What college admissions offices will rarely confess: Many grant preferences to males
How else are the supposed to maintain reasonable gender ratios? They see anything over 60% female as a no-go, and based on my travels I can see why. The men start abusing their relative scarcity, which leaves a lot of women very unhappy. U.S. News has once again stepped into the role of revealing who does and doesn’t quietly grant preferences.
(Although, when i went to their online link I couldn’t find the actual article. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, or maybe it’s behind their “premium” wall. If you find it, please share.)
Meanwhile, if you’re wondering what happens when universities cross that 60% line, here’s a link to a piece I wrote for the Chronicle.
Tags: admissions preferences
August 21st, 2009 at 7:19 am
Richard, I don’t see any documentation from US News, either. The secret of gender balancing has been out for a few years, but it still doesn’t make headlines the way affirmative action does (and it affects thousands more people). I wrote about it recently in my column on college admissions for examiner.com (http://www.examiner.com/x-766-College-Admissions-Examiner~y2009m7d8-College-admissions-who-gets-in-and-why-hint-it-helps-if-youre-male).
Good luck with your book!
Lauren Starkey
August 25th, 2009 at 12:41 am
The interesting thing to me is this concept of the “magic 60%”. Assuming you are correct that large numbers of women on campus become miserable when the ratio gets that high, I would suspect that some of it is that they are having to adjust to losing the advantage they have had all their lives. As I’ve mentioned before, there are 105 boys born for every 100 girls. In their 20s, there are 117 single men for every 100 single women in the population as a whole. So these women have, as a whole, a lot of experience with having been sought after. To have to deal with this local reversal of the situation can’t be fun. Schools like Harvard have the applicant pool to adjust their gender ratios. But for the majority of more normal schools, especially public colleges, I doubt there is much they can or are even really interested in doing. For these non-exclusive schools, if their ratio went up to 80%, they wouldn’t do anything differently, so long as all their slots were filled. Finally, I have seen no evidence that the AAUW is in the least concerned with this issue.