Flash back to 1960, a time during which only three or four out of every 10 college students in America were women, or even further back, when higher education was reserved strictly for men.
Today's educational landscape tells a completely different story, as an increasingly high proportion of females are applying to colleges - and in the process, giving males a leg up in the admissions process at prestigious private colleges.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women made up 56 percent of undergraduates in 2006, marking a widening gap between the number of men and the number of women opting to enroll in college since 1991. While the statistics might point to the increasing academic successes of women, Professor of Education Kathleen Weiler cited male underperformance as another cause for the imbalance.
"Another question might be, 'Why are men not applying?'" she said.
In analyzing the gap in higher education, it is important to consider issues of gender within the context of race and income, Weiler said. According to the American Council on Education, the disparity between the amount of men and women enrolling in college becomes much greater when looking at blacks, Hispanics and most importantly, low-income students.
"If you can take class into effect, I think men and women are equally represented if you look at white, professional, upper middle-class," Weiler said. "What's making it so out of whack is what's happening to the working class and young men of color. My own analysis is not so much that something is favoring women, but that these young men are facing so many barriers that they're not graduating high school and going on to college."
Brad MacGowan, a college counselor at nearby Newton North High School, agreed, adding that males are more apt to face educational problems early on.
"Since 1976, there's also been a gap in the high school completion rates of men and women. I think that's where the problem starts ... there's absolutely no doubt that women are doing better in high school and college," he said. "There's something that's just not clicking; there's something in the psyche of males that is just not engaging in education."
And as the gap grows wider, university admissions offices are becoming more and more cognizant of the potential for gender-imbalanced classes. In an effort to amend the phenomenon, many universities are favoring males in the battle for the coveted thick envelope.
At Tufts, the acceptance rate for men in liberal arts was 28 percent for the 2006-2007 school year, while women in liberal arts were accepted at a rate of only 24 percent. Almost 3,000 more women applied to the liberal arts college than men, though only 86 more women than men enrolled at Tufts, according to the 2006-2007 Tufts Factbook.
Admissions officers were not available to respond to repeated requests for comment.
Senior college counselor of collegeconfidential.com and co-author of "Panicked Parents' Guide to College Admissions" Sally Rubenstone, who works with high-achieving students, has noticed the trend, albeit slight.
"It's true that when students approach me for college counseling and they tell me their list of target colleges, if a student is a white, upper middle-class female from the Northeast, I will tell her that she has all the strikes against her," she said. "If a student is a white, upper middle-class male from the Northeast, I will tell him that he has all the strikes against him but one."
Rubenstone also noted that the tendency to favor males in the admissions process is specific to small, private institutions like Tufts.
"When you look at the colleges with which your typical Jumbo applicant is competing ... you will notice that at virtually every one of these schools ... the admit rate is higher for men than women," she said.
Unlike community colleges or public universities, private colleges can be pickier about issues like gender, rather than simply seek out the most academically qualified students.
"If you look at the public equivalent universities - i.e. UNC, UCLA et cetera - you will see at all of those schools, the admit rate is higher for women. It's only at the private elite colleges that you see this discrepancy," Rubenstone said.
Rubenstone said variations in choice of activity between genders were one factor that made some males more appealing as applicants.
"Sometimes [women's] choice of activities simply look less exciting on an application than what the guys are more likely to do. I have a lot of girls who come onto my radar screen who ... have spent an enormous amount of time taking dance classes," she said. "A girl who's devoted five or six hours a day to dance is going to get very little mileage out of that in most college admissions offices. Guys who've spent the same amount of time excelling in a sport are more apt to get a much bigger hook out of it in the college admissions process."
But admissions efforts to increase male enrollment have not all succeeded as they were intended to, according to MacGowan, who described a recent "backdoor affirmative action program for men" at Towson University. In order to allow more men admission, the admissions office there began a program in which students with lower GPAs and higher SATs were offered admissions, using SAT scores to try to find students that had underachieved in high school. Eighty-five percent of the students admitted were male.
But the retention rates for those students was shown to be lower than those for the rest of the university.
"They discontinued the program," MacGowan said. "It was clearly a case of a school finding a way to help the gender imbalance, and it didn't work."
Rubenstone, while admitting the potential of gender-influenced admissions decisions, said that it is difficult to characterize the significance of such trends.
"At the so-called 'elite' colleges, admissions outcomes can always be surprising," she said. "I don't see gender bias factoring into those surprises, even though statistically, I realize the odds are skewed in favor of the males."
