<p>At some colleges, it's more difficult to be admitted as a female applicant. CC's Sally Rubenstone provides the college counselor perspective.</p>
<p>As</a> educational gender gap widens, women are facing higher admissions standards - Features</p>
<p>One key point: not all schools try to maintain a gender balance, meaning that differences in the qualifications of the male/female applicant pool shouldn’t impact any individual’s chances.</p>
<p>In addition, gender may help female applicants in engineering and hard science programs, where they tend to be underrepresented in the the applicant pool.</p>
<p>I’m only sixteen so I can’t attest to any experience before this decade, but I’m guessing that in general, guys arn’t trying any less than they used to. The difference is that girls are trying harder, much harder. As social barriers have been brought down, women are now encouraged to make something more out of their lives than thier classic stay at home status (not that being a stay at home mom is bad at all, I actually think it can be very beneficial to the children, as I can attest to). Anyway, lowering the standards by gender is not the way to go, because it will only pander to the lazy male applicants and not encourage them to work harder. Besides, the difference is not yet so great that a boost for males is really needed.</p>
<p>Massman -</p>
<p>Men have more ‘good’ jobs available without an education, that is the root difference. A guy can fall back on hard labor, less women can move granite or landscape.</p>
<p>And I don’t think this is encouraging guys to ‘be lazy’, really, any school that is able to worry more about gender equity rather than bodies is one that isn’t depending on ‘lazy’ people that much.</p>
<p>And look at Brown’s applicant pool if you want to see what the point is:</p>
<p>7,233 Male applicants to 11,083 females. If admitted at that ratio, a 39.4/60.6 one, then it would very much affect Brown as a university and it’s appeal. So, in order to maintain being the university that Brown wants to be, they admit guys at a higher rate.</p>
<p>There is another large thread on this topic.</p>
<p>“but I’m guessing that in general, guys arn’t trying any less than they used to. The difference is that girls are trying harder, much harder”</p>
<p>I would actually tend to think the opposite.
-Girls aren’t really trying harder, guys are just slacking off.
Or, socially, its more acceptable for girls to get good grades than for guys to get good grades.
I won’t go too into detail, but some key points
-Think of “Geek” -are you thinking of a girl, or a guy with glasses
-Reading… when you check out the library or around school, do you usually see girls with books or guys.
-Drugs… who’s using them predominantly</p>
<p>I think the studying hard concept just isn’t “in” now for guys (i can’t say if it every really was, but it seems at the moment it definitely is not). Taking this further, you would see mainly guys dropping out, getting low grades, and not going to college</p>
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<p>Allright, I’m going to make a somewhat politically incorrect comment. True, guys can fall back on hard labor. But women can fall back to working at, shall we say, ‘gentlemen’s clubs’, where they will, frankly, make a lot more money than the guys doing hard labor. And I mean a LOT more - often times by several times more.</p>
<p>The point is, women who are of college age have a pretty lucrative option available to them. Obviously it’s an option that most women don’t want to do (but then it should also be said that most men probably don’t want to do hard labor either). But whether you want to do it or not, it is an available option.</p>
<p>A. More guys want to do hard labor than women want to be strippers. Probably 25% of my HS male grad class - wants to do some sort of manual labor. And no one wants to be a stripper.</p>
<p>And MOST strippers are broke. Good ‘gentlemans clubs’ = making good $$$. Jackson, Michigan strippers = meth addicts</p>
<p>And there are a hell of a lot more jobs available in hard labor than gentleman’s entertainment. Granite, landscaping, roofing, flooring, building, and so on.</p>
<p>This is not news!</p>
<p>There are more women than men at many (most?) colleges today, including the (old) traditionally men’s colleges like Yale. Funny that this story came from Tufts. Even “back in the day,” the Jackson (which was the Tufts women’s college) women had better stats than the Tufts men.</p>
<p>This isn’t really new at all [Someone else had a big thread about this topic on CC just a week ago], and this certainly shouldn’t be used as some feminist-stand point either.</p>
<p>I could instantly go and point out how many girls are being admitted at nearly double the rate of men in some places (Ex. Engineering fields), while obviously its the inverse in other places (Ex. Nursing.)</p>
<p>This is not sexism, it’s just the normal flow of the market of college admissions.</p>
<p>Its all semantics, but I think in institutions where women outnumber men and admissions is trying to maintain a balance, women set the bar and the men have lower standards to get in.</p>
<p>In the highly competitive musical theater admissions process, female applicants far outnumber male applicants and the rate of acceptance for males is much higher. It is harder to be a female in that applicant pool.</p>
<p>And at some other colleges, it is more difficult to be admitted as a male applicant (e.g. MIT). I think this is normal and just a part of the school in question trying to maintain a normal gender balance.</p>
<p>I agree with frankchn. I do not agree with some early posts regarding men “slacking off”. Just looking at the overall standarized test scores one can tell that males still have the upper hand over females, even with the extended CR and writing sections.</p>
<p>My $.02 </p>
<p>I would go with the comment made earlier:</p>
<p>“I’m only sixteen so I can’t attest to any experience before this decade, but I’m guessing that in general, guys arn’t trying any less than they used to. The difference is that girls are trying harder, much harder.”</p>
<p>Based on my experience (as prof. at a university in social sciences and humanities) the average college female student works harder than the average male. There are more men among the students doing the least and worst work. But there are almost always men among the top students in a class. I would add that some of the men who did not do well were as capable as women (or men) who did better. </p>
