As if getting into college wasn't hard enough, now it's even harder for girls. On March 23, in The New York Times, the dean of admissions at Kenyon College, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, wrote an editorial describing how, nowadays, it's become harder for females to get into colleges than males. You might be surprised by the reasons.
Apparently a lot more girls are applying to college these days than boys. Who would have thought? However, rather than being a wonderful time for females, the influx of applicants has made it even harder to get into college. Who would have thought, that after all the years of trying to get girls to continue on in school, it would backfire?
The problem is not that colleges are making it harder on females just to be difficult, but rather that males aren't applying with the same gusto.
Suddenly the page-long list of extracurriculars, Advanced Placement (AP) classes and community volunteering isn't enough, even for schools outside of Ivy status.
The competition has become much fiercer for girls, fighting with each other to get a spot in a college, while guys can get by with the same list of assets with no trouble.
According to Britz, two-thirds of coed colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. She said that the prediction is that by 2009, only 42 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men. At first glance, that sounds like it would be easier for a female to get into college than a male.
But, for the ladies out there, think about this one. You go to a coed school, right? Chances are, you picked it for a reason. Now, if you had looked at the College's viewbook and seen that 66 percent of the College was female, would you have rethought your decision? I know I probably would have.
Your turn, boys. Would you come to a school that's 66 percent female? Forget the "oh yeah, more chicks for me" line and really think about it. That's what college admissions officers have to think about when admitting future students.
I don't have a solution to any of this, though I wish I did. Nowadays going to college is almost a requirement for even an average job and no one wants to settle for a mediocre school when she knows she can do better. It doesn't seem fair that a woman, once again, has to work twice as hard than her male counterpart, and that this time the only one to "blame" is the hard-working girl busting her ass in AP physics and building houses for Habitat for Humanity in her two hours a week of free time.
To all the women who are applying to colleges, whether here on a tour, visiting for the night, or reading this online, I wish you the best of luck. And I don't envy you one bit.
