by Isia Jasiewicz // Princeton University
with Kiki Von Glinow // New York University and Adrienne Jeffries // William & Mary College

It’s not just that more women are applying to college than in earlier generations or that more women are applying than their male peers (although both of those are true). They’re also applying with stronger resumes and GPAs, resulting in a highly competitive playing field for female applicants. While our mothers fought against sexist assumptions of their gender’s inferiority, women today face an additional challenge: with some colleges struggling to find enough well-qualified males to maintain a 50-50 gender balance, there could be more rejection letters for accomplished girls.

Along with geographic and ethnic diversity, admissions officers try to construct a gender-balanced class, says Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions at Kenyon College in Ohio. And although most schools have shied away from attempting formal admissions policies giving preferential treatment to males, the desire to maintain gender balance may prompt schools to be stingier in mailing out fat envelopes to female applicants.

At Kenyon, for instance, more than 55 percent of applicants are female—a figure that Britz says is striking, especially considering that the school was a men’s college until 1969. Since gender balance is a consideration in its admissions process, Kenyon might hesitate to accept females with middling test scores, Britz says, in favor of males with the same scores who have the added benefit of lending the college greater gender diversity.

Kenyon is not the only school facing an estrogen-loaded applicant pool; women nationwide are matriculating at significantly higher rates than males. Out of all the undergraduates in the country in 2003, only 42 percent were male, according to a 2006 report on gender equity in higher education published by the American Council on Education Center for Policy Analysis. That means that for every male in college in 2003, there were about 1.4 female classmates. Education policy makers and academics predict that the proportion of women to men in college will reach 60-40 within the next decade, says Jerry Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennyslvania.

It should come as no surprise, then, that gender disparity is a hot topic among admissions officers—and some of them have even taken big steps toward reducing it.

The most noteworthy example is an experimental program at Towson University in Maryland. Admissions officers there had noticed a trend among their applicants, which Director of Undergraduate Admissions Louise Shulack says has been observed nationwide: male students tend to have slightly higher test scores relative to their female peers, while women generally have stronger GPAs. So in an effort to equalize the gender ratio, they instituted the Academic Special Admissions Program (ASAP) in the fall of 2005, which accepted students with slightly higher SAT scores but lower GPAs than the average scores of Towson’s student body, thus giving an advantage to a specific type of applicant, usually male. Ultimately ASAP proved unsuccessful, and the university canceled the program this fall due to a lower-than-average retention rate among its students. The students admitted in ASAP were less able to handle the demands of college coursework, Shulack says.

Some students at Towson think the university may have done better not introducing ASAP at all. Junior Justin Westphal says he thinks admissions should be based solely on merit, and gender should play no role: “If there’s a girl and a guy both applying to college and the girl does better, she certainly deserves to get in. If the guy were to get in just for being a guy, that would make no sense at all,” he says. Westphal, a digital art and design major, says that his classes are “definitely female dominated” and that his conversations with students in other departments indicate that the gender imbalance is consistent throughout the university.

Most students at Towson are used to the fact that the school attracts more females, says William Logan, a senior mathematics and economics major there. Logan says that even in his upper level math courses, which traditionally have been dominated by men, there are plenty of female students, though not as many as in the general education courses he took as a freshman.

“I don’t think gender balance makes that much of a difference in the classroom,” Logan says, explaining that he observed no difference between his learning habits in a female-dominated class versus a more evenly proportioned one. “I don’t see it as a detriment at all that there are more female students,” he adds.

Westphal agrees. He says that although studying on a largely female campus makes it difficult to find male camaraderie, he—like most of his friends—isn’t bothered by being in a male minority. “I’m actually kind of pleased to hear that the gender balance is starting to tip in this direction,” he says. “I grew up with a single mom, and she always had to work really hard to break the glass ceiling in the workplace. So I think it’s interesting to see women coming out on top in education.”

Towson’s formal attempts to increase male enrollment appear to be the exception, not the rule, but other schools have also observed females “coming out on top” in their high school performance. Admissions directors from James Madison University, the University of Mary Washington, and Kenyon all say that their applicant pools reflect the same pattern that Towson admission officers noticed: females are applying to college with higher GPAs, while males tend to have slightly higher SAT scores.

Though reasons for the trend are unclear, Martin Wilder, vice president for enrollment and communications at UMW—where two-thirds of the applicant pool and the enrolled student body is female—suggests that the disparity points to male students with academic potential underachieving in high school. Wilder attributes the gender gap in GPAs to a difference in the relative maturity level of adolescent girls and boys. Girls tend to mature more quickly, which he says allows them to realize the importance of studying earlier on in their educational development. “It’s un-cool [among boys] to be too smart or too bookish,” he says. As a result, boys are less likely to hit the books and more likely to pull out the “dog-ate-my-homework” excuse, and their grades will suffer even if they’re perfectly capable of performing on a higher level academically.

