the Sam Jackson College Experience

U.S. News & World Report ran a story two weeks ago about the “drastically higher” rejection rates women face at many colleges compared to men. This well known fact comes as no shock to those who know the numbers– more females graduate from high school and more of them seek college degrees than do their male counterparts. Their percentage in colleges and universities continues to grow. Alex Kingsbury describes the stats, informing us that “From rough parity in 1980, women made up 57 percent of the 16.6 million American collegegoers in 2006. By 2010, the Department of Education expects the ratio to be around 60 to 40.”

What’s the magic of that 60/40 number? According to Kingsbury, “anecdotal evidence suggests that once a campus reaches, say, a 60-to-40 split in favor of either gender, the college becomes less attractive to applicants of both sexes.”Although I like to cite all these numbers to inspire fear in my female friends, at the most elite schools it actually isn’t too much of a problem, perhaps because of the way the distributions work out with the male tendency to dominate the extremes balancing out the greater number of women (For a good example of this, check out my post analyzing the 2006 SAT data and scroll to the part where I summarize the differences between male and female scores). Kingsbury writes,

At the universities that attract the most applicants, balancing the boy and girl enrollment numbers appears to happen naturally based on the admissions data. At Harvard University, for example, the pool of more than 22,000 applicants has remained equally divided between men and women, meaning that both sexes are admitted at an equal-if dauntingly low-9 percent. Harvard has seen its percentage of female undergraduates increase steadily over the past decade from 46 percent in 1997 to 49 percent in 2006. Princeton, Stanford, Rice, Duke, and Yale universities are in the same boat; ditto for the elite liberal arts colleges such as Amherst, Williams, and Middlebury.

Where then is this massive inequity in admissions numbers coming from? Girls have “the biggest challenge” against them applying to small liberal arts schools. Colleges justify leaning on the scale for boys for their institutional needs, as they have done to justify countless other goals. The same logic that can be used for affirmative action can also be used to defend legacy, athletic, and development criteria; in this case, giving men a different, lower standard.

Colleges… contend that their schools are best served by keeping things balanced. “I don’t think that’s an issue of equity; it’s an issue of institutional prerogative [to create] a community that will best serve both the men and the women who elect to be members of that community,” says Henry Broaddus, director of admission at William and Mary. “Even women who enroll … expect to see men on campus. It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.” [...]

“There’s no easy answer as to what’s legal and what isn’t legal,” says Marcia Greenberger, copresident of the National Women’s Law Center. Even so, the continuing practice of admissions departments is worrying, says Emily Martin, deputy director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. “It raises questions about punishing girls for their success.”

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Here is just a quick picture of our Backroads group, minus trip leaders. This is in the Virgin River Narrows of Zion National Park, which was a lot of fun since I absolutely love hopping on rocks and scampering around in the water. I’m in blue next to my mom on the right. I have a real, serious post that I want to put up but it isn’t going through just now because my internet connection is seriously acting up. That’s very upsetting. Hopefully we will have it for tomorrow! Read about the Narrows more on wikipedia if you’re interested.

I am back from my Backroads trip to Bryce, Zion, and Grand Canyon national parks with my mom last week. We had to stay in Vegas a night coming in and a night leaving for logistical purposes, and it was dramatically awful. I won’t at this exact moment elaborate on the hatred for Las Vegas which fills me when I think of the place, but I will throw out a few bullet points. First, I never liked the place because of its environmental footprint, which I knew about before I had ever set foot there. Upon arriving, everything was more grossly capitalist and more importantly fake than I could ever have feared. The masses of sheep feeding the slot machines, the 100+ degree heat, the commoditization of everything… the experience combined was extremely dreadful. United Airlines made us suffer by essentially ruining two entire days of my life; wasting first one coming in and then, unsatisfied, another leaving. Both were due in some part to mismanagement but more to the fact that in its drive for a profitable bottom line it cut flights, increasing delays, damaging the consumer experience.

I will not go to Las Vegas again unless someone is paying me a considerable amount of money to do so, and United… well, thankfully Boston is a Continental hub.

