https://wapo.st/48ZK4nO

The op-ed cites these statistics: "Girls constitute two-thirds of the top 10 percent of their high school classes and apply to college at a higher rate than boys."

Then talks about schools' tendency to want a "balanced" student body, meaning one that has roughly as many boys as girls, would mean raising the admission standards for girls and/or lowering the same for boys.

Then the important questions:
* why colleges want roughly equal numbers of male/female students? Is this the right goal?
* does that meet the spirit of "Affirmative Action"?

quote:

Women have enrolled in college at greater rates than men since the early 1980s. They get better grades, drop out less frequently and are more likely to earn a four-year degree. ... So why do women still earn 82 cents to the male dollar?

[The author then shares her hypothesis on that.]

Quoting from an essay by a college admissions officer:

quote:

“Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”

That one surprises me. So here's my question to you:

Will you (either as a student yourself or as a parent/guardian of a university student/applicant or as an employer of university graduates) think less of a university if you see that it has more female students than male students?

As a parent, that thought never crossed my mind. Not sure how I would have felt about it as a student (back when I was a student).

Back in the day, Dartmouth had like a 16-to-1 male-to-female ratio, and Dartmouth is very remote. It was a definite disincentive for some men to apply. I don't recall the women discussing it.

It wasn't a consideration for me when I went to college. The college of engineering was almost entirely male students; females were a tiny minority. There were females on campus in other colleges such as fine arts, but the different groups didn't share many classes and didn't meet too often. Socializing with females occurred via a couple of all-women colleges not far away and several nursing academies. At one time, I was told that about a third of engineers married nurses on account of that.

I believe the proportions have shifted, but the emphasis on enticing female students into STEM fields would suggest that there is still skewing toward male enrollment there.

Big Al

That's interesting, and something I really never though about. I don't work on the "student side" of data analysis (I deal with employees), but it's definitely true that women have outnumbered men for years.

It's also true that women and men tend to congregate in specific majors, for reasons that are complicated. However, there are changes. There are more women in Pre-Med and med school, women dominate in Biology. Engineering still seems to be primarily male-dominated, but it's possible that's changed or changing and I'm not in the loop.

But the whole notion of whether that would be taken into account during college selection is new to me. Like Jodi, it never occurred to me when I was going to school. I don't recall it coming up in any discussions with my kids other than my daughter was adamant she did not want to go to an all-girls college.

I would feel like my daughter was safer in a school with fewer males. Men do commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime and sexual assault.

I just worried in general when my kids were in college, until they smarted up, which for both occurred around junior year.

My kids made some, um, questionable judgment calls when they first went off to school. Then again, so did I.

I was fortunate that neither of them really became party animals. That seems to be the scenario that is most concerning (both both sexes, but for different reasons).

I was offered a full scholarship, including room, meals, and laundry, to the Mississippi University for Women.

I was also offered a full scholarship, plus enough cash to pay for my room and most of my meals, to Ole Miss.

If I recall correctly, MUW was trying to get around the no-engineering thing by offering a 4+1 program at MUW and gotten a dual degree in physics and engineering, with the engineering degree coming from Mississippi State, which was just down the road. Mississippi State is better known for engineering, so it wouldn't have been a dumb thing to do, and I was only 17, so it wouldn't have put my life on hold to any real degree. (As it turned out, Ole Miss was the place for chemical engineering, because they had a strong chemistry program to support the med school, but never mind that.)

Anyway, there were a lot of factors at play, but I've gotta say that I never seriously considered the MUW offer, because there were no boys there.

And the price I paid was that I had to do my own laundry.

I don't know about the university as a whole but I teach in the journalism college, which I think is about 2/3 female these days.

Because of the vagaries of our accreditation body, journalism has had the toughest admission and graduation requirements (higher GPA, more foreign language, an outside minor) during my time at OU. Those requirements are in the process of changing, but I think they're one reason our gender balance is so skewed, since women do make higher grades and are more likely to stay in the program.

Some programs like engineering and nursing are long associated with one gender or another, but I'm not sure that's as true of journalism. It occurs to me that our college also houses public relations, which skews female, as well as creative media production and advertising, which may be less gendered.

My program is heavily female, despite there being a ton of male writers of fiction and nonfiction. I can't really explain that, except for the fact that there's a workload for our undergraduates that I honestly think is insane--they write a novel, one or two novellas, a dozen or so short stories, plus other things that depend on their interests. We naturally attract and retain students who are really, really focused on their studies, and that seems to be women these days.

I think I would go for the reputation of the school for the student’s desired field, rather than the male/female distribution. When my daughter went to college, I don’t remember the issue coming up. But that was quite a few years ago.

I wouldn't think anything about it.

Some of the best schools admit only women.