Somewhere with a healthy gender mix feel more inviting overall than somewhere with a "bro club" atmosphere (or the opposite of that).
From my recollection the women tended to be more conscientious about their studies too and often had added pressure from being the first woman in their immediate family to have attended higher education.
There are a number of problems with your post, but this one stands out. When a woman marries a man, the competition doesn't end, it's just starting. Many women don't plan to marry well, they plan to divorce well.
Not judging, just saying. Marriage is not the absence of competition, it's competition taken to a new height -- or do I mean depth?
It doesn't have to mean only. It's not unreasonable to expect that men and women, in the late teens and early twenties, would want to go to college to find people to date. Since when it college just about academics?
Given two colleges, one with a healthy balance of genders and one without, I would except most people would rather go to the healthy-balance college.
Also, I'm not sure how valid the author's statement actually is. I didn't spend a ton of time researching it, but I was curious. Here are the application numbers for two recent years (couldn't find University of North Carolina):
Boston College | 38.2k -> 41.7k (+9%) Brandeis University | 7.7k -> 8.9k (+15%) New York University | 38k -> 42.2k (+11%) University of Georgia | 17.4k -> 18k (+3%)
Each college continued to receive an increase in applications that was (with the exception of the University of Georgia) on par with other colleges.
If people are still applying to those schools, and they aren't seeing decreased applications, doesn't that mean the whole "tipping point" argument where no one will want to go to those schools is invalid?
In business you have to know your customers. If you're selling to 18 year olds, you can't ignore dating and sex. Especially if you're asking them to spend most of 4 years of their lives and $100,000.
The school I go to is ~75% male and I've overheard women complaining several times about how they wish there were more girls for them to hang out with. I hear pretty much the same thing from the guys, but that is to be expected. Overall, I think most students would prefer a college to have nearly equal amounts of each gender and any imbalance will cause complaints.
" Officials at schools ... are helplessly watching as their campuses become like retirement villages, with a surfeit of women competing for a handful of surviving men."
Is the argument here that women only go to college compete for men? And that colleges with more women are "retirement villages" because there aren't enough young men to hook up with?
Yep, done with this article.