<p>Why do so many men not try harder? There is no one answer. One factor is that schoolwork is simply not as encouraged as a part of being a guy. Another factor is that men have a higher risk for a wide range of problems (like learning disabilities and drug use). </p>
<p>To say something that may offend a few, I believe that we are finding out what happens to men and women when market forces are allowed to operate with fewer traditional limitations. It is not all wonderful. We have men who are falling through the cracks and ending up in prison (or staying with their parents). Up to now the forces that have undermined women’s wages have been stronger than the forces that give them an advantage. As the obstacles are removed women have more reason to compete with men, and it is turning out they are really good at it! They also appear to understand that more work equals more rewards, and so they are working harder and harder, even to the extent that it makes them miserable (see NY times article on the super female students of Newton, MA).</p>
<p>If women continue to do better (e.g., graduate college more) than men, we will end up with a world where women’s incomes finally match and perhaps exceed that of men (already happening in New York for younger women). </p>
<p>College attendance appears to be at the cutting edge of this trend. So what we are seeing there is perhaps a preview of what will be happening in other aspects of our lives in the coming years.</p>
<p>I am left wondering about what people think of this trend. In particular I wonder how it will play out for men and women. There have been some interesting newspaper articles already about the effects on marriage. Most women seek a man to marry with at least equal education and earning power as themselves. Most men feel better if they are making even more money than their wives. </p>
<p>A problem as more women start making more than their male peers (not that they do not deserve to).</p>
<p>Not just in the US is there an educational gender gap -</p>
<p>[She</a> Goes West, He Goes Right: Lack of Women in Eastern Germany Feeds Neo-Nazis - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News](<a href=“http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,485942,00.html]She”>She Goes West, He Goes Right: Lack of Women in Eastern Germany Feeds Neo-Nazis - DER SPIEGEL)</p>
<p>“The reasons behind the mass migration from east to west are primarily economic. Despite some regional improvements, the economy in former East Germany continues to lag far behind that of Western Germany. Unemployment remains persistent and is well over 10 percent for those under 25 years of age. The fact that young women in the region tend to be better educated than the young men means that women have an easier time finding work in the west.”</p>
<p>This is old news. The Kenyon Dir of Admissions wrote a similar article about a yr ago. Shcs do strive for gender parity and 55/45 is often the closest shcs get to “equality” - - and even that requires giving men a “tip” in terms of admission. At MIT, Harvey Mudd and a few other male heavy schs women will get the tip, but men are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of the educat gap.</p>
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<p>I doubt that too many people want to do hard labor, not if they could make the same money without hard labor. Of the 25% of your HS male class that says they want to do hard labor, I think the vast vast majority of them actually mean that they prefer hard labor to the alternative (i.e. studying to get a degree, which a lot of people don’t want to do either). But that hardly means that they really “want” to do hard labor. It’s just the best of their available options.</p>
<p>The same is true of stripping. Again, I agree that most girls don’t WANT to do this. So why do you they do it? Again, they generally see it as the best of their available options. </p>
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<p>Well, the truth is, MOST AMERICANS are broke. Seriously. The average American doesn’t make that much money. The average American is living hand-to-mouth. </p>
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<p>Ah, but you’ve just proven my point, haven’t you? Even if you’re right, and the strippers in your town are meth addicts (your words, not mine), well, meth ain’t exactly cheap. To be a meth addict means that you must be able to afford your habit. </p>
<p>The bottom line is, strippers in any town almost certainly make more money than the hard laborers in that same town. Be honest. How much do the hard laborers in Jackson, Michigan really make? </p>
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<p>But those are irrelevent. We are talking about what people can realistically do right after high school. I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t learn anything about roofing or flooring or building when I was in high school. If I actually wanted to learn those skills, I would have had to train. But that training process would be, frankly, not that different from just going to college. Yes, obviously it would be learning different stuff (i.e. more hands-on), but at the end of the day, you would still require additional study beyond regular high school. </p>
<p>On the other hand, you, frankly, don’t need to learn anything to take your clothes off.</p>
<p>This kind of article shows up several times every year and it’s always the exact same story. So no points for originality here. They haven’t even taken a paragraph or two to suggest that perhaps primary and secondary education have been altered in a way that makes it more difficult for males to succeed, which these pieces usually do.</p>
<p>But it still makes the same crucial omission that all of these articles do, which is that it includes no statistical data beyond acceptance rates. I can only assume that this is because the male test scores are higher, which would badly hurt any argument that they’re getting some sort of a boost.</p>
<p>The Kenyon article did refer the the relative preparedness of male vs female applicants.</p>
<p>Has anyone every seen any data that compares the SAT scores of men vs women at highly selective colleges or universities. If there is a real gender bias it should show up there. Differences in admit rates do not neccesarily imply a gender bias, since women may be applying in greater numbers. It woud also be an interesting way to quantify the magnitude of the bias, if there is one. Folks collect and publish this data on race and other issues, it would be surprising if there was no such data on gender.</p>