btw, I’d been wondering whatever became of the Civil Rights Commission’s investigation of anti-female gender bias in public college admissions, which is mentioned in a few of the sources people have linked to in this thread. It looks like many of the colleges under investigation just balked at providing the data to the Commission, which, thwarted, just dropped the issue in 2011! Wild. See http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/civil-rights-panel-suspends-inquiry-into-gender-bias-in-admissions/31368
and http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/are-admissions-preferences-for-men-okay/28909
This story gets even weirder, because at the very top tier – the most selective schools – relatively more men are admitted. Here’s a recent article (Oct. 2014) discussing this; the researchers assert that it has to be because those schools must rely relatively more on SAT/ACT scores than midrange schools do, and that men do better on those than women do as a whole! http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/what-keeps-women-out-of-elite-colleges-their-sat-scores/39109
I went to a college that had recently become coed so the gender ratio was still skewed, maybe one third female. I was a pretty confident girl, so in class I didn’t feel cowed (remember the stories about girls feeling less than in the classroom?). Outside of class? Many of the school’s traditions were still pretty male dominated and were just beginning to be open to women. It was easy for me to get a date. I know that men complained about the dearth of women on campus.
I chose not to go to a very very male dominated engineering school where I was also accepted. My reasoning did not have to do with being one of the few women, but that I thought I might rather study liberal arts. Women I knew who went there did complain that it felt weird to be just one of a handful of women.
You all will laugh, but one son is applying to some LACs with woman heavy ratios, and he is hoping he gets in!
So, I got curious about gender ratios in U.S. education more generally. Here’s what I’ve found out, mainly from info from the Census Bureau and the US Dep’t of Ed:
80% of American high school students graduate from high school, which is the highest percentage ever, under the strict method of counting graduates: enumerate all the ninth graders four years prior, and count as a “graduate” every one who is given a diploma four years later. Done that way, there were 2.9 million graduates in 2012, and 718,000 who didn’t graduate who had been in ninth grade before; that’s where the headline 80% graduate rate comes from. Only some of the remaining 20% are dropouts – many are taking more than four years for completion. More girls than boys finish high school straight through – 84% of the girls who had been in the ninth grade four years prior graduated, while only 77% of the boys did, so out of the 2.9 million graduates, about 52% were female and 48% male. But there’s a less strict way of looking at 2012, by counting the number of “high school completers” that year, defined as individuals from ages 16 to 24 who either graduated from high school or completed a GED during the preceding 12 months. There were about 3.3 million high school completers in 2012; 1.62 million of which were men, or 50.6%, and 1.58 million of which were women, or 49.4%.
These days, something like 70% of high school completers will start in some sort of post-secondary educational program within a few years, 66% in the fall immediately following graduation or attainment of their GED. Women are quite a bit more likely to immediately enroll in college; that 66% college enrollment rate right after high school is due to 71.3% of young women enrolling compared to 61.3% of men.
How many college students are there now? As of 2014, there were about 21 million students of all ages enrolled in colleges and universities in the U.S. of all types: 2-year, 4-year, public, private, and for-profit. About 12 million of those were women and 9 million were men, so looking at the average across all types of post-secondary institutions, the students are 57% women and 43% men. That’s just the world as it is out there these days, so if anything the ratios at the SLAC’s my daughter is considering are more equal than average!
The things you learn…