<p>Elmira College (NY) went co-ed in 1969 & they still need males!</p>
<p>Chestnut Hill College (in Philly) also a former women's college, now co-ed in a very pretty section of Philadelphia!</p>
<p>He may have an advantage applying at Vassar being male, especially if he is from an underrepresented state, not CA or NY or Northeast. Idaho would be great!</p>
<p>Vassar and Davidson want boys, but I think they are huuuuge reaches for a 3.0something, 30 ACT boy, no matter where he's from, unless he brings something really special to the table. Most of the other colleges mentioned here are more realistic, if not functionally open-admissions. (Chestnut Hill College is in that category.)</p>
<p>Wheaton College in Massachusetts is a former women's college that still offers admissions advantages to men, Beautiful campus between Boston and Providence, cross-registration with Brown, good D3 sports, involved faculty.</p>
<p>I remember reading a couple of years ago, that Wells college was admitting men...someone thought my son would get a good package, but it was too far for him. Also I think because his stats were below theirs, that Connecticut College gave him a few points for being male, they really were outspoken about wanting more male students then.</p>
<p>To reiterate what some of the others have said, Wells and Elmira both have high percentages of women (77 and 69 percent respectively). In in the Boston metro area Regis, Lesley, and Wheelock have all gone co-ed in the last five years and are all looking to increase the number of male students on campus. I believe that you would be a fit academically at all of those schools.</p>
<p>(Safety schools St. Scholastica in MN and Lake Erie in OH recently added football teams to help recruit more men.)</p>
<p>This is an interesting thread with a slant I hadn't thought of. Got DS#1 settled into an LAC that suits him well; DS#2 is a hs junior who I believe will have decent SATs (low-mid 600s?) but probably something like a 3.0 uw GPA. I fret a bit about what is out there for him. We are in VA and Randolph College came to mind, although it's <em>awfully</em> small (700 students). I think NE might be a bit far for him--other suggestions on top of those already offered for schools like this in the mid-atlantic/midwest regions? (I gotta think places like Skidmore with 30% acceptance rate are way out of reach.)</p>
<p>ingerp, we're in VA too, and my jr. son also has about a 3.0 uw gpa. I'm thinking that he would benefit from a small LAC but agree that Randolph might be <em>too</em> small. One thought that we have is Roanoke, but it is interesting that they don't have a football team either. Seems obvious to me that having a football team would make a school more attractive to males.</p>
<p>Funny--that's the third time I've heard Roanoke College this week. (Is it a sign???) Not much bigger than Randolph, but CTCL really likes Emory & Henry (~1,000 kids; allegedly strong football tradition; profs get <em>amazing</em> write-ups).</p>
<p>
[quote]
Seems obvious to me that having a football team would make a school more attractive to males.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don't know that this is really obvious. Football tends to swamp the male student body at small colleges. For example, St. Scholasitica's new team means that one out of every eight male students is a varsity football player and that the relatively low-budget school just spent $8 million on new lockerroom and training facilities. I'm not sure all male students would see that as a plus.</p>
<p>At Davidson, the President has come right out and said that they rely on the women to bolster the academic standards of the school. Unsaid is that recruiting for Div I sports at such a small school tilts the male students in a heavily non-academic direction.</p>
<p>You can very quickly end up with a real divide in campus culture between the women and the men.</p>
<p>On the other hand, few if any of the formerly all-women's colleges have been able to approach a 50-50 gender split, so I don't know the answer.</p>
<p>Davidson might be an outlier--its Division I athletics might lead to the "academic women/non-academic men" imbalance that you mention. For a typical Division III LAC looking to boost its male enrollment, football seems like an obvious way to do it. It seems like where a person should be cautious is when a small school competes at the Division I level. I would be curious as to what interesteddad thinks about a school like Longwood, for example, that competes at Division I, or a school like Wake Forest, that competes at Division I, despite their small sizes. Do those schools have any sort of imbalance between "academic women" and "non-academic men"?</p>
<p>I don't mean to say that men at Longwood or Wake Forest are "non-academic"--far from it. Maybe I should have said "less academic" than women. Maybe that is true of many, or even most, schools nowadays. My concern is when a small school has Division I athletics, it may lead to an imbalance between academically-inclined women and less academically inclined men.</p>
<p>On the other hand, some Division III schools, like Roanoke, do not have football. Is this a good idea (saving money, etc.) or a bad idea (might lead to fewer men being interested in the school)?</p>
<p>I used the College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics website to look at admission rates for men versus women at 17 of the top LACs. Altough we don't know if the credentials of the men were the same, on average, as the women applicants, there are some interesting differences. On average the admissions rates for men were about 20% higher than for women. There are several outliers:</p>
<p>Pomona M 20.2% W 12.7% (women's admission rate lower than for AWS)
Vassar M 34.0% W 21.0% (perhaps to be expected as a former women's college?)
