johns hopkins vs. smith

BJM8
Sun, 23 Apr 2006 10:56:58 +0000

Right now, it is much more difficult for women to get into elite colleges because co-educational ones want to keep the gender balance even, and so women compete against women instead of against the applicant pool as a whole.

MWFN…this is why Smith’s admission rate seems to be higher than coed elite schools. The applicant pool at Smith and other women’s colleges is small and highly self-selected. Women, possibly just like yours or my daughter, have a much more difficult time getting into elite coed schools. Not only are they competing with a 50-50 split of male to female, but then must also compete with athletes. Their potential of admission is cut in half before starting the process.

Too many young women in America act, think, and believe, not because it’s their integral nature but rather because they’ve been pushed to it by messages from the media, Hollywood, teachers, parents, male classmates. I see this every day in my role as a Principal in a suburban middle school. For 17 years, I served as Principal in a very different setting; a very urban, inner-city school where girls were submerged by more pressing problems of poverty, gangs, street violence, drugs, falling-apart families, crime, and teachers who were past the point of caring or treating students with respect. I’ve seen it all in the past 26 years, and the education that girls get in comparison to boys is not equal, nor fair. The main thing that is necessary is for the educators to get educated themselves in what is going on; it seems all too likely that most of the teachers who are doing these things are not even aware of it. If useful strategies are taught to future teachers as to how to combat gender bias, schools in the future may be a great deal fairer of their treatment of all students. I tend to spend a good deal of time with first year teachers involving this very subject. It is imperative to me that they understand gender differences in their classroom, and that they understand their own biases when dealing with both sexes.

For more on this topic, go to the post “Why All- Women’s Schools?”