<p>Now that I am looking for a college for my son (senior this year) the difference between male and female enrollment in colleges is striking home. I read/heard that it is 55/45 for all undergraduate college enrollment. But a lot of the schools we have seen/been interested in the difference is greater (Seattle University and USF 63% for female enrollment).</p>
<p>Is there any study as to why? Are girls just more driven now? (my daughter sure is) Or is it the boys are less driven (seeing how much time they spend gaming on line that seems to be at least one of the reasons)</p>
<p>I have also heard that some schools are considering males a underrepresented group on campus, and while that is good for my son, will be bad for my daughter (two years behind him).</p>
<p>There are some college tours we have been on where he is one of only a few males. Very strange</p>
<p>Also construction, factory work, trades that do not require 4-yr undergrad degrees. I don't recall whether this difference is only for 4-yr liberal arts colleges or for all 4-yr schools including large universities that also have engineering schools or other specialty/tech schools where males might outnumber females in specific majors.</p>
<p>Not sure what gaming has to do with it anything but I agree there are more options for careers and lucrative careers for boys than girls (trade related fields for one) and fields that more boys than girls enter (like culinary) that are non-traditional for traditional 4 year college programs. Not to mention male dominated fields that often don't require a traditional college (fireman, policeman, EMT, etc.). I would imagine that the armed forces take a larger chunk of males out of the post high school directly to college route than women. I'm sure I could think of more examples given time. Also in general there are more women than men in the country as a whole - not sure how the numbers play out for 17-30 (which would be college age), but it's quite possible there are simply more women, I just don't have the time to go researching this. My guess would be that over the long run - more males make use of their college degrees and remain in the workforce than females, even though they may be under represented in the campus numbers at the start of the adult journey so it's really doesn't "mean" anything that males outnumber females on traditional college campuses. It is still a fact that more women drop out of the workforce to raise families than males and that males still earn more for comparable work over the long haul.</p>
<p>Guys have always been able to get decent-paying jobs that didn't require a college degree. That was true fifty years ago, and it remains true today.</p>
<p>All of the above makes a lot of sense. Another factor is that boys who do go to college gravitate towards more techy schools, like MIT and Worcester Polytech, and to schools known for their sports teams, like Duke and Univ. of (put your big football/basketball school name here). This means boys don't go to liberal arts schools or artsy colleges in the same percentages as the girls.</p>
<p>In doing some research in the gender balance in my state, I discovered that the big state U had more girls than boys, but the state colleges and community colleges had more boys than girls. I wonder if this is connected to the achievement gap (that girls tend to perform better in HS) and the development gap (that many boys don't start to take school seriously until junior or senior year of high school). This also skews the boys into a different type of college than the girls.</p>
<p>This is a topic I have been thinking about for a long time. I believe this is a multifaceted and complicated problem. </p>
<ol>
<li>I think girls are not restricted by their teachers anymore and are actually encouraged to go to college. Many of my friends were not encourage toward college.</li>
<li>In my family, my daughter works harder than her boy friends. Perhaps they have a sense of entitlement.<br></li>
<li>I do think video gaming has something to do with this trend. Maybe reading ability. My daughter’s boy friends simply don’t read like my daughter.<br></li>
<li>Males are parented differently than my generation. My father was a loving but a very strong figure in my brother’s lives. I’m seeing much less of that now. I think the effect this has on boys is less drive to please the father figure in their life. (IMO).<br></li>
<li>Boys need to learn how to work a job. I see more boys without any practical job experience. My daughter has had some pretty bad jobs (and not in a good way). She knows she wants a decent job.<br></li>
</ol>
<p>I have been talking about these trends for more than 8 years and many people thought I was crazy. Now this trend is well documented.</p>
<p>Girls do perform better than boys in high school. I think that more girls than boys are in the top 10% of their high school classes. I think that on the average, girls are more successful in doing what one needs to do to succeed in school: sit still, study hard, keep track of your assignments and turn them in on time, etc., and that * on the average*, boys are less compliant and less well-organized, especially while they are under 18.</p>
<p>I think that this has always been true, but that in the past, girls were discouraged from going to college. Now that girls are encouraged to go to college, more of them are going. My humble opinion.</p>
<p>Also, for schools with non-trditionally aged students, many more women return to school as adults than men for many reasons. They also help skew the stats.</p>
<p>Perhaps fewer boys than girls obtain an education that prepares them for college in part because more boys than girls are "lost" to illegal activities and incarceration.</p>
<p>Lots of reasons, some of them addressed in above posts. The males have always been more "endangered" for a number of reasons. I have noticed that the girls tend to dominate the honor rolls and the valedictory positions. It seems that they are just better students. Maybe maturity reasons. </p>