However! Lest my experience sound wretched in its entirety, I can not emphasize enough how amazing and fabulous the week I spent in Backroads‘ care was. United just got our bags to us this afternoon so I haven’t yet fished the digital camera out and uploaded pictures, but I will soon, and the raw beauty of these places I saw will be yours to share! Cedar Breaks, Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, and Zion were all spectacular, even more so for my not ever having seen anything nearing their scale or nature. It was a majestic alien landscape which was often harsh but was consistently beautiful. I love the national parks and hiking and seeing new wonderful things, and this was unparalleled hiking luxury with Backroads, really immensely enjoyable.

Just getting back in the swing of things today, pictures and general return to posting will commence soon.

Beloved readers, I will be away for a week on a Backroads trip with my mom to Bryce, Zion, and Grand Canyon national parks. I will be back on the 20th. If I am not responding to your e-mails during this time very promptly, now you know why.

Feel free to leave comments about things in general, future posts, past concerns, whatever you like, I’ll address it all on my return. I highly recommend checking out the Archives and nosing through the wealth of content there if you have some free time.

Also, in July I am going to be part of a really awesome webinar series about admissions blogging that Karine Joly is running through her new Higher Ed Experts site. You should go sign up, no matter who you are, because it’s a great set up–I’m July 31 and earlier that month you also get Nancy Prater, Ball State University Web Coordinator and Ben Jones, director of communications for the MIT admissions office. If you don’t read their blogs already, you should–they have a lot of great stuff to say and I’m excited to be involved in this endeavor.

Plus, you get the good feeling knowing that my portion of your ticket price goes towards supporting my college education…! To my higher ed marketers and institutional readers out there especially, check it out, and even if you are able to turn down this amazing value! then register anyways and check out what Karine has set up because it’s pretty cool. I’ll profile it fully when I get back, I’ve been meaning to do so for a while.

: )

I pretty much agreed with Fred Stutzman out of the gate on the Facebook gifts feature when he said that the pricing and demand wasn’t there appropriately for these to work out terribly well. Well, it’s about four months now since the introduction of the Facebook gifts capacity and I thought that was as arbitrary an occasion as any to look back and contemplate its failure. My specific inspiration for this is that recently with the F8 facebook platform in place there is a ‘Free gifts’ application which is exactly what it sounds like. I know I’m not eager to give more publicity and hype to the facebook machine but hey, bandwagon.

In my anecdotal experience the gifts went something like this for every friend I had on facebook: You had one free gift and you chose it reasonably carefully (perhaps) and gave it to one particular person, or you perhaps hoarded it and then, at some later junction, you gave it to one particular person. Then you became aggravated at the distraction of the ‘Give a Gift’ button on everyone’s wall.

As of this writing there are 177 gifts available for purchase in the ‘catalog’ many of them ‘limited edition’ but really none of them having fewer than 100,000 available for purchase, many with 1,000,000 and several with 10,000,000. I think some went out of stock originally and are since gone. All the same, any current movement could probably be accounted for by new registrations–that 3% growth that everyone always talks about with Facebook. Just speculative, I suppose, but I think any purchases are really exceptions to the rule. Maybe Facebook’s PR line differs, but coming from a school which is decidedly posher, I might expect, than the median facebook user’s, if there was going to be purchasing I think my demographic might be leading the way a little bit. It’s not happening.

Danah Boyd envisioned the gifts as being unsustainable long term in their then-current form, which looks to have been pretty spot on, too. I also originally felt great resonance with Danah’s suggestion that scarcity should be involved more–Facebook almost started out really strong on this one when they had a limited introduction school by school which had people excited and wondering what the gifts were all about. Within a relatively short timespan, though, all interest had waned.

I guess at this point I’m looking to see if either something shifts with the gift strategy (evolution) or they’re swept under the rug (extinction). I wonder if the additional bandwidth cost of those characters of code and occasional server calls for gift images etc has cost Facebook money relative to gift revenue?

Final note: super-sharp readers will see I’ve tagged this post ’social networking site’ despite the fact that Facebook likes not to be called that anymore. Maybe they’ll change their name to a symbol next…

Update: 2:20 am – Apparently four of my friends, newsfeed tells me, have recently received the ‘congrats grad’ gift! Check first, though–two of them are a couple and these are their first gift-givings, and the other two… well, I can’t explain those immediately, but it’s not very statistically significant given the dearth of gifting I should have been seeing given the depth of my friend-pool. Oh well.

One More Note: Inside Facebook has some nice info on the Free Gifts app which inspired this post.