Why are so many more women applying?

4thfloor
Sat, 11 Aug 2012 09:20:17 +0000

Am curious about this myself.

ALL the Ivy League undergraduate colleges offer liberal arts programs (remember, the liberal arts include humanities, fine arts, but also the social and natural sciences), and none except Penn and Cornell offer undergraduate business degrees, so being liberal arts is not it, at least not by itself. And as pointed out by fireandrain, Brown is not shabby in computer science or engineering either.

Brown does have the Open Curriculum, but Columbia, which has the Core at the other extreme (as well as an excellent engineering school), has a similar situation: 14,493 female vs 11,686 male applicants. This becomes even more lopsided if one adds in the 5,153 female applicants at Barnard. How come?

Girls being smarter does not explain Harvard and Princeton, which do not have this female bias.

I like the “friendlier” explanation, though it is anecdotal, and not completely satisfactory; Dartmouth also has a friendly reputation, but the female : male applicants ratio is much more even at 9,788 : 8,990 (especially for a small school that has to field a proportionately larger athletic program), while Columbia, though an excellent school, has not been argued by many to be outstandingly friendly.

Very curious.