Isn’t Virginia Tech primarily a tech school, though? Likewise with Georgia Tech (which also has higher admit rate for women).
I’m wondering about large universities that are not primarily tech. Like UMich, etc.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University is not primarily a tech school. Its mix of majors can be seen at College Navigator - Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
For the 2024-2025 school year, Virginia Tech had 31,035 undergraduates. Of those, 13,273 were in the engineering college. It definitely leads the pack. The business school is next, with 6222, then Science at 5659, Liberal Arts and Science at 4845, Ag School at 3605, Architecture Art and Desigh at 1886, Natural Resources and Environment at 1320, Veterinary Medicine at 951. (data here: https://udc.vt.edu/irdata/data/students/enrollment/index#college)
Looking at Univ Michigan Common Data set info for Fall 2023 - juniors and seniors who have declared a major - https://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/factsfigures/stuchar_umaa.pdf - 13.7% of students are computer science majors, 3.6% are Mech E, 2.2% are BME, 2.2% are Aerospace. All of those are in the College of Engineering at VT, so would total 21.7% of the student body. Not quite the same as the roughly 1/3 of students in engineering at VT, but not that far off.
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I feel this my D26 who will be applying as an Engineering Major is also not willing to consider any of the “tech” school, due to the gender imbalance.
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That’s how my D feels as well. She also crossed off WPI after she heard that it’s heading towards a more imbalanced population as well.
To me, the gender dynamics of engineering school admissions come down to the basic economic law of supply & demand. I spent a career in public education and 40 years ago we were trying to get more girls to go into technology. Yet today 78% of college engineering students are male. Colleges want females in engineering and other tech subjects. Well, if demand is high and supply is low, the price goes up.
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Indeed. And I have no independent way of knowing otherwise, and what he is saying strikes me as plausible, and that is about the end of that inquiry for me.
And when looking at those sorts of cases (where the female admit rate is higher, but not like double as at MIT), it is probably worth remembering in this context that there is a general pattern now of girls skewing toward higher academic credentials coming out of HS than boys. Normally that is a whole other conversation (what is happening, why is it happening, can we do anything about it, should we do anything about it, and so on). But in this specific context, if you tell me like 66% of female applicants are passing a credentials bar to 55% male, to me that sounds pretty expected in light of that background pattern.
Again probably not enough to explain the whole difference at MIT, but then MIT is precisely the kind of college that attracts just a ton of “lottery ticket” applications. And although I would not necessarily expect that, say, Vassar was getting a lot more male than female lottery ticket applications, MIT? Again, that to me is plausible.
Anyway, again I feel like there is not that far we could take this investigation with the very limited data available to us. So I don’t want to say I can definitely rule out thumbs on the scale happening at some colleges.
Heck, I am dead sure Vassar DOES have a thumb on the scale. Except I think it is for male applicants, not female applicants.
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Count me as one that believes that qualified female engineering applicants get a thumb on the scale at many colleges. Sometimes the thumb is very light, sometimes not. That thumb might be a higher likelihood of admission or it might be a bigger merit aid package, but I think it’s there. It’s not that unqualified women don’t exist, or exist in good numbers. But when women like @tamagotchi’s D want to avoid tech-heavy schools because of a gender imbalance, those schools realize that they need to make their offers to those women more attractive to try and improve the balance.
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FWIW, and I note that the OP isn’t looking for a tech college, so maybe this whole thread gets broken out somewhere, but RPI actually admits a higher percentage of men than women. Per their last CDS, the overall acceptance rate for men is 65% and for women it’s 60%. Of course, demonstrated interest and lots of other factors are important, and that might be why, but just an interesting datapoint that would go counter to the “It’s easier for women than men to get into tech schools.”
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That does seem plausible as well, as I also suspect a lot of discretionary merit programs are influenced by yield models of some sort, and it would not surprise me if that was helping some female applicants for engineering get higher merit offers at some colleges.
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. . . the OP isn’t looking for a tech college . . .
Huh? This discussion hasn’t been about tech colleges. Data from colleges which are primarily engineering schools was used simply because it is the only data available regarding gender admissions for prospective engineering students. These schools were used only as examples. The OP’s daughter is interested in Chemical Engineering and will be applying as a prospective engineering student. The thread has never left that topic.
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My apologies for the confusion. I stand corrected.