I’ve seen a bit of talk about Vassar’s supposed 60:40 female to male ratio and how that distribution gap is going down. Based on what I’ve just researched, I believe that that may have been intentionally done by the school’s admissions.
According to Vassar’s common data set from 2013-2014, 806 of 2,376 men were admitted that year (34%) while 1,026 of 5,221 women were admitted (19.7%). That difference looks quite significant.
Does this create a slight perception that the men at the school may be less qualified than the women?
You are correct that a higher percentage of men are admitted to Vassar than women. But I would not draw the conclusion from that fact that there is a perception that the men are less qualified. Vassar says that the credentials of men and women entering the college are virtually the same. The school basically has way more qualified applicants than it can it can accept. Men are regularly getting top grades at the school and distinguishing themselves in other ways. If you are a guy and you are admitted to Vassar, you are a super highly qualified student.
If you want to measure qualifications by average SAT scores, let’s look at the data for incoming freshmen.
The Vassar College Fact Book contains 10 years of average SAT scores by gender of enrolled freshmen. For the 4 classes of '08-11, where the SAT score consisted of Critical Reading and Math (maximum total score 1600), males had higher combined average scores in all 4 years, ranging from 11-37 points higher.
Beginning with the Class of '12, Writing became a part of the SAT (maximum total score 2400). For the 6 Classes of '12-'17, males had higher combined average scores in 3 of those years (ranging from 4-29 points higher); in the other 3 years female scores were higher (ranging from 7-19 points higher).
I suppose freshmen qualifications could arguably also be measured by high school Grade Point Averages, but the Fact Book doesn’t contain that data by gender.
Men have a higher acceptance rate than women at every college now not just Vassar. Your stats about acceptance rate is accurate. It’s harder to be accepted as a female anywhere in the country. There’s a lot of sociological implications of this but suffice it to say that it is easier to get into college if you are a male than a female because women outnumber men in the application pool. Vassar is no exception.