novaparent

From looking at the common data set for the last several years it seems like a lot more girls apply to William and Mary than boys but not a whole lot more girls get admitted. Why is that? It's the same pattern, year after year after year. Are they discriminating against girls to make sure there's a decent gender balance in each class?

John2698

Yes. One quote that I heard is that they want enough Williams to balance the number of Marys.

3rings

With their gender neutral homecoming queen they may have found a way to even the playing field

swish14

Most non-engineering schools have more girls as applicants than boys.

soccerguy315

The stats of admitted girls and admitted guys are not very different, last I heard.

There is no reason that the admitted students should reflect the applicant pool as a whole. If that was required, every school would be accepting applicants from the bottom 10% of their applicant pool.

frazzled1

^^^ Great point!

More females than males are applying to colleges across the board (though perhaps not at every institution). Yet most students don't want to attend schools with a 60/40 gender imbalance. I think we could call it gender discrimination if W & M rejected applicants simply because they are female, or admitted applicants simply because they are male.

novaparent, I'll agree that instate female applicants from your area probably have a very tough go to stand out in the applicant pool, though that would be true of male applicants from NOVA as well. Can we say that W & M discriminates against students from your geographic area because it's likely that students from the rural southwestern part of the state have a somewhat easier time getting in? Or is it more accurate to say that W & M, as a leading academic institution, has an interest in admitting a qualified but diverse student body? I have no doubt that W & M could fill the entire freshman class with highly accomplished female students from the DC metro area, but then it wouldn't be W & M for long.

Hope the poster from W & M admissions will check in on ths.

Ronbo1960

I think it is entirely driven by statistics. The school wants a diverse group of students which means some from NORVA, some from SW VA, some from SE VA, some from OOS, some men and some woman. More woman are applying therefore the woman applicant pool will be more competitive. Although every school claims that they do not have a quota system everyone knows that is a big lie. You just have to hope they need someone who has your background whether its race, gender, or locality and you meet the entrance requirements. I'm not saying the applicants accepted are not top notch and qualified, but anyone who thinks a school does not reject an applicant who is stellar in every way to fill a need somewhere else is just kidding themselves. That’s why everyone has heard about a horror story regarding a kid who is outstanding in every way not getting in to the school of his/her choice. Not to long ago there was story in a DC paper of a guy from NORVA who had perfect SAT scores, top 1% of his class, ran cross country and did not get into JMU. There are no hard rules when it comes to admission and you just don't know why a call is made one way or the other. Those who get in say it was fair. Those who don't say it is rigged.

soccerguy315

there are definitely quotas. Every school has them. None of them will admit to it though. They will say that it is in their best interest to have a geographically and culturally diverse class. And... that is probably true. People wouldn't want to go to WM or UVA if they were 100% kids from NOVA.

Ronbo1960

I agree soccerguy315. It's just the way it is. I have told my daughters (H.S. seniors this year) to look at applications just like interviewing for a job with a lot less feedback. You can walk in, be a match for all of the criteria and the person interviewing you could take a dislike to the earrings your wearing (honest to God I was on an interview team where my boss actually decided not to hire someone because on that!). Do your best in school, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

(P.S. I'm not against the diversity and I believe it is very important for any first rate school to ensure that there is a mix of backgrounds. I also do believe that all of the students admitted to W&M are very qualified regardless of whether or not they meet a minority bean. But to say it does not play a role is totally ridiculous.)

novaparent

of course most schools have more girls applying than boys but from what i've seen this doesn't mean that most schools are letting in fewer girls than boys. they're just having entering classes with more girls than boys. william and mary is different because it has a LOT more girl applicants than boys, like two to one, not just 60/40, but year after year they let in a much higher percentage of boys than girls. look at the numbers yourself and you'll see. how can it be that every year the boys are SO much more qualified than the girls??? u-va is on record that they are gender blind in admissions and their numbers confirm this, but william and mary says no such thing.

oh, and let me say this. that william and mary is way tougher on nova kids than elsewhere in the state is largely a myth, or at least musch tougher to prove. when it comes to statewide and nationwide girl discrimination by william and mary it's a whole different story. the numbers are right there for everyone to see, year after year after year.

soccerguy315

the boys are not more qualified than the girls.

