But which divisions or majors did female and male students apply for? If (for UCLA and UCB) the female students applied to general L&S while male students applied to CS/EECS, that could affect the female and male admission rates even if the female and male applicants were similar in application strength.
That’s complicated. You might be fine depending on the existing sports given your female skew, or you may only need a partial adjustment. But according to the article, this is why e-sports is a popular alternative–it is nominally coed but skews very male.
I note one of the things that often comes up in this context is that girls generally average higher grades than boys. Including in STEM (there are just less of them in STEM).
This is true in both high school and college, so this is part of the “problem”. If you use a system where high school grades are the main predictor of college grades–which is reasonable with proper normalization for course difficulty and grading schemes–you will get girls skewing as more academically qualified. Of course some of the less qualified boys may not apply to college, but often the female college applicants skew more qualified than the male applicants, particularly at the most selective colleges.
So not only is the volume of applications higher from women, the natural admission rate for women would be higher too.
You can sort of see this in the Cal system admissions statistics, by the way, given the ban on gender discrimination. Using Berkeley as an example, in 2022-23, more women than men applied, 64210 to 58473, but the admit rate was also higher among women, 13.8% to 8.6%. The class ended up with a 1.51 female:male ratio.
17 year old boys are not responsible for the world’s problems, and too many of them feel shut out of college. Colleges are often 60% women and it’s RARE to ever see a college with more men than women. As parents of boys we should be concerned about this trend.
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Certainly not in the engineering world. My D was in a meeting last week with all the production higher ups and she was the only woman in the room out of two dozen. She was one of two in her AP physics class in high school and her college wasn’t close to gender parity. Only 27% female in engineering.
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Yes, I’m usually the only woman at our structural engineering association meetings in Maine. I keep thinking we’ll get young women, but they are rare.
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So of course there is a long history of women pointing out representation gaps, compensation gaps, and so on, and those women being told by certain people it was because of natural differences in abilities, career self-selection, the byproduct of choosing to have babies rather than just focus on career, and so on.
And the point of all that was that these complaining women should just accept those disparities as inevitable, and indeed proper in a meritocratic system. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcomes, and surely no one could question whether there was equality of opportunity . . . .
OK, then boys start being underrepresented in college, and many of the same people who told women to just accept the inevitability of these other disparities are saying something clearly must be done to help our boys close the gap! There isn’t equality of outcomes! These boys deserve our help!
And I think it is understandable that some women react by thinking some version of, “Yeah, of course since boys are finally on the wrong end of something, NOW you think it is a problem.”
Now of course it was always a bad answer to think all of that was inevitable and proper. So ideally we would take all these issues equally seriously, whether the issue involves boys, girls, men, women, or so on. Complete equality of outcomes in all ways is not necessarily a reasonable goal, but when there are gaps we should be making very sure that is truly just a choice, and not something we are failing to do to give everyone a meaningfully fair opportunity.
And given that context, I don’t think it is wrong for women to be cautious about whether what will happen next will be aggressive attempt to help boys in terms of college admissions, while all the disparities that favor men are left unaddressed. But hopefully people can be open to truly comprehensive attempts to make our educational and career system work better for everyone.
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Like I said, 17year old boys are not responsible for the inequities of the past. I don’t understand this pointing to past discrimination as a sort of “ah ha, boys are now getting their come uppance” And it’s not true that boys are underperforming. Average SAT scores for boys are higher than for girls. So one might wonder if admissions decisions are being made that discriminate against boys. As a mom of a boy, but also as a member of society, I want both boys and girls to have opportunities to go to college and we should be asking why there is this wide and growing disparity.
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Is there data showing boys are being discriminated against in college admissions? That girls are advantaged over boys with comparable stats? (Serious question) I have not seen any, but was under the impression that the primary driver of the disparity was that girls are applying to college in larger numbers than boys (which is what I have seen in every CDS I have looked at, and is wholly representative outside of schools like MIT and CalTech).
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I agree, but that’s not what people are usually arguing. It is more that it is unfair to help boys when they have a gap, while ignoring girls and women when they have a gap. And that is not just an historical point, once you look after college admissions you start seeing a bunch of growing gaps going the other way.
So it is very, very important to understand that in almost all developed countries, including the US, girls on average get better grades than boys, at all levels including both the secondary (HS) level, and undergraduate level. Here is an accessible article (ignore the preview title, that is not the substance I am citing), but there is a lot of empirical work confirming this:
So there really is no evidence that colleges which rely primarily on grades for academic qualifications are discriminating against boys, unless you believe choosing a neutral measure that doesn’t favor boys is inherently discrimination.
Instead, if you see colleges which have higher admit rates for boys such that an applicant pool that was much more girls than boys gets closer to even by the time you are looking at enrollment, it is extremely like they are actually discriminating against girls, not boys. Or more properly, admitting more boys with marginal qualifications, in place of admitting more girls with higher qualifications. And the article we are currently discussing has a bunch of people basically confirming this is happening.
