<p>Interesting in-depth article about how many college enrollments have an increasing percentage of females, particularly colleges without engineering programs.</p>
<p>The article also describes how Federal Civil Rights authorities have started to investigate whether colleges are discriminating against females in admissions. </p>
<p>Excerpt:</p>
<p>"Alerted by media reports that some admissions officers may be accepting less-qualified male students over female applicants, the Civil Rights Commission is investigating whether women are being discriminated against in college admissions.</p>
<p>"Everybody should feel very uncomfortable by the notion that it is more difficult for a woman to get into a college than a man," Heriot said in an interview.</p>
<p>Last year, the commission subpoenaed the admissions records of 19 colleges, including the University of Delaware and five in Pennsylvania. All but one were picked at random within different categories, including elite universities, religious schools, and historically black universities.</p>
<p>The University of Richmond was chosen after U.S News and World Report said its admission rate for men was 13 percentage points higher than for women."</p>
<p>An official of the University of Richmond had previously defended discrimination against female applicants because they have dedicated dormitories for females on one side of a lake and males on the other side of the lake, and claimed that if they didn’t maintain 50-50%, it wouldn’t balance out with their dormitory space.</p>
<p>Yeah, I don’t see what’s wrong with this. The acceptance rates can vary dramatically for the different races, yet they must be the same for the two genders?</p>
<p>More importantly “Everybody should feel very uncomfortable by the notion that it is more difficult for a woman to get into a college than a man”</p>
<p>Shouldn’t we feel more uncomfortable that some colleges have 70% women? If it were 70% men people would cry purposeful discrimination!</p>
<p>This smacks of political correctness gone too far. If they were too many men, DISCRIMINATION!</p>
<p>If colleges try to attract more men or make it harder for women to get in, DISCRIMINATION!</p>
<p>To me, it raises the questions about college readiness and academic motivations. At my S school, of the top 20 students, only 3 are boys. It has been that case since jr. high school. Outside of sports, the girls have more ECs as well. Why aren’t these boys more motivated to work hard in high school? Why aren’t they more engaged in the process? Do these males have a sense of entitlement, expecting to be able to get into selective schools even though they spent more time online playing video games instead of more organized activities? Has the writing portion of the SAT skewed the scores toward females, as the concentration on language skills are more valued over the math and reasoning skills?</p>
<p>I personally have no problem if a private school decides to build a diverse class, including gender, race, financial and geographic diversity. It is more important that these “less qualified” males still bring something to the classroom environment. Said inferior males will need to prove themselves capable of their spots in class.</p>
<p>But note that the feds are NOT examining the “widespread” female admissions preferences to Engineering-tech colleges or to undergrad biz programs…</p>
Why don’t you look at the score distributions for males and females in the highest percentiles. Males still outscore females significantly.
They’re bringing the gender ratio closer to 1:1, which is supposed to be “good” for the student body as a whole. Isn’t that exactly what race-based AA is about?
<p>All I can say is that my daughter is not interested in attending a college that has significantly more women than men. I suspect she is not alone.</p>
<p>My Ds were also not interested in any colleges with a 60F-40M (or greater) ratio, and eliminated those colleges from their lists. I wondered, though, if enough females did this, would the ratio correct itself? (I’m not a math person).</p>
I don’t think so, because those schools with 50-50 ratios probably do have to suppress female admissions to achieve the ratio. The oddity here is that the “disadvantaged” group probably generally prefers that they do this.</p>
<p>Yes, the male-female ratios over time should be self-adjusting because over time more males will be attracted to colleges with high female percentages, and more females will cross colleges off their list with high percentages. (My son’s eyes lit up when he looked at some of the high female percentages of a couple of the colleges he was looking at.)</p>
<p>However, I understand that discrimination on the basis of gender is illegal for any college that receives Federal funds (which is all but Grove City College I believe).</p>
<p>It is natural that a college would try to achieve gender balance if they have applicants of approximately equal credentials. However, if a college is purposefully picking less qualified males, I have a serious problem with that. It is particularly bad when a college is trying to maintain 50%-50% parity (which the U. of Richmond is accused of), as opposed to being happy with what might be a more natural 54%-46% ratio.</p>
<p>If I was a college trustee, I would be angry that highly qualified females would be turned away, thereby lowering the average quality of the student body.</p>
<p>As pointed out in the article, the ratio of male to female students is particularly off-balance among African-American students. That trend is also present among high school graduates in many urban school systems - many more female African American students graduate than males. </p>
<p>It is shocking how low the high school graduate rate is in many urban public school systems.</p>
<p>For a number of years now, there have been larger numbers of young women applying to college than young men applying to college. This is not news. One theory that has been tossed around is that young men are more likely to play around with computers so much in their spare time in middle and high school that they develop employable skills and can skip college altogether. What is clear is that by high school graduation, the young women are more likely to be college-ready, and more likely to actually go. It appears that the only fields of study that are still majority male all the way through the Ph.D. are the STEM fields.</p>
<p>As a footnote to nothing: the US Civil Rights Commission is not an enforcement agency and has only authority to hold hearings and issue reports, reports that in the past have been ignored by the Federal agencies that have investigative and enforcement responsibility. The CRC has always been on the extreme either on the left or the right depending on who controls the Commission. In my experience, which included 25 years in Federal civil rights enforcement and coordination, the USCRC is a fairly useless agency.</p>
<p>Not necessarily. Colleges with a lotsa attractiveness to guys have engineering and business (and D1 sports). Liberal arts colleges, which have a distinct gender problem, typically have none of those three. (Correlation???) In such schools, the balancing will not occur.</p>
<p>Add in the fact, that females graduate from high school in larger numbers AND take more college prep courses…</p>
<p>The Washington Post had an article about this several months ago since the feds are studying the admissions practices of several local colleges and universities. I was surprised to see that JHU has more females than males. I think less males are going to college which is sad (and which they should also be studying).</p>
<p>Remember when an adcom for Kenyon wrote “To all the girls that I’ve rejected” and what a stir that caused? She stated that they were admitting males who would never be admitted if they were female. Maybe it’s time for some enterprising young woman with a name like Morgan or Taylor or Pat to apply to several schools as female, and several more as male, and see how it all shakes out.</p>
<p>Not according to Hopkins’ Common data set and IPEDS, which both report more male undergrads, but only marginally. However, it also shows that males are accepted at a higher rate than females (25% to 23%), but that could possibly be the one year I looked at.</p>