If there are 8000 female applicants and 4000 male applicants, it doesn't mean that there are twice as many QUALIFIED female applicants, only that there are twice as many female applicants. You can deduce NOTHING about the quality of the applicant pool based on the number of applicants.

according to collegeboard.com, UVA is 57% female, and W&M is 56% female.

frazzled1

This is counter to what two of my daughters have observed at W & M, so I'm not sure that I can accept the point as true, though I'll agree that it might be difficult to prove. I'm not sure that your point about W & M discriminating against female applicants has been proven, either. I hope W & M Admissions will weigh in on both issues.

My middle d, and a similar female classmate, were waitlisted at Duke with visibly better stats than the two boys from their hs who were admitted. However, at a school like Duke, most observers will accept the admissions department's contention that they practice holistic evaluation of applicants: stats are simply the beginning of the process. Which students will contribute most to the Duke community? My d may have been ranked first, with higher SATs, but she was only a pretty good flute player, while one of the guys was first chair in his instrument at All-State Band. My d may have qualified to take the AIME and succeeded in not completely flubbing it, but one of the guys was a top scorer in the entire state. My d is obviously a female, and the guys are obviously male, but Duke didn't "discriminate" against her by choosing two qualified males instead. Seems to me that this is how selective admissions work: your stats qualify you for consideration; the rest depends on what the school needs to compose a class.

I believe that admissions at W & M are essentially the same as at Duke (except for the state-mandated admissions criteria, of course): many more qualified students apply than can be admitted. The admissions department must select an entire class, not merely the 1260 most statistically qualified applicants. (And of course many more than 1260 are admitted in order to yield those 1260 freshmen). And I don't believe that any of the posters on this thread has implied that gender "does not play a role," as you state in post 9, so I don't believe we're being "totally ridiculous" in our responses here.

standrews

Your premise is wrong. It's not the same year after year. The percentage of women enrolled in the freshman class at W&M has increased in recent years (Common Dataset, section B.)

2008 56.3%
2007 54.2%
2006 51.7%
2007 53.3%
2004 51.1%

This is evidence of a change, and not of some arbitrary standard of gender balance being enforced in spite of 63% of the applications coming from women.

What is the same from year to year is that the number of applications keeps increasing, not just at W&M but pretty much everywhere, thanks to the demographics of the baby boomlet and the common application. Meanwhile the number of seats at the nation's finest institutions have seen little or no increase.

I say all this as a parent with a daughter who will apply to W&M this year. I do not think she is being discriminated against because she is a women. While the numbers say she is less likely to gain admission, I'm not so sure she would be as interested in applying if W&M's gender mix mirrored the percentage of applications from women, 63%.

novaparent

Standrews, I'd suggest you look at the numbers being reported for each of the five years that your post refers to and do this math: percentage of male applicants admitted versus percentage of female applicants admitted. You will find that for each year a much higher percentage of males is admitted. For the last year it was 43 percent of the males being admitted and 28 percent of the females.

Soccerguy, that UVa has a higher proportion of female students enrolled than William and Mary only proves my point. UVa is on record that it is gender blind in admissions while William and Mary is NOT. If you look at UVa's common data set you will see that, unlike William and Mary, there's no real difference between the percentage of male and female students accepted.

Finally, I find it hard to believe that year after year after year William and Mary, which has a reputation in the state of Virginia as being the most rigorous school academically, is bombarded with applications from girls who aren't serious students.

Standrews, you may sing a different tune come April. Your daughter will in fact be held up to a higher standard than the boys, whether you care or not. There is just no getting around these numbers.

We can argue until the cows come home whether William and Mary SHOULD apply different standards for girls than boys to make sure the class is well balanced. But there's no arguing that it DOES.

soccerguy315

I bet UVA gets more male applicants because (1) it has an engineering school and (2) it has ACC sports.

really? I bet Harvard gets thousands of applications each year from students who have no chance of getting in. I also bet that there are a fair amount of students in VA who send applications to W&M, UVA, Tech, JMU, Mary Wash, and one of GMU/ODU/VCU/CNU. I applied to GMU, and was in the process of applying to Mary Wash (but I didn't finish that one when my JMU acceptance came).

I disagree. If the stats of the accepted males and females are essentially the same, then they are both held to the same standards.