Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Campus Gender Ratio: Honor Roll Girls          infostomp.com* Continuing our discussion of my post Still Plenty of Big Men on Campus on Michael Gurian's Washington Post article "Disappearing Act" about the changing gender ratio on college campuses, this via e-mail from writer and social commentator Katha Pollitt: Pollitt: The class and race issue is very important, but is it the whole explanation for the lower numbers of boys? At many/most expensive liberal arts colleges, attended mostly by white middle-class/upper class people, there are more female students than male (and the boys get an advantage at admission, or there would be even fewer). Of the Ivies, i've read that only Harvard is still majority male. (Of course there are schools like Case Western, that are oriented toward engineering and similar, and there boys predominate). I think even many state Universities have more girls. If 34 percent of boys go to college, and 41 percent of girls do so, that is a seven point gap-- the skewed ratio among blacks can't account for that, or low-income either, I'm guessing. Girls do do better in school. Anecdotal: in Sophie's middle school, which was NYC public, mostly middle-class kids, the honor roll was always more girls, and if you looked at the kids who made the honor roll every semester, by the end of middle school, those kids were ALL girls. Every single one. If you open up a local paper and look at those articles about top academic honors at the local high school, girls are more than half. I don't know that it has anything to do with gendered learning styles. When I asked Sophie why girls did better in middle school than boys she said: girls study. I wrote a column about this issue a few years ago when it came up. One point I made is that girls NEED college more than boys, there are still good jobs for men that don't require a BA -- technical jobs that you get a certificate for. My nephew dropped out of Brandeis to go to cooking school, and one of sophie's male classmates from Stuy is in cooking school also. On paper, they would show up as troubling statistics. but they want to be chefs! For women, however, there really aren't any good jobs that don't require at least some college. So women have more incentive to go. (*photo is my alma mater Princeton University. Currently still majority male but very close to 50/50. It was 20/1 when I first matriculated. -RH) 6:07:51 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Robin Herman. The Girl in the Locker Room™ name and design are trademarks owned by Robin Herman. Last update: 1/5/2006; 9:07:28 PM. Powered by   Girl in the Locker Room!