Admissions Chances for male vs. female at MIT??

sakky
Sun, 31 Oct 2004 01:19:01 +0000

To be perfectly fair, it should be known that other schools actually provide preference to male applicants. This is particularly true of formerly women-only schools that have recently become coed, like Vassar. But not just them. Efforts to increase the enrollment of men, including what is in effect affirmative action for men, is an increasingly hot topic.

Consider the following quote:

"Like a lot of high-achievers, Jennifer Johnson thought she knew how college admissions worked. Step 1: Take tough classes, get good grades and test scores in high school. Step 2: Get into a top college.
Ms. Johnson did the first step well. But soon after she applied in 1998 to the University of Georgia at Athens, the flagship campus, Johnson discovered she was wrong about Step 2: it mattered to the school that she was not a man.

If Johnson had been a young “Mr. Johnson,” the university would have added .25 to a “Total Student Index” score. She also would have gotten points if she had been a racial or ethnic minority. It was enough to tip the balance against her, her lawyers say. Johnson was rejected.

In response, she filed a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the university of gender bias in its admissions process. The August 1999 suit also alleged race bias.

“College admission should be based on academics,” Johnson says. “I just kept wondering, Why should a boy get any extra help getting in?”

The reason was fairly simple: The university had 45 percent men on campus, and just 42 percent of first-time freshman applicants have been male in recent years."

http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/2001/05/22/p11s1.htm

"…The simple reality is that right now, girls are more academically successful in grade-school than boys. Girls graduate from high school at a greater rate than boys, and tend to get better grades. Girls also express more interest in attending college than boys. Girls also tend to do better in undergraduate college than boys.

…after lagging behind men in the 1960s and 1970s, women achieved equality in college attendance rates in 1978 and have done better ever since. Nearly two million more women are now attending college than men and are acquiring far more certificates, associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The gaps prevail for all major race/ethnic groups, age groups, and states, and will widen over the current decade…In addition to enrollment gaps, women also stay in college long enough to acquire degrees at substantially higher rates than men. As Paul Harrington of the CLMS noted, “The growing gender gaps in degree attainment are quite astonishing particularly when viewed in the context of the substantial economic advantages for men to acquire post-secondary credentials.” "

http://www.nupr.neu.edu/6-03/gender.html

"Some colleges have revamped recruiting techniques to create more interest from male applicants.

“Everyone is recruiting males much more vigorously and intently,” says Walter Massey, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, implemented a recruitment program this year called The Talented Tenth, which invites African-American high school males to the campus for a series of workshops about college. The current freshman class is 72% female.
Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., resurrected its football team five years ago when male enrollment began to slip. The school also recruits at all-male high schools.
Many schools are heavily promoting science and technology programs, as well as ROTC and sports facilities.
According to Massey, the success of these recruitment techniques is judged by their ability to stop or slow the decline of men in college. Virtually no schools have been able to reverse the trend, Massey says.

The shifting gender balance over recent years prompted Morehouse to host a symposium in April to address the problem of declining male enrollment. According to Massey, discussions revealed that some institutions were giving “slight preferences” to male applicants"