I am curious about this. My daughter leans towards a big, urban university, but she did apply and get accepted to a couple of LACs. I know I have read here that there was a gender imbalance at LACs but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. At one of the LACs my daughter was accepted to, it is 59% female, 41% male. Is this something new, or has this happened more recently? Do big universities have more male students? Or is it that more young women are attending college now? FWIW, I am just curious, I am not making any judgments at all.
It is both that more women are attending college in general in the United States and that more women want to go to LACs. The gender imbalance has been a fact of life for a number of years.
~60% of college degrees are currently being awarded to women, versus ~40% for men. Men are also more likely to pursue engineering or technology related majors, which I believe is more heavily associated with larger research universities. The exception to the LAC STEM rule that comes to mind is Harvey Mudd, which also happens to be ~55% male and ~45% female.
Many LACs will have slightly more female students, perhaps 52% to 48% . Two that come to mind with much bigger disparities (60/40) are Conn College and Skidmore, and some of that may trace back to their days as all women schools
Thanks for the responses everyone. @wisteria100 I made a mistake – the LAC I was referring to is actually 56% women, 44% men.
@LionsMum Even the ones where it is roughly 50/50, the application pool might still be 60% female, thus making it more difficult for females to get accepted. Bates, Bowdoin and Middlebury have this issue. Colby however has the opposite problem, yield is much lower among females so the acceptance rate is noticeably higher.
Schools with large nursing programs or education programs often are 60% or more female.
This issue is also affecting universities’ arts & sciences divisions.
For instance, while taking some grad classes at Columbia a decade ago, one Prof who came off of a stint in the Columbia College admissions office mentioned that due to the relative academic/application strengths of the average female applicant vs the average male applicant, if the admission office didn’t actively try to maintain some semblance of gender parity by giving admission tips to more borderline male applicants, the fear among adcoms was the gender ratio could have gone as high as 80/20 with the males being in the distinct minority. And that gender imbalance would deter many applicants, including females from applying.
Incidentally, the grad class where this discussion took place was over 75% female.
Is that Vassar? That is one of the real extreme cases. Vassar gets more than twice as many applications from women. The acceptance rate for men is 34% and women 19%. It went coed about 1970.
This has been an issue for awhile now and is concerning some who think there is a long range imbalance coming in the education levels of men and women. Since women tend to want to marry men with as much or more education as themselves, this can lead to problems down the road.
I think that for the very selective LACs, the split is closer to 50-50. At D1’s private university, it was approximately 55-45.
Overall the ratio of boys to girls at colleges and universities is currently at about 3:4 The gender spread varies, skewing heavier towards girls at LACs and heavier towards boys at more technical schools. I was reading about this earlier today - this is one of the explanations put forth for the tendency towards ‘hook-ups’ as opposed to courtship and long term relationships on campuses today.
At Ivies it’s closer to 50/50 - perhaps because they have the luxury of being able to build a class.
I remember us discussing this on CC a decade ago. Jennifer Delahunty Britz, was dean of Admissions and Financial aid at Kenyon and she wrote the Op-ed peice, To All the Girls’s I’ve Rejected, where she wrote about gender imbalance and how highly qualified young women were being rejected for the sake of gender balancing
UNC-CH also has a gender imbalance, so it’s not limited to LACs. For the class entering in the fall of 2014
http://uncnews.unc.edu/2014/08/15/carolina-welcomes-new-students-campus/
D is looking at good but not tippy top LAC’s and is seeing this pattern. Connecticut College is on her list, for example. She just visited Loyola of MD yesterday, which is 42/58. Their neighbor, Goucher College, is even worse: 33/67.
This is fascinating. I had no idea the gender difference was so stark. It seems like male is a plus factor for applicants to many schools.
Surprisingly, Boston University also has a 60/40 female to male split. Still trying to figure that one out…its a large research university, not a LAC.
This isn’t just a college issue. I work on the student selection committee for a program that gives low income middle school students a boost to college with a summer and Saturday program starting in middle school, high school tutoring, and college application support. We are looking at 6th grade applicants (standardized test scores, grades, teacher recommendations, and short essays). The girls are miles ahead of the boys. We see about four stong female applicants for every strong male applicant. We take boys all the time with credentials that we would reject girls with. (not what you asked, I know, but this issue isn’t just starting at college admissions time!)
Re: #15
If the overall enrollment has more female than male students, why is it surprising that some individual schools (regardless of LAC versus RU) have more female than male students?
@intparent Wow, I really had no idea. I am surprised this hasn’t been discussed more on CC – there seem to be so many other discussions about how this group or that group is or isn’t getting a bump.
I’m not sure why there is a draw for more women at BU than men… Vs other national universities with a closer gender mix. Why do more females apply to BU than males?