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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