Most schools now have more girls than boys.
The gender gap is not an issue in college admissions.
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Girls make up 60% of all college students, and the trajectory towards 60% was happening before 2020, when the world went test optional. Itâs clear they werenât hampered much because of testing.
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Different Ivy+ colleges have different FA, but NPCs for the best FA Ivies suggest ~zero cost to parents from typical families with below ~median US income. Published FA stats from both the college and 3rd parties suggest cost for lower income parents averages less than cost at typical publics (assuming no merit scholarship).
For example, Yaleâs website at Affordability | Financial Aid lists the following net costs by income:
<$65k Income â Median Cost = $3k, 100% qualified for aid
$65k to $100k Income â Median Cost = $6k, 99% qualified for aid
$100k to $150k Income â Median Cost = $15k, 99% qualified for aid
$150k to $200k Income â Median Cost = $30k, 95% qualified for aid
The federal FA stats database includes mostly Pell grant kids and lists the following stats:
$0 to $30k Income â Average Cost = $2k
$30 to $48k Income â Average Cost = $5k
$48k to $75k Income â Average Cost = $4k
$75k to $110k Income â Average Cost = $15k
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For low income students:
https://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/affordability/cost
Does that correlate with the gender gap in admissions?
Just go to the Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth websites and type into the calculator the family financial requirement for families whose income is <$150k. You can even scale it up to $250k and see that even with that income, costs are radically lower.
Then look at the state tuition.
at MIT for example, the average student who took loans graduated in 4 years with a debt of <$20k total and the vast majority had no debt.
Maybe itâs different in Canada, but this is a pretty well known fact here on CC.
That is a false narrative because the acceptance rate is so low for these students to begin with. So 1 student gets in and pays less than the 20 who get into state college. So if state colleges, didnât exist 19 students donât go to college. But,one lucky winner goes for free!
Maybe it is because of the programs, these girls are entering. It doesnât address the fact that in programs where the competition is based on SAT results, there is a buitl-in bias against girls.
The question was is there an opportunity if you are an underprivileged child with excellent SAT scores then to attend a top college. You replied that an underprivileged student âcanât afford it anywayâ.
That is not the case as you see now from the college websites.
Now youâre still claiming that itâs a âfalse narrativeâ under the separate claim that it âdoesnât matter because so few underprivileged kids are accepted.â 18% of Yale undergrads and 20.7% of Harvard undergrads receive Pell grants. And those percentages are increasing very rapidly. If you point at any random student at MIT / Harvard or Yale, it is much more likely than not that they are receiving financial aid.
It seems kind of hard to believe for some, but those are the data. Easily verifiable, public and published annually.
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A couple of points about Pell grants and the profile of those who qualify.
About 34% of current college students receive some level of a Pell grant. Pell Grant Statistics [2023]: How Many Receive per Year
Current max Pell grant is $7,495 per year. Some limited income families will qualify for full Pell, others for partial Pell. Many middle class families also qualify for partial Pell grants (depending on family size. A family of four with $75K income and modest assets qualifies for some Pell grant).
I know there are frequent disagreements on CC re: middle class definition, but many sources start the income range somewhere in the mid to high $40Kâs. Hereâs some recent Pew Research numbers: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/02/middle-class-income-in-major-us-cities.html
My point is to not conflate Pell Grant recipient and limited income. Many middle class families qualify for partial Pell Grants, and even more will under the new simplified FAFSA (once thatâs working well).
Itâs great that some highly rejective colleges want to increase the proportion of Pell Grant recipients. But their numbers of Pell grant students are relatively small, so while the students they enroll may benefit greatly, the overall volume doesnât really move the needle looking at the whole group.
Other schools are doing the heavy lifting of enrolling and graduating Pell grant students and positively impacting social mobility in a more significant way (see various rankings of schools that do best in social mobilityâŠUSNWR, WSJ, Third Way, Economic Mobility Project, and CollegeNet have all taken a stab at that.)
The percentage of Yale kids receiving Pell grants is never going to approach 100% but a 55% increase over a couple years shows where their headspace is.
The fact that people on CC argue about what âpoorâ means⊠gives me a new appreciation of the mods.
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Does anybody else wish Test Optional meant Test Optional?
In other words, a non-submitting student either did not achieve a score at the level for the school, or decided to focus efforts on other things - grades, extras, sports, work. Colleges would simply judge the student accordingly - and admit that is the case.
