<p>I was looking at the common data set for Brown 2011-2012. Men - 12 thousand applicants, Women - 18 thousand applicants!! That’s a huge difference. By comparison, I decided to look at Penn. Men - 16 thousand, women 15 thousand. Anyone know why so many more women are applying to Brown?
Thanks.</p>
<p>I suppose Brown has some characteristics similar to a liberal arts school (open curriculum, liberal campus), and liberal arts schools typically have more female than male students. </p>
<p>There’s also a general trend in male students under performing which has been attributed from everything to female teachers to blue collar work opportunities to intellectualism incongruity with western masculinity to p 0rn. Due to Brown’s prestige and rigor, I doubt the latter is a major problem; however, on a large scale, it makes college admissions for young women more difficult.</p>
<p>Also, Brown has small (but excellent!) engineering and computer science programs and no professional degrees like accounting, or even a traditional business major, all of which typically attract male applicants.</p>
<p>Being perceived as a friendlier school I think is part of that. I think more women applicants get the feeling when they visit etc that, unlike some of it’s counterparts, Brown really doesn’t have any longer any lingering sexist divide from the “old boy network”. At least the women I know very closely who have applied there in the past few years, as well as other Ivies etc have told me that. No one has told me it was because the men at Brown were better looking, although I have heard that they are “nicer”. :)</p>
<p>Am curious about this myself.</p>
<p>ALL the Ivy League undergraduate colleges offer liberal arts programs (remember, the liberal arts include humanities, fine arts, but also the social and natural sciences), and none except Penn and Cornell offer undergraduate business degrees, so being liberal arts is not it, at least not by itself. And as pointed out by fireandrain, Brown is not shabby in computer science or engineering either.</p>
<p>Brown does have the Open Curriculum, but Columbia, which has the Core at the other extreme (as well as an excellent engineering school), has a similar situation: 14,493 female vs 11,686 male applicants. This becomes even more lopsided if one adds in the 5,153 female applicants at Barnard. How come?</p>
<p>Girls being smarter does not explain Harvard and Princeton, which do not have this female bias.</p>
<p>I like the “friendlier” explanation, though it is anecdotal, and not completely satisfactory; Dartmouth also has a friendly reputation, but the female : male applicants ratio is much more even at 9,788 : 8,990 (especially for a small school that has to field a proportionately larger athletic program), while Columbia, though an excellent school, has not been argued by many to be outstandingly friendly.</p>
<p>Very curious.</p>
<p>Very little fraternity life. If I were a woman, I feel like this would make a school much more attractive to me.</p>
<p>Do you think the supplement application has any effect on this? I didn’t see last year’s application, but this year’s Brown supplement has a lot of extra essays. Both my son and my daughter are good students, but she (as is typical of girls) is more disciplined to sit down and write those extra essays. My son is like - where else can I apply? :)</p>
<p>Generally speaking, more women apply to most colleges. I think this is a symptom of girls being raised not to engage in risk-taking behaviours and boys not being raised in this manner (so women will be more likely to ‘hedge their bets’ and apply to more colleges than men).</p>
<p>Also, since men are slightly more likely not to pursue tertiary education in favour of, say, an apprenticeship, women are simply more populous in college in general.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>However, the reputation of Brown’s CS and engineering program among most HS applicants and parents is less than that of most other schools. Whenever someone on CC says they want to study CS or engineering, you never see Brown recommended – it’s always Cornell or MIT or Stanford or CMU. Most guys interested in those two areas don’t apply to Brown, and that contributes to the imbalance.</p>
<p>Fraternities and a business school boosts Dartmouth among male applicants. Wharton is attractive to guys, so that helps Penn.</p>
<p>The lack of interest in attending team sporting events is another factor. Football stadiums packed with screaming fans appeal to male students, I think.</p>
<p>What’s troubling is that the imbalance is growing – the gap is getting wider. When my daughter applied several years ago, there were more women applicants, but the margin was smaller.</p>
<p>I just always thought that it was because we male brown students were just so ridiculously good looking that many guys were too intimidated to apply and girls came flocking in droves :)</p>
<p>Seriously, I am still skeptical that the main reason for Brown’s female applicant bias is the relatively lesser appeal of engineering at Brown. I just checked this up: according to [College</a> Navigator - Brown University](<a href=“College Navigator - Brown University”>College Navigator - Brown University), Brown graduated 92 engineering majors. A sizable major: more than twice Harvard’s 42! Yet Harvard does not have a pronounced female bias.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Brown <strong>does</strong> have a significant business oriented program; the new entrepreneurship program attracted a whopping 72 majors. By the numbers, this does not appear to be a campus dominated by humanities and fine arts.</p>
<p>The other explanations – the relatively low profiles of fraternities and football at Brown – seem more compelling. Cornell, Penn, and Dartmouth, which do not have a female bias, also have stronger Greek presence, while Yale and Columbia, which do have a female bias, seem to have weaker fraternities. And though Harvard and Princeton, which do not have a female bias, also are not dominated by fraternities (eaten clubs are coed), the football culture is probably stronger there too.</p>
<p>But then, is that really something that people want changed?</p>