrated many advocates for women, its substance didn’t surprise admissions officers. While few admissions officers wanted to talk publicly about the column, the private reaction was a mix of “of course male applicants get some help” along with “did she have to share that information with the world"</p>
<p>Affirmative</a> Action for Men :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs</p>