Female enrollment at CMU SCS at all times low. Any thoughts on why only at CMU and not at any other schools.
Administration/admissions have been quiet about it when asked.
My question is how to think about as a parent of a girl interested in SCS? Apply or don’t bother as the environment could be toxic.
The graph suggests the gender balance was almost exactly 50/50 from 2019 to 2022. I very much doubt the gender balance just happened to land on exactly 50% male / 50% female. CS and tech balance is almost never 50/50 without some kind of admission or application preference. For example, 27% of students at GeorgiaTech school of computing are female. 30% of prospective CS majors in the Harvard freshman survey were female. Stanford is not much higher in spite of making special efforts to increase CS enrollment. Across all colleges in the US (NCES), the balance is ~21% female / ~79% male. CMU’s 50/50 was the exception, rather than rule.
CMU CS went from 31% female to 50% female in 2 years between 2015 and 2017, then % female enrollment started to decline after 2022. I expect CMU reduced the degree of admission or application preference for women, perhaps eliminating altogether. Lingering effects of COVID may contribute to the apparent changes in admission priorities.
I was curious, so looked up % female CS bachelor’s degree recipients in most recent IPEDS year – 2023-24. Stats are below:
% Female CS Degree Recipients
Oregon – 9%
Utah – 11%
CSUs – ~15% (range = 9% to 20%)
Texas A&M – 17%
RPI – 17%
UCLA – 19%
Median of All 4-Year Colleges – 20%
Northwestern – 23%
Chicago – 24%
Yale – 27%
Stanford – 31%
Berkeley – 35%
Harvard – 35%
MIT – 40%
Washington – 44%
Cornell – 45%
Caltech – 45%
CMU – 47% (highest percentage among all dual-gender colleges with sample size of >50)
see this old article outlining CMU’s efforts towards gender equality. All these work came to naught in last couple of years. Why?
I suspect that CMU removed gender identification from applications due to some (misguided) attempt towards affirmative action. That caused this chain of unintended consequences and decreased female enrollment. I still don’t know why it didn’t impact any other schools?
Another hypothesis is potential of toxic environment discouraging new female admits to accept CMU’s admission offer. CDS unfortunately is not by department, so we would never know.
What really bothers me is admissions and leadership has been silent. Clear institutional priorities need to be conveyed otherwise they risk this ratio getting worse before getting better.
The reporting in the Tartan article is surprisingly poor. The current female enrollment across the campus is NOT “historically low” at 38.8%. I attended in the early 90s and confirmed my memory through a 1994 fact book and at that time female enrollment was around 30% and SCS enrollment was about 7% female.
That doesn’t help with your question, and my experience is far removed from whatever the current environment is. When I attended, many engineering and CS classes would have 1 or 2 women, and it was a challenge.
My college roommate’s daughter is currently a student, but in engineering, not CS. She doesn’t love CMU – it tends to be a quirky place socially and not always a typical college experience – but she is flourishing academically.
I suspect @Data10 is correct, that after the Supreme Court disallowed affirmative action in admissions, CMU’s 50/50 split for CS wasn’t sustainable. There may or may not be toxicity in the program, as you asked, but that’s unlikely the reason for the dip.
There does seem to be a notable correlation between race and gender balance. Example stats are below. The vast majority of Asian SCS students were female, but all other races were majority male. This pattern completely changes for the fall 2024 entering students, following the Supreme Court ruling that limits consideration of race.
Fall 2019: SCS Total (all classes)
Asian – 62% Female
White – 40% Female
URM – 11% Female
Overall – 47% Female
Fall 2020: SCS Total (all classes)
Asian – 62% Female
White – 38% Female
URM – 10% Female
Overall – 48% Female
Research shows that women more often leave engineering careers than do men. I wonder if CMU found the same thing, i.e. that after recruiting women to engineering majors, more of them dropped out of engineering majors than did males, thereby defeating the attempts at gender balance that they had initiated in the first place.
“It is a common belief that women drop out at higher rates than men. In fact, female four-year graduation rates were consistently 3 to 5 percentage points higher than the average four-year graduation rates of all students included in an ASEE report on undergraduate retention and time-to-graduation benchmarks.” - Matthew Ohland, Engineering Education
(Specifically discussing engineering retention).
Thanks everyone. Elephant in the room is why it’s not happening at other colleges, and more importantly, if this trend continues, school wide female enrollment will certainly drop to single digits.
What would you do if you are admissions? Not an easy decision if the party line is we can’t look at gender due to affirmative action.
Our experience visiting CMU was that it’s very much a fit school. I can see where the vibe may not be attractive to some women.
Glad to hear it. Thanks for the information.
How many colleges publish % female among entering freshman who are prospective majors in CS/engineering? Far more common is instead publishing bachelor’s degree recipients by major and gender (IPEDS reports this for all colleges) or publishing gender distribution by major enrollment across all classes, including students who don’t declare major until 2nd/3rd year. These types of measures may take years before patterns become evident in reported stats. IPEDS still doesn’t publish stats beyond 2023-24 grads, which was before the CMU decline.
Another factor is there are only a small minority of colleges that appear to artificially boost female enrollment in tech, which are mostly highly selective colleges that have enough quality applicants to produce a quality class when limiting a portion of pool (Caltech, MIT, Cornell School of Engineering, …). And only a minority of that minority likely boost female enrollment by manipulating race, such that that would be notably impacted by the supreme court ruling.
Considering that the overall average across all colleges for CS is ~20% female (similar to CMU’s new entering class), and only a very small handful colleges in the United States with significant sample size reach single digits, I doubt that CMU will reach single digits for CS, let alone the full college, which includes a good portion non-tech majors that tend to be majority female.
As noted earlier, I don’t think this is the reason for the change, but available stats are below.
Fall 2019 Entering Class (as listed in article graphs)
College of Engineering – 44% Women
School of Computer Science – 48% Women
College of Humanities and Social Sciences – 52% Women
All CMU Students – 50% Women
2023-24 Bachelor’s Degree Recipients (as listed in IPEDS)
College of Engineering Majors – 37% Women
School of Computer Science Majors – 47% Women
College of Humanities and Social Sciences – 57% Women
All CMU Students – 49% Women
I wouldn’t assume CMU stats above align well with other colleges. Engineering persistence rate by gender is all over the map for different colleges. Influential factors can include things like whether colleges admit by major or school, or encourage students to try out different majors; whether colleges have more/less selective admission for different genders; whether colleges have a notable % female students/TAs/professors/role models/… and related support mechanisms; etc.