A couple weeks ago my friend Emily forwarded to me a U.S. News and World Report article, “Admittedly Unequal“, which reports that many schools are rejecting female applicants at a much higher rate than male applicants. For example, in 1997, The College of William and Mary admitted 51 percent of their male applicants and 43 percent of their female applicants. In 2006, those numbers went down to 44 percent for the boys and 26 percent for the girls.
This is accompanied by a significant increase in the girl/boy ratio in applicants. Far more girls are applying to college, and yet roughly equal numbers of boys and girls are getting accepted. The major reason cited in the article is a desire in admissions committees to keep the gender ratio close to 50/50. That smells pretty fishy to me, so I started writing some emails.
The first email I wrote was to Marilyn Hesser, Senior Associate Director of Admission at the University of Richmond, who is quoted several times in the article. Here’s the first chunk of my message:
“Today I read an article in USA Today called “Admittedly Unequal” which quoted you saying that the University of Richmond has a policy of rejecting better qualified female applicants over slightly lesser qualified male applicants in the name of maintaining an equal proportion of both kinds of students. I am certain that you and your colleagues have thought this decision over very carefully, and do not take it lightly, but I would like to urge you to please reconsider this policy.”
In retrospect, that was an unfair characterization on my part. If I were to write the letter again, I’d assume that I was wrong about my understanding of the policy, and ask if it really was what I thought it was. Hesser responded almost immediately, very politely asking where in the article she described such a policy, offering to try to address my specific concerns.
I went back and looked carefully at the article, and realized that it was this quote from her that concerned me:
“The board of trustees has said that the admissions office can go as far as 55-45 [women to men].”
That kind of policy suggested to me that if 60 percent of the top candidates are women, some of those women would have to be rejected in favor of less qualified men. Hesser responded again very quickly, saying:
“I can understand how you might have misinterpreted the quote ‘The board of trustees has said that the admissions office can go as far as 55-45 [women to men].’ This happens when words are excerpted from a larger context. The day of the interview, I went on to explain that the reason the board of trustees had set the 55-45% female to male ratio was because this was the range at which we were able to admit both men and women of comparable academic promise.”
Which puts aside some of my fears, at least for the incoming class of 2007. But I still wonder: why do they need to set a ratio at all? Why can’t they just admit the best applicants, male, female, black, white, hispanic, queer, straight, differently abled, etc.? I’m guessing the board of trustees doesn’t issue decisions stating that only, say, 10-20 percent of admits can be Hispanic.
And it still troubles me that admissions committees are concerned about the ratio and what kind of ratio students want. I don’t care if students prefer a 50/50 ratio, I think schools should admit the candidates who will contribute the most to the campus, be it through academic performance, social contributions, or diversity of thought and practice.
I don’t like it, but I have to mention the concerns about the dating scene. You know, the “but our girls won’t have enough boys to date!” concerns. I could raise red flags about the heteronormativity of those concerns, and I could point out that women are more likely to practice fluid sexuality[1] than men are, which would mitigate the difficulties with having a smaller pool of heterosexual men. I could do those things but I won’t. *cough*
The real problem with admission committee deciding what the dating pool should be like for women is that it takes the decision away from the applicants in question. If your school is 60% women, and women are still applying in droves, it means they don’t care. Either they’re queer or they just don’t care about having a huge pool of guys available for dating. Women who don’t need a man to complete their lives. What a concept!
Moving right along… The next letter I sent was to Henry Broaddus, Dean of Admission at The College of William and Mary. I lodged roughly the same complaint I sent to Hesser. He responded in no uncertain terms:
“… at no point in our admission process do we hold men,
or any other subset of the applicant pool, to a different set of
admission standards. The only demographic criterion to which the
College is beholden is the in-state/out-of-state ratio of 65/35 as
per its agreement with the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
And he went on to point out that the SAT scores for women admits are actually a little lower than the scores for men, and one of the reasons for the disproportion in admits is that there are far more women applicants. I responded, in part:
“I’m still troubled by the difference in admissions rates (according to the article 44% and 26% for men and women, respectively). There seem to be only two explanations for that difference:
1) The women applicants are on average less qualified, or
2) The admissions requirements are stricter for women.
Are you saying that the former is true?”
Broaddus responded, in full:
“Mr. Pukinskis, it’s not so much that the female applicants are less qualified as it is the case that there are simply more of them.
Yes, men are disproportionately represented in the admitted group relative to the applicant pool, but that’s in large part attributable to the highly self-selected group of men who apply.
Further complicating simple statistics based on gender alone is the fact that the disproportion of women relative to men is even greater among our out-of-state pool, which has an overall admit rate of 26% (for men and women). That depresses the numbers considerably.”
The point about the out-of-state pool is a good one, and certainly accounts for some of the gap. But the first bit, that there are simply more female applicants, doesn’t really address my question, which has to do with the admission rate, not the number of admits. And second point, really, is affirmation of my suggestion #1: the women applicants are on average less qualified. Because the men are a “highly self-selected group of men”.
So, apparently there are circumstances that are discouraging lesser male applicants from applying. I’m willing to accept that, but I’d sure like to know what those circumstances are.
But in the end, I don’t think the problem is as big as I thought it was. Really, my only remaining concern is that some of the admissions staff in the article seem to talk about 50/50 ratios as if they’re a good thing for universities. As far as I’m concerned the proper reaction to a 60/40 girl/boy admit ratio is “rock on! We’ve got more and more ladies kicking ass and taking names, and we’re more than happy to accept every one of them into our university family. A female majority is yet another way we can encourage a pro-feminist anti-patriarchy environment on our campus.”
Maybe When Feminists Rule The World.
[1] Baumeister, R.F. (2000). Gender differences in erotic plasticity: The female sex drive as socially flexible and responsive. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 347-374.
