rm | "scarce" resources, college and sexism

The dating pool is definitely a bit slim for the straight ones

Given the existence of various dating services and social networks on the Internet, how much does the male/female ratio on your campus impact the dating opportunities?

To me the question is "how many people still go to college with the plan that this is where they will meet their spouse?"

I think the number is way higher than most of us would say.

Admissions officers believe, I think, more than is justified, that it matters where you go to college. There are a few schools - a tiny handful -that everyone has heard of and are known to be huge plusses, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, but outside that wee group all the distinctions we make about 'good and selective colleges' are just fakery. People make all kinds of distinctions between, like, Brown and Oberlin and Kenyon and UNC Chapel Hill, as if there is a hierarchy there that means anything in any other part of existence, and it's false.

The single most important thing is to go somewhere you feel at home and not to go into a huge mountain of debt for an undergraduate education. If you're part of the 99.8% of students who don't get into one of the five colleges whose mere name on a diploma matters, there are simply no other significant factors to consider. Admissions officers think there are but they're shilling.

I went to a college below my level because I was both a slacker in high school and because it was a way to get a private university education without any debt (also DC seemed like a good place to go to J-school).

15 years after graduating, I feel grateful I didn't wind up going to one of the schools that mattered, because it's one less thing upon me that creates expectations about how I look, what I do, how I behave.

Whereas I always regretted not even trying.

I think there is value in artificially gender balancing colleges, to a point. Obviously if the underlying causes that make college so unattractive to men and so attractive to women keep escalating, no amount of admissions fiddling will be able to solve the problem, but I don't see the harm in correcting for a 10% or 15% bias if the underlying causes are mostly things like maturity at adolescence, perceived cultural appropriateness of learning, and things like that. I can expand on this further, but I want to bring up court reporting as an example of what can happen when there are no checks on admission in a situation that becomes gender biased. In the '50s and '60s, court reporting was an extremely lucrative, respected, male-dominated profession. Over the last 40 years it has tipped over into a 90% female dominated profession, and as the percentage of women increased, salaries, prestige, overall applications to court reporting schools -- not just male ones, though they were affected even more dramatically -- and the level of academic preparedness of court reporting school applicants have all dropped dramatically, to the point where the profession is half as lucrative as it was, schools are closing, 85% of students who enroll in programs drop out before graduating, there's a nationwide shortage of qualified reporters, and the entire profession is on the verge of imploding. This is not all due to the self-accelerating gender imbalance of the last 40 years, but I argue that it might well have been slowed or countered somewhat if schools had made a special effort to reach out to male applicants.

On a side note, that school was my 1st choice-- until the administration actively tried to force a friend of mine from pressing charges against her rapist, because he was on the basketball team. Then the school came to his defense and tried to discredit her, even though there were witnesses. In the end, I didn't even apply there because the whole thing was so appalling.

I hear you, but I'm having a hard time with believing gender balance is what's associated with prestige.

It's men.

Men are associated with prestige.

And women are associated with the lack there of.

Is this an eternal condition? Are men the only way to grant anything prestige?

How do we change it?

I also prefer operating in relatively gender-balanced environments (one of the reasons I love Doctor Who/Torchwood fandom), but that's because of my own identity issues (I think/hope) not because boys accord worth.

shit. just shit. :(

my sister told me, when she took her daughter to tour one of the small private colleges here, that someone actually told her, "ring by spring or your money back."

i used to hear 'jokes' about someone getting an "m.r.s." degree- i really had no idea that was not only serious, but ADMITTED, now.

If some white person was complaining about these admissions policies in terms of race, would you be so quick to jump on it? Or ask why black people were being held to lower standards?

I remember my mother talking about. She went to Katherine Gibbs Secretarial College after dropping out of B.U. And it was sort of a stigma thing -- you weren't going to get married going to Gibbs so you were either assumed to be a slut or a lesbian or had to hope your future boss would fall for you.

Women's colleges need better marketing.

To be fair, when I was looking at colleges, I didn't really want to go somewhere where the gender balance was off either -- I wanted to either go to a women's college or somewhere where the gender ratio was reasonably even. I don't remember why I was thinking this way, but now it feels like going somewhere that the gender balance was off would create an atmosphere where the women would feel like they were competing for dates because men were a scarce resource instead of good grades, and that's not something I wanted to deal with -- at a women's college, you kind of assume everyone there isn't interested in competing for men. I ended up going to a women's college, and it was awesome. I still live with some of the women I met there and am going to continue doing so.

But most women aren't interested in women's colleges either.

It's funny, because one of the arguments I've heard against women's colleges is that the world is co-ed -- and yeah, it is, but women outnumber men at least three to one where I work, so it's not like life is always going to be fifty-fifty either.

The correct, and interesting, analogy would be if blacks were the majority of the qualified applicant pool and colleges were having a hard time filling up the white quota.

Unless that was the analogy you proposed, in which case I misread you.

There's more than five that matter if you want to continue with grad school.

Which ones they are, of course, depends on your field. Which many people don't know going in, even if they think they do. *sigh*

I think the question was, why are men being held to lower standards and still getting in? This happens with many Affirmative Action programs too, doesn't it?

O_O.

Looks like I got lucky, in that that assumption didn't seem to hold true where I went. People would expect people to hook up with other coeds (it made for abundant fodder for the student-run bog rag), but hoping for wedding bells as a result would be highly unusual. Maybe it's an American thing?

Edited 2009-03-31 16:11 (UTC)

Gender imbalance exacerbates cultural bias, in both directions. It's worthwhile encouraging women to break into the boys' clubs of construction and finance (to give two examples), just as it's worthwhile to make sure that the percentage of female doctors doesn't continue its current trend unchecked, from over 50% to over 60% and beyond, relegating medicine to "women's work", as it always has been in many cultures, and making it all the more difficult for men to work in caregiving professions without cultural stigma. The more women go to college and the fewer men do, the less relevance college education will have in our society. Even if we eliminated male favoritism, that would be the case. But it's all the more important, given the history of male favoritism in our culture, that any group that wields power and prestige in our society -- and if the Learned are not one of those groups, we're doomed -- be a group untinged by gender imbalance in either direction. It's just too dangerous and too tempting to the essentialists to do otherwise.

I don't know what you're asking.

Not only is it an American thing, I would argue it may even be a New England thing, because I hear it around here all the time.

Yes.
I suspect one high female-to-male ratios turn students off is perception -- they all have ingrained privilege telling them that it's not a hard school, so not as good a school, if a lot of girls get in.

Thing is, though, if gender stopped being an issue for admissions, that perception would change pretty quickly.

So this is basically going "There's this problem, it's stopping us from admitting female students" without acknowledging that it's a problem that they are helping to perpetuate.

yes. yes yes yes.

so not as many men are applying.

maybe they should get off their asses.

er...
Lost a word.

I meant, "I suspect one reason high female-to-male ratios turn students off..."

Many opponents to affirmative action programs on race insist that applications should be "color blind" - and if no black people, for example, can make the cut... that's too bad. If we oppose gender balance for men, then shouldn't we also oppose "balancing" race in the way affirmative action tries to do?

I, for one, am glad you ended up where you did. :)

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