I agree, maybe in part because I am a Dad of a boy.
But we need to do this with clear eyes. By the time you are looking at US college admissions, you are looking at a larger applicant pool of girls, AND those girls also average better grades in their HS classes. And that in fact correctly predicts those girls will get better grades on average in their college classes too.
If we don’t understand this is the nature of the problem, we won’t be able to address it in ways that will be remotely satisfying to most. At the moment, a lot selective of colleges are either not doing anything, and just enrolling a lot more girls, or in some way giving boys a preference in admissions. And we won’t be able to do better until we can figure out a fair and effective way to address what is happening from birth through secondary school.
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Not anything that would show that in general.
However, some people will point to things like admissions rates for girls being higher than boys at many colleges which have a ban on gender preferences.
But this is explainable by the well-documented effect that girls get higher grades on average than boys.
So if a college is just looking blindly at applications and it helps to have better grades, then the likely result will be a higher admission rate for girls than boys.
That said, the one possible exception is that certain “tech” schools have such higher admissions rates for girls it might be implausible that is all just grades. To be sure, these studies have found girls get higher grades on average in STEM classes too. But maybe not enough to explain the difference in admissions rates at these tech colleges.
Otherwise, there is much more evidence of discrimination against girls than against boys.
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It is a bit more complicated than just this. The average test scores are higher for girls on the verbal section and higher for boys on the math section, but while girls do better across all demographics on the verbal, boys tend to do better in wealthier areas with higher concentrations of white and Asian students.
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I think any issues that affect boys come long before college. Some boys don’t thrive in elementary school where there tends to be a lot of emphasis on sitting still, listening and being compliant. For many boys that is a challenge. Also, for many boys being too academic isn’t seen as “cool” or desirable - they’d rather be athletic and popular.
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I see no evidence of any discrimination against boys when it comes to college admission. On average they get lower grades and apply in lower numbers so it shouldn’t be a surprise that they are being enrolled in lower numbers. I actually think a super high performing boy with grades/test scores at the tippy top of the range has a slightly better chance at some selective schools who are looking for gender parity, because there aren’t as many boys that fall into that category (especially if you aren’t looking at Engineering/CS).
Yeah, as noted before, if you try to use higher SATs as a statistical proxy for boys, mostly what you will get more of is just higher-income white kids. And maybe a few more boys, but not a lot.
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I think this is pretty obvious, and in some cases I am not so sure about the “slightly”. Those differences in admit rates by gender at Brown, which of course has STEM but not STEM-specific admissions, seem pretty hard to explain without anything other than a fairly significant gender-related “hook” or “tip” or whatever you want to call it. Still only matters if you have the numbers, but if you do? A model like they used in the Harvard lawsuit could spit out some pretty interesting results.
My S24 is also convinced this is happening at Vassar, which he really likes. And I can’t say I can prove otherwise. I am making sure he does not actually reclassify Vassar as a target instead of reach. But still, if you compared a boy and a girl both with really high numbers, would Vassar be a softer reach for the boy and harder reach for the girl? Again, not sure there is a good case to be made against that conclusion.
This does seem to be at least one of the contributing factors, and is not making it any easier to convince my S24 that a boy who is smart enough to see Vassar as cool and desirable is just playing the game better than a boy who does not. Yeah, buddy, you go ahead and try to get into Michigan Engineering out of state, I am going to go hang out at Vassar with a bunch of smart girls with great futures . . . . I mean seriously, how do you rebut that argument?
But anyway, it does appear to be a piling on of all sorts of different things. Boys also mature later in various ways. Parents sometimes seem to impose higher behavioral and academic standards on their girls. Girls and female mentors may reinforce the same higher standards among each other. Teachers may reward and reinforce behaviors differently, even totally unconsciously, which can have cumulative effects over time. More teachers may be strong female role models. And on and on.
Unfortunately, this makes it seem like it isn’t just a school thing, it is a broader cultural thing. Which is good to know, but then all the harder to figure out what to do about it.
In most of the UCs, engineering majors are capacity limited and more selective for admission. They also tend to be among the most male-heavy majors based on the interest distribution of prospective students. So it is not surprising that men have a lower admission rate, even if they have comparable admission credentials, because they are more likely to apply to more selective majors.
Yeah, you would have to control for that to really build a compelling model. I am personally skeptical that alone is enough to explain the whole difference, but without a lot of work I could not prove that.
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Assuming you mean in reference to a straight male student who is interested in a major that Vassar offers with sufficient breadth and depth… that argument may not be convincing to a gay male student who wants to study some kind of engineering, however.
It would be interesting to see. And to address the grades vs. SAT issue - my kids have had a few friends that had strong SATs (1450+) but sub-par grades. They were bright boys that didn’t take school seriously. I have hard time thinking that they should have been admitted to certain colleges over hard working/high performing girls who had slightly lower test scores.
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