Re:How to Make School Better for Boys
by russelluresti on Friday September 13, 2013 @11:55AM
(#6381273)
Maybe it's just me, then. I know when I was looking at schools I didn't even consider the gender breakdown of the school. It wasn't anywhere near my top concerns - it wasn't even a factor I looked at.
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?
Colleges seeing a decrease in enrollment and "no one will want to go" are completely different things. If colleges are worried about it they probably have some market research to back up their worrying. Whether it will end up being true is a completely different story. However even a modest decrease in the percentage of the population going to college would have a huge effect on the money available to universities.
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.