Gender gap growing on college campuses

By Peter Y. Hong
Los Angeles Times

ROBERT DURELL / LOS ANGELES TIMES Annie Selak is student body president at Santa Clara University, a once all-male institution where females now make up 57 percent of the 4,550 undergraduate enrollment.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — When admissions officers for Santa Clara University recruit new freshmen, they do their best to reach the kind of students they'd like to see more of on the Silicon Valley campus: boys.

"We make a special pitch to them to talk about the benefits of Santa Clara, as we do for other underrepresented groups," said Charles Nolan, Santa Clara's vice provost for admissions.

It's a startling development to anyone who remembers that Santa Clara was all male until 1960. But the Jesuit-run school reflects an important transformation of American college life.

Among the 4,550 undergraduates at Santa Clara, 57 percent are female. That matches the percentage of U.S. bachelor's degrees now awarded to women, a demographic shift that has accelerated since women across the country began to attend college at a higher rate than men about a decade ago.

Schools face dilemma

Today, many colleges, particularly selective residential schools, face a dilemma unthinkable a generation ago. To place well in influential college rankings, those schools must enroll as many top high-school students as they can — and most of those students are female.

Administrators are watching closely for the "tipping point" at which schools become unappealing to both men and women. They fear that lopsided male-female ratios will hurt the social life and diverse classrooms they use as selling points.

Despite employing the same tactics used for years to lure ethnic minority students, few colleges say they give admissions preferences to boys. But high-school counselors and admissions experts say they believe it is happening.

"At some schools, it's definitely a strategic advantage" to be male, said Chuck Hughes, a former Harvard admissions officer who is now a private admissions counselor and author of "What it Really Takes to Get into the Ivy League and Other Highly Selective Colleges."
 
"More forgiving" of boys

Vincent Garcia, a college counselor at the Los Angeles prep school Campbell Hall, said liberal-arts colleges, especially, can be "more forgiving of the occasional B or even a C" from a boy. "Sometimes the expectation is a little bit less" than for girls, he said.

At Santa Clara, admission standards have risen along with female enrollment, and officials say those are not eased for boys. But for the past two years, the college has targeted special mailings to high-school boys. Current students also telephone every boy who has been accepted to encourage him to attend, something that is not done for every girl.

So far, Santa Clara's change into a female-majority campus has been more evolution than revolution.

Football was dropped in 1993. Now thousands of students instead fill the stadium to cheer the women's soccer team. Women routinely hold most of the campus leadership positions. And when the student union was remodeled recently, the number of men's toilets — which had been more than double those for women — was cut to make space for more women's stalls.

If students complain about the gender mix, it is usually with a sense of humor. "My friends tell me I should switch my major to engineering if I want a boyfriend," joked Annie Selak, student government president and religious-studies major, citing one of the few mostly male sectors on campus.

Researchers are divided about the causes and extent of the college gender gap.

Some say the gap is limited to lower-income students and minorities, with girls from those populations more likely to attend college and boys more likely to go directly to work or the military. Affluent white males are at least as likely to attend college as their female counterparts, according to those experts. Others say the gap crosses race and class lines.

Whatever the case, the highly selective colleges attracting affluent students are also getting more — and academically stronger — applications from girls than boys.

Mark Hatch, dean of admissions at Colorado College, said his school admits a higher percentage of female applicants because "in some ways they're stronger, period." The Colorado Springs liberal-arts college maintains a 53 percent female enrollment. "We could get to 50-50," Hatch said, but doing so would require easing admissions standards for boys to a point "that would make us uncomfortable."

A former counselor at two Los Angeles high schools, Hatch said that in college admissions "the developmental lag rears its ugly head." High-school boys "are more likely to be late bloomers," sometimes not hitting their academic stride until their junior year, he explained. That can hurt boys in class rank and cumulative grade average.

Balance now the exception

Campuses with an even male-female ratio are now the exception rather than the rule. The colleges with very abundant and strong male applicant pools tend to emphasize engineering, science and business or be such marquee schools as Stanford and most Ivy League colleges.

But many of the finest liberal-arts colleges and top national universities such as Georgetown, Boston University, Emory, Brown, Tulane, Vanderbilt and Northwestern enroll more women than men.

New York University, which has no engineering school or big-time sports, exemplifies the phenomenon. NYU is now among the most sought-after schools in the country, with more than 34,000 applicants annually — 60 percent female, the same percentage that make up its undergraduate enrollment.

But as academic standards have climbed, the 60-40 ratio also reflects NYU's refusal to lower admissions standards for males, said Matthew Santirocco, NYU's dean of arts and sciences. "We are not engaged in social engineering. We just let the best person win."

Sociologists may ponder the effect of such shifts, but today's students seem comfortable living it.

Men especially enjoy the new social math. At midday on the Santa Clara University student union patio, juniors Patrick Semansky, 20, and Richard Bersamina, 20, who were classmates at an all-boys high school, said they were very aware of the gender imbalance when shopping for colleges.

Santa Clara's female majority "definitely wasn't discouraging. This is an attractive place," Semansky said mischievously, glancing at women milling about.

"This is definitely an attractive place," Bersamina agreed.