women students now accepted at lower rates
In an effort to keep roughly the same percentage of male and female students, colleges are now admitting women applicants at a lower rate than similarly-qualified male applicants. US News and World Report found that college admissions rates for women are dropping because they have closed the gender gap and then exceeded it. The authors found that over the past 10 years many schools are maintaining their gender balance by admitting men and women at sometimes drastically different rates. Men had an admittance rate an average of 12 percentage points higher than similarly-qualified female counterparts had.
The percentage of women in higher education has been steadily growing: From rough parity in 1980, women now make up 57 percent of the 16.6 million American college-goers. By 2010, the Department of Education expects the ratio to be around 60 to 40.
Some of the reasons for the higher number of women in college are that females graduate from high school at a slightly higher rate than men and are more likely to forgo the workforce for an advanced degree. From the early grades on up, girls tend to be better students. By the time college admissions come into the picture, many watchers of the “boy gap” agree, it’s too late for males to catch up on their own. Indeed, beginning in those formative K-12 years, girls watch less television, spend less time playing sports, and are far less likely to find themselves in detention. They are more likely to participate in extracurricular drama, art, and music classes. Across the board, girls study more, score better, and are less likely to be placed in special education classes.
The academic success of women should be good news, especially considering the fact that just a generation ago women were barred from some of the country’s best universities: Boston College, Johns Hopkins, the University of Virginia, Brown, Dartmouth, Notre Dame, and Harvard weren’t fully coeducational until the 1970s. Men, meanwhile, were barred from a few women’s schools such as Radcliffe, Barnard, and Smith, among others.