Gender Imbalances in Admissions at Top 30 (USNWR) LACs

Well then all Vassar needs to do is promote itself as the Harvey Mudd of the Northeast and it will start getting apps from all those Caltech hopefuls.

@Oregon2016, Harvey Mudd and Wesleyan may be classified as LACs while Caltech and Dartmouth are classified as research U’s even though Wesleyan and Dartmouth are closer to each other in characteristics and Mudd and Caltech are closer to each other in characteristics than the former are with the later.

Just because Dartmouth is classified as a research U doesn’t suddenly make it more like Caltech than Wesleyan.

I’m not sure why this is tough to grasp . . .

One of the reasons that the demographics for Connecticut College, Skidmore, and Vassar skew more toward women is that these were all-women’s schools that went co-ed in the late 60s/early 70s.

Although Wesleyan didn’t get the exception from the Carnegie Institute to be classified a baccalaureate institution, and is now classified as a Master’s institution. I don’t know whether that makes it an RU or a LAC technically.

I don’t think that Vassar is aiming for gender parity as it started as a women’s school. Also for a long long time there’s been approx 40+% men and you really can’t tell the difference on campus.

The mini-flap in 2006 about affirmative action for men at some LACs is worth revisiting. I didn’t read the WPost article. It may have been mentioned there . . . . forgive me if it is.

To summarize: Kenyon admitted in a NYTimes op-ed piece that it offered affirmative action to men to keep up it’s ration of men to women. The truism (whether true or not) was that if there’s more than 60% women at a school, all applications drop off. Neither women nor men want to attend such an imbalanced school. LACs facing this problem (because fewer boys are graduating from high school, graduating WELL from high school) than are girls, higher education has been dealing with this problem in general. That men then tend to choose universities over LACs, exacerbates this problem for many LACs.

Here is Chron Higher Ed’s review of the issue: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/27/admit

http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/affirmative-action-for-men-strange-silences-and-strange-bedfellows-in-the-public-debate-over-discrimination-against-women-in-college-admissions

Here is a 2015 piece updating the situation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/30/achieving-perfect-gender-balance-on-campus-isnt-that-important-ending-private-colleges-affirmative-action-for-men-is/

@Oregon2016
It describes itself as an LAC, as do many ranking organizations.

Whether by design or accident, these colleges from the original post are those that come closest to being both gender balanced in admissions and in the classroom:

Amherst: 48% women, 52% men
Claremont McKenna: 48% women, 52% men
Hamilton: 52% women, 48% men
Washington & Lee: 50% women, 50% men

It should be noted, however, that Colgate, Grinnell, Oberlin and Colorado College (also schools that are gender balanced in admissions) are nearly as balanced in the classroom, in that they enroll smaller percentages of female students than national trends would indicate (54%, 55%, 55% and 53%, respectively).

I’m not sure what this means.

Wheaton MA, another coed school that started out as all-women’s, also has a higher acceptance rate for women. It seems to just be Vassar (of the formerly-female colleges I know) with acceptance rate higher for male applicants. it’s also the highest ranked, only one to require test scores, and the only one that was originally affiliated with a men’s institution.

@Oregon2016 - take it up with Marvey Mudd.

https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/

@usualhopeful Wesleyan is still listed as a baccalaureate institution on Carnegie’s website… do you have another source for the switch?

@smartalic34 - Looks like it was changed. under the notes section: “01/26/16-Basic: Master’s(S) to Bacc-A&S | exception that should have defaulted”

http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/lookup/view_institution.php?unit_id=130697&start_page=lookup.php

I get that everyone-and-their-mammas know Harvey Mudd is a LAC and I’m an idiot. So explain how and why this obvious LAC is such an outlier in its applicant pool’s gender distribution among its 21 LAC peers listed by the OP? I’m no Malcolm Gladwell. While more than half of those peers accept a larger chunk of males, and the other half may very well bend admissions standards to accept an equal chunk (pure speculation), Mudd has an abundance of boys. Why? It’s just a LAC like the other 21. I can’t find in its history that it was single sex, which is the explanation batted around for Vassar. But many of the peer LACs were historically all-male too.

It isn’t located in a frozen wilderness like Colby.

Which of the peers’ applicant pools overlap with Caltech and MIT more than Mudd? Which LAC does the majority of Mudd’s accepted go to?

Or put another way, why do girls applying in such large numbers to all the other 21 LACs NOT apply to an equally prestigious LAC that actually provides them an admissions boost? Surely those girls aren’t as dumb as me.

If it truly is just a LAC like the others, why don’t the peers simply add Mudd-like humanities courses to attract boys?

Because of the gender gap in STEM fields. If you’re looking for root causes for that, well, it’s going to get a bit more complex and speculative, but there has been a great deal of scholarship on the subject.

I’ll also add that just because Mudd is an LAC doesn’t mean it’s “an LAC like the others.” It’s an oddball LAC. It’s not the only one (weirdest? Maybe, uh, Deep Springs?), but it’s an anomaly for sure.

@Oregon2016, I’m not sure why you’re under the impression that a LAC has to have a particular gender distribution or major distribution or have to draw from the same applicant pool as other LACs. Nothing in the definition stated above mentions any of that.

The applicant pool fixation is particularly strange to me. So, by your reasoning, if Brown’s applicant pool has more overlap with Vassar than with Caltech, does that make Brown a LAC?

Granted, LAC is kind of a marketing term. Yes, the undergraduate student experience at Mudd, Caltech, and Cooper Union is more similar to each other (even though USNews puts them in to 3 separate categories) than any of them are to Vassar. But then, all 3 of them are more similar to each other than any of them are to UMich either. So does that mean that Caltech isn’t a research U? It’s actually as tiny and close-knit as a LAC.

@marvin100, last I checked, Deep Springs is a 2-year college.

@PurpleTitan

[Deep Springs College is an accredited two-year full-scholarship liberal arts college](Employment FAQ | Deep Springs College)

But yeah, it’s about as unique as they come.

@marvin100, that makes “LAC” little more than a marketing term, as many CC’s could be considered LACs.

@Oregon2016

Because, unfortunately, there is still a gender gap in the STEM fields. There is nothing in the description of a LAC that says it has to have an equal amount of male and female applicants.

Because, (again unfortunately), there are not as many females interested in STEM. And if they did apply in the same numbers as the males, they would no longer receive the boost. Mudd wants to see more equal ratio male/female in their student body and since the pool of female applicants is smaller, those that do apply have a better chance of getting in than their male counterpart.

Yes, Mudd, is a unique LAC in that it only offers STEM majors, but that does not exclude it from being a LAC. LAC’s can offer STEM majors, it’s just that most offer more than that. Go back to my post in #19…Mudd fulfills each part of the criteria.

@PurpleTitan - Deep Springs bears no resemblance whatsoever to CCs except that it’s a 2-year school. Although it technically can award associates’ degrees, it doesn’t really do so in reality, and the vast majority of DS “grads” wind up at top-20 schools to finish their undergrad studies.