I believe if enrollment at Test Optional Schools behaved this way, there would be little debate about Test Optional and whether it is appropriate.
This has always been my assumption about what test optional colleges actually do. If they actually admitted it, wouldnât it effectively make them test preferred?
I do not think they do that right now for the most part. I do not think they are putting the added pressure on the other parts of the application. Just my opinon from what I see.
There are several different components to break down. One is that men average a higher combined SAT score than women. For example, the 2019 group report (pre-COVID, when there was a higher participation rate), shows 8% of men scored 1400+ compared to 6% of women. Male test takers were 1.33x more likely to score 1400+ than female test takers. There are similar differences in average score, median score, etc. Itâs nowhere near the magnitudes of differences we saw for lower income, first gen, URMs, or other groups correlated lower SES; but it is a statistically significant difference that occurs every year and remains present when controlling for differences in SAT participation.
While women average lower SAT scores than men, women average higher grades than men at all education levels, from elementary school to college. For example, the NCES reports that among all HS graduates attending US public HSs, the average GPA was 3.23 for women vs 3.00 for men. The first college that with detailed stats that came up in a Google search was Auburn. Auburn reports the following GPA by gender at IR | Term GPA by Class/Gender Most other colleges show a similar pattern.
- Freshmen Year: 3.35 female vs 3.18 male
- Cumulative GPA at Graduation: 3.40 female vs 3.19 male
Differences in average GPA between genders remain after controlling for major. There are also similar differences in freshmen retention, graduation rate, and other measures of college success. Women as a whole are more likely to be academically successful in college than men, yet are less likely to achieve a high combined score on the SAT.
Another factor is how this impacts college admissions . With better GPAs/transcripts and worse scores on average, women as a whole are more likely to benefit from test optional than men. As such, at test optional colleges, women are consistently overrepresented among test optional admits compared to men, and men are consistently overrepresented as test submitter admits.
However, this does not necessarily translate in to test optional policies increasing enrollment of women. The highly selective colleges that are emphasized in this thread often try to achieve an approximate 50/50 gender balance, and may admit as many students as needed from each gender to achieve that goal. There are plenty of well qualified students from both genders, so they can achieve a good gender balance, with little sacrifice in academic quality of students.
Some example stats from Yale, comparing 2019 CDS (test required) to 2023 CDS (test optional). The much larger increase in applications among women than men is consistent with women being more likely to apply test optional. although I realize that there were numerous other external factors than influence application rate besides just going test optional.
- Female Applications: Increased 51%
- Male Applications: Increased 29%
While there were large differences in application rate increase between genders, the gender balance of admitted and matriculating class, only showed a small increase in % female. The overall class still remained a roughly 50/50 gender balance. Test optional may have contributed to admitting some different specific female applicants than under a test required, rather than large differences in total number of female admits.
- Female Admit Rate: 5.3% â 4.0%
- Male Admit Rate: 6.6% â 5.1%
- Class Gender Ratio: 50% Female â 52% Female
Of course most colleges are not as selective as Yale and may not have the option to maintain a 50/50 gender balance, and instead may have greater changes in gender balance of class when gender balance of applicants changes.
Intriguing points. Thank you for all of these data (on this thread and others). You must either spend considerable time / effort in researching these points, or you are incredibly knowledgeable with a photographic memory or both.
I, for one, appreciate your contributions of data to CC. Whether they support my opinions or not. It helps us all learn.
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Cornell has decided to bring back testing for the HS Class of 2026.
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https://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Test-Score-Task-Force-update-release.pdf
"However, those who were admitted without test scores tended to have somewhat weaker semester GPAs, were more likely to fall out of âgood academic standing,â and were less likely to re-enroll semester after semester. These patterns hold true holding constant studentsâ high school GPAs as well as other personal and high school attributes."
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Someone needs to tell Cornell they are wrong too.
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Cornellâs study fails to take into account many variables. On one hand they say students didnât submit test scores that were perfect and on the other hand assume that those with the âlowâ unsubmitted test scores, didnât do great. BUT, the whole context of these incoming students is not taking into account: what was the impact of online learning and those students that had âproperâ online learning access in the year preceding university. End of the day, the decision at these schools was made to go test mandatory LONG before these studies were done. And frankly, the school can do whatever it wants. Trying to rationalize it with incomplete data is strange. The odd line was the reference to âstudentsâ indirectly submitting their scores.
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