Gender imbalance question

We were there for accepted students day and noticed a large what appeared to be disproportionate amount of females to males. Is the admissions office taking any steps to actively even out the gender balance?. We have visited many schools in the northeast where it is almost 50/50 so we found this odd.

You can easily look up the gender ratio of every college and choose one that’s closer to 50-50 if that’s important to you. Tulane’s ratio of about 60-40 is not unusual.

That is correct. Tulane has been running about 57:43 I believe, and that exactly matches the national average. It is true that some schools have been more at 50-50. But this has been brought up several times, even this year, and current students have said repeatedly they do not find it to be an issue at all. They even say that if no one told them different, they would think it was closer to 50-50. @audi2016

thank you both for the replies! It is a beautiful campus.

@audi2016

Interestingly, I just this minute finished watching a video report that mentions the schools that are achieving a gender balance despite the fact that nationally women apply at a 57-58% ratio. They were basically saying that those schools were discriminating against women in order to achieve a gender balance. So I guess we can proudly say that Tulane has never discriminated based on gender! I am saying this a bit tongue in cheek, but of course there is a lot of truth to it. But then, anyone that knows anything about the rich history of Newcomb College and the many innovative and ahead-of-its-time programs for women over the years would know that Tulane has always been at the forefront of progress towards gender equality.

Tough to be 50-50 these days unless the school has a big engineering or other program that attracts lots of guys. Or the school is uber-selective. Harvard and Stanford have soooo many ridiculously qualified applicants that they can make the m/f ratio whatever they want and still not experience any dip in academic stats. Or the school has affirmative action for guys.

Schools that do a lot of merit aid (like Tulane) will trend a bit more female. Since the high academic stats the merit aid targets will more often be from a female.

It’s interesting, my younger D attends U Miami which is 51% Female 49% Male. I’ve heard that the overlap in students applying to Tulane and Miami is extremely high. If this is true I wonder why so many more guys end up at Miami.

There are still all-women colleges though, so proportionally that should help “thin out the herd” of girls accepting spots in co-ed colleges. I would assume.

I read an article recently about gender imbalances on campus potentially driving the “hookup” culture:

http://time.com/money/4072951/college-gender-ratios-dating-hook-up-culture/

I take it with a grain of salt, though. A guy who likes to hookup just won’t have to work as hard to do so with more women around, and a guy who doesn’t won’t start suddenly doing so just because there are a plethora of females.

At least I’d hope not.

I really don’t know. Some guesses would be that it goes back to Tulane cutting back on engineering majors offered, as well as eliminating computer science at the time (it is now back but very recently). These fields are still male dominated. I suppose related to that, Tulane is also known as being particular strong in many of the humanities subjects, and that skews female.

Just looking at some data, Miami pretty consistently has about an even split in applications by gender every year, and that carries on to a pretty even split in offers made and finally to enrollment. I won’t do the data table, like I said it is reasonably close to 50-50 for each step most years for the last 5 at least.

But here is Tulane’s

Year___# apps% F app__% F adm%F enrolled

2011-1237,76757.7%56.5%57.1%
2012-13
30,08059.3%
60.3%58.1%
2013-14
30,12260.3%
61.8%58.7%
2014-15
28,90161.4%
63.2%61.7%
2015-16
26,25761.5%
59.2%___59.7%

And this year they say for now it is just under 59% female. For those wondering about the dip in applications after 2011-12, 2012-13 was the year they added the “Why Tulane” short essay. Interestingly about 2% more females applied that year and an upward trend after that. While it is totally unscientific to make any conclusions off that meager amount of data and lack of controls for other variables, one could wonder about the effect of the extra essay on the balance of applications.

Anyway, make of that what you will. It does demonstrate one thing I think. The more balance there is in the application and admission pools, the more balanced the ending class is likely to be. Like Miami, Tulane seems to have fairly steady ratios right down the line.

I suspect more males may enroll at Miami, at least partly, because the football and basketball teams have had more recent success than Tulane. My daughter just doesn’t care too much that Tulane athletics hasn’t been too great the last few decades. But my son that will be applying in 1 year is more excited about universities with better athletics.

That is certainly a viable hypothesis, @X22011

Good chance of an additive effect here I think. And despite Miami’s results, we have to keep in mind that the national pool of applicants is 57:43 female, give or take.

Why is the # of apps trending down, from 37K to 26K?

We went to an accepted students day a couple of months ago and the admissions counselor said apps were up to , I think, about 35,000 for this year. I suppose this year is 2016-17 for the upcoming entering class of 2020. She mentioned apps were probably up this year from the big jump in US news rankings. I wonder if there are less high school graduates, thus a smaller number of applicants?

Graduation rates (HS) have been pretty stable since they peaked in 2012 http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_219.10.asp

Well, as I said the initial drop was clearly due to the addition of the essays. After that it is just a guess, but with every class being “too big”, which translates to more students enrolling than the target number by at least 5%, Tulane probably kept narrowing (chopping off the bottom) the marketing parameters they gave to the direct marketing company they use. Fewer students getting the free app mailer and so fewer applications.

Totally agree that this year the USNWR ranking spike caused people to seek Tulane out. That was predicted right after the list was published in August. I think admissions did say something about a 30% increase in apps, which would indeed be 34,000+.

Personally I think the SAT average increasing 20 points on the 1600 scale is quite impressive. I thought there would be at least some commentary on the pinned thread announcing this year’s class profile. But nada. Oh well, I guess everyone is just happy about it, which I think they should be.

I would have expected an increase when Tulane changed to accepting the Common App!

@DebmomNY

Well, that is a weird situation. They took the Common App, then switched to the Universal App, then switched back. I don’t remember the years, but I am pretty sure they were on the Common App when my D applied in Fall 2008, although I think she used the Tulane application she received in the mail. In any case, with the Tulane app being so easy before the essays, I am not sure how much of a difference that made. Besides no essays, they also did not require LOR. It was pretty much based only on your resume.

But you are right that changing to the less popular Universal App probably decreased applications. I think they did that the year after they added the essays, but I am not sure. I also think they only did the Universal App for about 2 years. Would have to do some digging to confirm or amend that.

@MotherOfDragons said:

There was an older economist article from several years ago that may apply here: http://www.economist.com/node/15867956

Here is the first paragraph:

Certainly a fun hypothetical, but I think the difference between today and 50 years ago (which if you change “the world” in the Economist article to a college campus) is this. The reason I say that the Economist hypothetical is like college 50+ years ago is the old adage that coeds were at college to get their Mrs. degree with a suitable college man. thus 20 women would, for the most part, all want to pair off with a man. With that as a primary goal being a thing of the past, of those 20 women, 5 might not care about dating at all. Or even if they all do, they are not there with the goal of something long term. Hence the dating (mating) pool is much more fluid, and assuming one does not need a sexual partner 100% of the time, fewer men can still find partners at least some of the time. Now before anyone gets upset, I am not saying that the women have to be “sleeping around”. At 57:43, a few women with 2-3 partners over 4 years changes the scenario. Hmm, hope I explained what I meant to there because I feel like I am going to get into trouble over this one. But I think it is a realistic description of college life these days.

Also, I think someone might have mentioned this already, but women tend to date older men more than vice versa, and I know that undergrad women date law students and grad students more than the undergrad men do the same. That also balances out the numbers.