Another explanation for the disparity in male and female GPAs comes from Michael Walsh, director of admissions at JMU, which was all-female until the ’70s and currently has a 60-40 female-to-male breakdown among enrolled students. Walsh attributes the trend in part to the influence of female high school teachers. Because they had to surpass their male peers when they were in school in order to get good jobs, they continue to put more pressure on girls today to get good grades, he says.

Yet the gender discrepancy admissions conundrum stems from more than teacher influence or social standards among students, says Jacobs, the University of Pennsylvania sociology professor. The crux of the problem for him is not in the differences in scores between males and females but the fact that more women are applying to college in the first place. And the explanation for the female applicant majority, he says, can be found at the intersection of gender and class. Among students from affluent backgrounds, the overwhelming majority—male and female alike—go to college, he explains. “Disparity between men and women will only begin to appear in groups where college access is not universal.”

This means that the gender disparity is most pronounced among students whose parents aren’t college-educated, or whose family’s finances won’t allow for all their children to go to college. In those cases, gender may help determine whether students go into the workforce after high school instead of off to college.

That might be more appealing to male students than to females, says Deb Thyng Schmidt, a senior adviser with AdmissionsConsultants, Inc., a firm that provides college counseling and application advice to high school students. Many well-paying blue-collar fields, from carpentry to car repair, remain male-dominated. As a result, men leaving high school might feel less pressure to go to college than females, who may feel less inclined to go into traditionally male workforces that don’t require college degrees, she says.

Whether or not the gender disparity trend will hold up may depend on the economy, says Fran Stage, a professor in New York Univeristy’s Steinhart School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Stage says the possibility of a recession over the next couple of years could make jobs scarcer—and, as a result, more male students may wish to receive degrees in order to add an edge to their resumes.

The future of gender disparity in higher education may also depend on the development of programs in colleges. Although Towson seems to be the only university that tried an explicit policy to favor males in the admissions process, many admissions officers are aware of the growing gender disparity and are debating ways to address it.

Much of that discussion comes out of liberal arts schools, which “don’t have the rah-rah athletic programs that many young men love, thus making the large state universities more attractive to young men,” Britz says. While boys tend to want televised football games and larger communities, girls may be more content to study in smaller towns like Gambier, Ohio, which is home to Kenyon and barely 2,000 residents. Schmidt says families may prefer to send their daughters to liberal arts schools in small communities, “where they’ll be more looked after.” 

One approach that liberal arts schools can take to increase the number of male applications they receive, Schmidt says, is to market academic and extra-curricular activities that may be appealing to male students. Birmingham-Southern College and Shorter College (both of which have a student body with a male-to-female ratio of about 40-60), for instance, have both introduced new football programs with the goal of attracting males.

In general, though, schools seem reluctant to make moves designed to favor male applicants. Wilder, for instance, stresses the importance of “holistic review,” in which gender is just one of many factors considered in admissions decisions—which is an explanation we’re used to hearing from admissions counselors regarding race, but not necessarily gender, and certainly not favoring males.

Indeed, much of the rhetoric surrounding the question of whether to favor male applicants overlaps with the affirmative action debate. And, as with affirmative action for race, there’s a delicate line between encouraging diversity and giving unfair preferential treatment. Some colleges may steer clear of outright affirmative action policies for males to avoid legal ramifications.

Regardless of the legal situation, some say having a female majority might not be so problematic. Considering the relative strength and focus of female students at JMU, Walsh says he doesn’t see a compelling reason to maintain a 50-50 balance on campus. “I’ve heard people say we have to have a 50-50 split because if it’s 60-40, there aren’t enough people to date the women,” he says. “But women here tell me, ‘I’m here to get an education. I’m not here to get my Mrs.!’”

Indeed, it’s our mothers’ fight to earn BAs over “Mrs.”s that we have to thank for women’s current overrepresentation in higher education. And some, like College of William and Mary sophomore Jasmine Tutt, say we shouldn’t sacrifice the fruits of the feminist struggle just yet, even if it does mean that colleges become more female-dominated—like her own campus, which, according to university spokesman Brian Whitson, is about 63 percent female. The fight for gender equality, Tutt argues, should come before attempts to maintain gender balance on college campuses. “Since more and more women have started entering higher levels of education, the standards for achievement have increased,” Tutt says. “But looking outside of class, behind the numbers and test averages and GPAs, I would say that—socially—gender equality still has a long way to go.” 

Isia Jasiewicz is a sophomore majoring in art history at Princeton University. She’s glad she got in despite being a girl.

Illustration by Emmanuel Tavares // Parsons The New School of Design
 

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