<p>For LACs in particular, it gives males a bit of an advantage. I know that my son whose grades were on the low side, but with high SATs, the GCs at school felt that because he was taking very tough courses and did not have peaks and dips but consistence, he would get a bit of a break on those grades that females may not get as there are enough of them with great grades. Son is typical of many males. Now that doesn't mean that he was going to get into the top schools or was a shoo in anywhere, but there was the feeling that he would have a small edge over females with similar stats. For engineering, and other male heavy programs, the opposite would have been the situation, because co ed schools do like to stay close as they can to a 50/50 split in sexes. Some schools like Goucher, Wheaton, Skidmore that are trying to hard to attract more males give males an even more significant boost. That is something to remember when you are looking at stats and trying to match kids to schools. A son applying to those schools would have an edge over a daughter. My good friend has a daughter who was a better student than her son who did not do as well in college admissions as her brother. BC which was her first choice school did not accept her, but did take her brother in a much tougher admissions year with dicier transcript and similar SATs. And it was no surprise to the counselors involved. Son also got some pots of merit money that Daughter did not.</p>
<p>I don't know if this is true for your local high school, but here I've noticed an environment which is so busy trying to raise the self esteem and confidence of girls that they're losing the boys in the process. For instance, when a boy asks a question, the response from the teacher is something like, "Weren't you paying attention?" When the girl asks the question, the response from the teacher is something like, "Good question. I'm glad you brought that up." I've discussed this topic with my sons and their friends. They all agree that the once they reached middle school, the teacher's tended to favor the girls. They would call on the girls to answer questions and so forth. Luckily, my sons were fortunate enough to have coaches and positive male role models within the family to give them positive feedback. I feel as though schools have swung so far to the side of boosting the self confidences of girls that they are losing the boys. Has anyone else out there noticed a similar trend within the school system as their son's moved from elementary school to middle school to high school?</p>
<p>
[quote]
3. I do think video gaming has something to do with this trend. Maybe reading ability. My daughter’s boy friends simply don’t read like my daughter.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>If they weren't playing video games then they'd be off elsewhere doing an activity that doesn't involve reading. When I want to read a book, I read a book. When I want to blast some werewolf-zombie-vampire-nazis, I play a video game.</p>
<p>To the OP, I think you should take a look at some different sets of schools. During my undergrad hunt, the best I remember finding was around 60/40 M/F ratio (that's what happens when you only look at schools aimed at engineering/science).</p>
<p>I actually read on one of the boards here that at least one of the LACs (think it was Whitman) was more liberal in admissions to males than females. And we are taking this fact into account for our college admission strategy.</p>
<p>I just get the feeling that girls are more focused than boys are. Especially in school. My daughter's friends seem to be more on top of their academics than their mail counterparts.</p>
<p>This does seem to be a recent development. I just keep wondering if my mom was right, that girls really are naturally smarter than boys. </p>
<p>And I looked up the census figures for males and females 18-29 and the populations are virutally 50/50 in this age group.</p>
<p>I wonder if there's been a study on this anywhere.</p>
<p>
[quote]
"Human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said psychologist Richard Haier of the University of California at Irvine upon releasing his study of male and female brains in January.</p>
<p>Again using MRIs, he found that men have more than six times the amount of gray matter -- which controls information processing -- in their brains as women do. But females have 10 times the amount of white matter, which controls networking abilities.</p>
<p>The findings "may help explain why men excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics) while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information ... such as required for language," the study found.
<p>If you look at the old dunce capped kid in the corner picture, it was nearly always a boy. Boys are knuckle heads when it comes to school. Yeah, a generality that I know does not always hold true, but more so for males than females. I wish it weren't so having 5 of these guys under my wing, but so far it has held. And I was one of those moms who wanted to raise my kids in an androgynous life. Ha! Got me good on that one.</p>
<p>"If you look at the old dunce capped kid in the corner picture, it was nearly always a boy."</p>
<p>If you attended a catholic school back "in the day", this statement does hold true. You know why? Because the nuns beat the crap out of boys for no reason. They hated the boys. I went to a catholic school for grades K-1. My only memory of that school is feeling so bad for the boys because they were constantly singled out and punished. I witnessed one nun literally beat a boy and then tell him that if he told his parents about it, he would go to hell. The boys are not the problem. The problem may be with the many adult women who don't know how to communicate and teach to boys. I'm a sister to three brothers. I'm a mom to 2 sons. Aunt to many nephews. No dunces here. No knuckle heads.</p>
<p>HA HA cptofthehouse! D2 was a percussionist in middle school and was the only girl percussionist in her band. She is a somewhat shy kid. She was appointed as the "leader" and had to make sure everyone put away their music and cleaned up their area. She hated band because the boys were always pushing and shoving and poking each other with their sticks and mallets and when the bell rang to change classes they all ran and left her to put the music away and clean up. We tried to talk her through this but she ended up quitting even after the teacher tried to intervene. The best advice she got though was when a mother of sons told her she needed to know that " to boys life is a contact sport". I thought this was great humorous advice and never forgotten it!! ;) Gotta love it! :)</p>