Middlebury M 24.5% W 17.8%
Swarthmore M 18.8% W 13.7%</p>
<p>We can't know for sure, but it would appear that at these schools it is a real advantage to be male when hoping to be admitted.</p>
<p>dadx:</p>
<p>The real unwritten story is the gender disparity among minority groups. The lack of qualified black male applicants for elite colleges is a national tragedy. The disparity carries over to other groups to.</p>
<p>Look at these gender splits by group at Swarthmore this year and consider the implications for admissions odds (unless you are the parent of a white female, then I'd recommend a stiff belt of scotch).</p>
<p>African American
84 Women
50 Men</p>
<p>Asian American
139 Women
115 Men</p>
<p>Latino/a
99 Women
63 Men</p>
<p>White (inc. unknown)
401 Women
423 Men</p>
<p>So, the better qualified girls who are rejected will find a place at a good college lower down the rankings?</p>
<p>How about doing college admissions by proven ability and achievement, without regard to gender?</p>
<p>If that means women-dominated top universities and LACs, and the LESS qualified boys deservedly finding their places at lower colleges, then so be it.</p>
<p>After some years of harsh reality, maybe the boys will start working harder and earning their places in fair competition.</p>
<p>The problem facing many LACs in this regard is that if the gender balance tips too far towards women, the number of applications fall, from both men and women. In this regard young men are the benefit of affirmative action. Not to compensate for past or current injustice, but to provide enough diversity to keep applicants interested in the college.</p>
<p>"If that means women-dominated top universities and LACs, and the LESS qualified boys deservedly finding their places at lower colleges, then so be it."</p>
<p>The problem is that women don't want mostly-female campuses, and they'll gravitate to the more balanced schools in the tier, even if the admissions standards are a bit lower overall.</p>
<p>Cross-posted.</p>
<p>So . . . how is this different from the other kind of affirmative action? I sense that very few of us have any problem with colleges saying "In order to keep attracting the kinds of students we want, and to provide the best educational environment, we need to make certain we have at least a minimum percentage of boys. In order to do that, we're going to admit many more boys than we would if we made decisions on a gender-blind basis."</p>
<p>Furthermore, that minimum percentage seems to be at least 35% everywhere, because it looks like a 2:1 ratio is about the tipping point when students -- boys and girls alike -- conclude that the college isn't really co-ed and stop applying. But at the most prestigious schools, the minimum percentage they are using is about 50%, even though they could doubtless get away with 45% or even 40%. In other words, they are admitting more boys on a preferential basis than they have to for instrumental ends, simply because they like the idea of equal numbers of boys and girls. It's no mistake that the "outliers" in dadx3's data -- the ones that seem to favor boys more than average -- are high-prestige colleges with no big sports tradition that have 1:1 F:M ratios.</p>
<p>Now, I'm fine with this, just as I'm fine with affirmative action for URMs, despite the fact that boys -- mostly preppy, affluent boys at these schools -- do not exactly have a burden of historical subjugation to overcome. But usually people get apoplectic over affirmative action issues here. Why are more posters not railing against this awful discrimination? Or is discrimination somewhat less awful when it operates in favor of our sons (and potential sons-in-law)?</p>