Many Colleges Reject Women at Higher Rates Than for Men
"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."
Often lost in the debate is the fact that the gender ratio in higher education has undergone major shifts before. Between 1900 and 1930, for example, men and women were equally represented in higher education, largely because of teaching programs that were dominated by women. That parity ended abruptly after World War II, when the GI Bill disproportionately benefited males returning from military service. Men continued to be overrepresented until the early 1980s.
What does all of this mean for applicants? 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.
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.
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."
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."
Sitting in the admissions office at the University of Richmond, Marilyn Hesser agrees. 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."
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