Hi, I’m a junior in high school who recently visited the Boston University campus and did a tour - and needless to say, immediately fell in love with it. It’s my top school as of right now for a multitude of reasons, and it’s certainly not a stretch school for me so I feel somewhat confident that I could get in.
There are tons of things that I love about the school and it seems like the perfect fit for me, but there’s just one thing that is a little concerning.
I know that the gender ratio is something along the lines of 40:60, females:males, and I really wish it was more like 50:50. This is admittedly a factor I’ve been thinking a lot about recently and I wanted to hear from people who have gone or go to the school if this ratio is something that you notice, whether in classes or even just normal campus life.
Thanks!
@ellacasey Not specific to Boston University, but I’ve read that the 60:40 female/male ratio was something real for adcoms, because potential female applicants then become hesitant to apply. So anecdotally, your post here is evidence for that view being correct. Probably not too important but, besides less men, you may find BU somewhat harder to get into as a woman given that they have in fact crossed over that 60% female threshold: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/boston-university (“Campus Life” pie chart: 61% female/39% male)
It’s not horribly noticeable but it depends on what school you’re in. I was worried about that too, but I’m in Questrom and I think it’s an even 50-50 for us. Again just depends on the specific program.
in most of my classes it isn’t noticeable!!! honestly, i view it as a good thing because statistically boys applying to college have lower test scores/grades so they are not letting in less qualified boys to even the ratio, BU is gender blind.
According to Title IX, discrimination on the basis of gender is illegal so all schools are “officially” gender-blind in that sense. BU had around 65K applicants last year and admitted around 16K, a 25% admit rate. It wouldn’t take too great a difference in grades/scores by gender to account for the observed BU 61/39 gender ratio. But consider a school like Brown, with a 53/47 female/male ratio. They had 36K applicants of which 3500 were admitted. If you had the same grades/scores distribution with the Brown applicants as with the BU applicants, then the top 8% gender ratio would likely be close to 90/10. Obviously Brown is favoring male applicants. And likely BU is as well. If they didn’t, then girls wouldn’t want to apply, per the concerns in the OP.
Most liberal arts colleges are 60/40 female/male ratio these days. This isn’t just BU.
I sat in on a 200-level Comp Sci class there that had 4 girls in a class of about 60. OTOH, in some Psychology classes women can outnumber men by 10:1. As was mentioned, it depends on the class, your major, etc