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.”

It’s that last part–the possibility of punishing girls for their success-which troubles me. The fact remains that even though nationwide most schools are ‘open admission’ and that that is the most straightforward reason women are taking so many spots in college (as more are applying) many women, especially those I know who considered / are considering top schools, find themselves discouraged by the climate which seems to exist. There can be advantageous flip sides for would-be women engineers, but what I see is that guys don’t seem to have the same mental burden of a seemingly uphill battle even at those schools where the numbers make things harder for them. The reason these girls are having trouble is essentially because they were such good students: they study more, score better, and that academic performance is recognized and has to be ‘accounted for’ to give guys a fighting chance.

For girls, making the cut might come down to something as simple as the expected field of study. As an admissions officer from a small midwestern liberal arts college puts it: “God help the female English majors who apply to this school.” In fact, women hoping to study engineering will find themselves at an advantage at schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which over the past decade has admitted women at a rate that is 17 percentage points higher than for men.

So just how severely do women have the deck stacked against them at some schools? At the University of Richmond, “female applicants have faced an admissions rate that is an average 13 percentage points lower than that of their male peers just for the sake of keeping that girl-boy balance,” writes Kingsbury. But lest we think that it is an exception, the piece moves on to draw from the secret US News arsenal- its rankings. Richmond is not the exception and it is not the most extreme. “Using undergraduate admissions rate data collected from more than 1,400 four-year colleges and universities that participate in the magazine’s rankings, U.S. News has found that over the past 10 years many schools are maintaining their gender balance by admitting men and women at sometimes drastically different rates.” Sadly no good overall rates are given by the author.

The article enunciates a sense of a sort of desperation among some small liberal arts colleges, struggling to find men to admit. Obviously I acknowledge that a gender imbalance on the basis of a lack of outreach could be a problem readily addressed- if these mystery boys would somehow be convinced to attend these schools for which they are well qualified, there should be no problem, right? The problem I observe is the means to this end:

Some colleges, like Lake Erie College in Ohio and Husson College in Maine, are making extra efforts to attract male applicants by creating football teams. Others are emphasizing hands-on learning on college tours, tweaking their advertising brochures, and reaching out to all-male high schools. Common recruiting practices like writing personalized notes or having alumni call interested students are not as effective at landing students with a Y chromosome, schools have found.

Perhaps it my limited perspective here which has me frowning when I see testosterone driven activities being used for recruitment purposes, but this bothers me not on such an objective level but more because it seems so clearly a throwback to the days of old when the Big Three put out videos to trumpet their schools which made great efforts to downplay any studying, academics, or intellectualism and instead focused on more character driven aspects of both the education and the educated. Modern military recruitment videos at least sometimes trumpet the value of getting money for college, even if it’s only after a marine somehow defeats a minotaur of fire with a magical sword. You might call be crazy in my worry here, were it not for this next sentence after that last one quoted:

Male applicants are often in an advantaged position-so much so that college counselors have begun advising some boys to “emphasize their maleness,” says Steve Goodman, a longtime independent college counselor. He encourages male students to submit pictures or trumpet their sports activities. “Anything to catch an admissions officer’s eye.”

Great– didn’t anyone remember what happened to Aleksey Vayner? In any event, the article started to end on a nicely encouraging note chastising those applicant-readers who might have been getting some smart ideas.

In the end, targeting applications to schools with historically better admit rates for either gender is a Heisenbergian exercise, where the previous year’s data will influence the next year’s applicant pool in unknown ways. “Students have very little control over admission in general, and their gender is something that they have no control over,” says Connecticut-based independent counselor Janet Rosier. “Worrying about this aspect of an already secretive process will only cause kids more stress.”

Fantastic–stop worrying, keep the stress level down. Now, remember that paragraph I quoted just above–football teams, all that hooplah about attracting guys? Hold that in your mind while you read this last piece, and you’ll see why this whole article came together at the end tasting a little hollow.

Sitting in the admissions office at the University of Richmond, Marilyn Hesser agrees [with Rosier]. Students, she says, need to follow their hearts in finding the best place for them to live and study. Chasing numbers can be problematic. “We could do more to get applications from men,” she says, “but that would also result in more applications from women.”

Yes, you read that correctly.

To conclude: It’s always tricky to come down for either sex-blind admissions versus a semi-quota based system to ensure no one demographic overshadows the other, and this modern day dilemma is novel to me because I was not applying to the smaller schools for which this was a problem so it was not something which I had seriously considered. A good friend of mine is attending a school where it is almost 75% female, and I will have to poll him a year from now about campus sensibilities. The root cause of the numbers problem seems to stem from the number of high school graduates headed towards college, and the blame for that gap can be pointed at many people. What’s more important than mulling over the numbers of these college-bound is considered the many people who drop out, who choose for reasons financial or otherwise that college is not right for them, and the kids in those subgroups for whom college could become a reality if they were given some help. That said, the battle to improve U.S. education should be fought on many fronts!

Related: Alex Kingsbury spoke about her work on NPR a few weeks ago, listen in here.