Hi, I’ve been looking at the ratio of women to men at various small liberal arts colleges my daughter is considering. Here are the gender ratios ranked from most equal to most skewed:
51% Women / 49% Men Bowdoin
53% Women / 47% Men Kenyon
53% Women / 47% Men Carleton
52% Women / 48% Men Sewanee
54% Women / 46% Men Grinnell
55% Women / 45% Men Wooster
57% Women / 43% Men Whitman
58% Women / 42% Men Hampshire
58% Women / 42% Men Kalamazoo
I don’t see any inherent problem with a more unequal student body, but I was wondering if the experience of going to a school which is nearly 60/40 would ever be bad in an of itself? Would love to hear the thoughts of someone male or female at a college with a more unequal ratio. Does it ever effect the classroom dynamics? Does it ever happen that it’s harder for the women to get decent dates because there are fewer men? Do the men have – even marginally – less incentive to behave more or less decently, since there are so many more women?
Any thoughts, esp. from students, would be really appreciated! Thanks~
Well, that depends. If you are a guy going to a 60/40 female/male school who is looking for a significant other, than your chances are improved and viseversa. It also depends on the field you’re in - engineering is pretty male dominated (for the most part) no matter what the overall split is.
And the examples you gave aren’t very drastic. I doubt 1% or 2% more females at the college will make much impact whatsoever.
Well, it was interesting – at one school we visited I asked the young woman student tour guide about it. I think it was Skidmore. She was really nice, and said it wasn’t an issue for her – she was on some team – soccer, I think – and spent most of her time with her teammates. Meaning that she was mostly in the company of women. She didn’t see any problem, and I don’t think that that had anything to do with her sexual orientation, just that it didn’t come up for her. As a guy, I was thinking how if I were going to a school like this, my friends from high school would just be kidding me about how easy my ‘chances’ must be, but that my actual experience of the feminine-ness of the place might just be overwhelming at times…
@IlliniDad18 - Just because someone goes to college doesn’t mean they are intelligent and successful. Most of the articles you see about college graduates swimming in debt are about women who chose a soft major that they cannot make a career in, and are stuck in hourly retail jobs. These women are not intelligent or successful.
Zinhead: I think your comment was uncalled for and unjustified. I’m not sure what your point was, except to insult women and express a general misogynistic stereotype. Poor baby, I guess you have a hard time competing with women, so you have to denigrate them as a group, and salve your own self-image by pretending that they are incompetent?
Yes, there is likely to be a considerable difference in gender ratio between advanced physics and advanced psychology courses at coed schools with a wide range of majors.
My concern with a lopsided ratio of female/male is that it will cause a distorted social dynamic between men and women; here is a link to an academic article on the subject: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130599/
I think that schools with lopsided female/male ratios that are located in larger towns or cities, or where there are other colleges and universities around, may not have those type of social distortions or to such a degree, because of the opportunities to meet other people; but for colleges that are located in smaller towns, or are more isolated, I would be more concerned about negative effects.
Thanks for the NIH link. Interesting. And – exactly. As it turns out, the schools I listed in the original post are by no means atypical – in fact, they’re closer to equal than tons of schools! There seems to be two things going on – more women enrolling than men, and more men dropping out than women. Both factors are in play, so you can’t just look at matriculation to find out what the actual gender ratios are on a given campus –
@Haxagonal - The gender ratio also impacts the chances of getting into certain colleges. For example, here is an article from 2009 that discusses the issue:
"Women apply in greater numbers than men to most colleges in the D.C. area. They make up at least three-fifths of the applicant pool at a number of schools, including the College of William and Mary in Virginia, Goucher and St. Mary’s colleges in Maryland and American University in the District.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that some schools are favoring men by admitting them at higher rates than women to try to preserve a male-female balance on campus. Conventional admissions-office wisdom dictates that colleges dominated by either sex are less appealing to applicants in general.
William and Mary admitted 43 percent of its male applicants and 29 percent of its female applicants in fall 2008, according to its institutional data. Vassar College in New York’s Hudson Valley admitted 34 percent of the men who applied and 21 percent of the women. Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania admitted 19 percent of male applicants and 14 percent of female applicants. Wesleyan University in Connecticut admitted 30 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women. Female applicants far outnumbered male candidates at all four schools."
The fact is that schools that want to maintain a gender ratio and have a preponderance of degrees that appeal primarily to women will accept men at a high rate. To use William and Mary as an example, the 2013 admit rate for men was 41% (5,150 applied, 2,101 accepted) while for women the admit rate was 29% (8,896 applied, 2,564 accepted). Overall, the undergraduate is 55% female, 45% male.
Well, that’s important, and thanks for the link, Zinhead. It’s a policy issue in the abstract, but it has real consequences for my family – because if it’s all still true, then it means that there MUST be schools where my daughter would not be admitted that would admit a young man with a less impressive academic record. I think that’s a bit unfair. On the other hand (in addition to not particularly wanting my daughter to have to put out in order to have a social life) I generally support a college’s right to create the kind of student body it wants to have by making the offers it does – partly b/c if their hands were tied, and they couldn’t do that, then it seems to me the system would be even more lopsided than it is now, with GPA’s and challenging courseloads and standardized test scores being even more important that “the whole person”. That’s kind of the opposite of what I want.
Although to put it into perspective, our high school guidance counselor told us that the national average of college populations is about 57% female to 43% male; so colleges with those lopsided ratios may simply be more reflective of that national average.
Still, I would be more comfortable with a ratio closer to 50/50 for the reasons already given.
Hexagonal, I like to think that women’s colleges make up for the admissions bump men get at many LACs. If your daughter is willing to look at women’s colleges the gender ratio becomes a non-issue.