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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]You're an idiot. I said "certainly far fewer boys apply than girls," and you responded by talking about another poster who said the school was going private and all girls. Of course that's not gonna happen. But UVA's female enrollment is greater than males only because nationally there are more women applying to college than men. UVA's admissions are gender blind; more women apply, more get in, more attend. Enrollment figures for W&M are 58/42 and not 70/30 only because the school actively discriminates against women applicants. Even its Dean of Admissions has stated that the school doesn't want to be known as the "College of Mary and Mary." https://www.vox.com/2015/2/17/8050259/discriminati...-problem-in-college-admissions

And no one is saying that all men care about nothing but football and STEM. They're just saying that, generally speaking, MORE man care about that stuff then women do. And this is indeed a fact. It's why STEM-focused colleges are often EASIER on women, for pete's sake.

Some folks like to argue just for the sake of arguing. [/quote]

No.  You're an idiot!   :D

Just to set the record straight.  W&M does not "actively discriminate" against women applicants.  [b]All[/b] public institutions are by law (Title IX) gender blind.  This is what Dean Broaddus had to say in reference to his "Mary and Mary" comment:

[quote]Interestingly, in response to the U.S. News article and its journalistic spawn, which cited that our admit rate was higher for male applicants than for female applicants, we ran additional numbers on admitted students for the year in question. We discovered that among males admitted to William and Mary, their mid-fiftieth percentile range on the SAT was slightly higher than the range for admitted females. The women, on the other hand, had a higher average rank in class.

This was not an engineered outcome or even something we calculated until the charge of gender bias was leveled, and I’m not inclined to read too much into it.

But we might suspect that our holistic, individual review rewards what can appear to a reader as untapped potential in certain young men even as the same process discounts what appears to be stronger achievement in the classroom by young women.

Whether that’s heightened by a committee’s interest in gender balance, the modest rarity of males in a pool that’s majority female, or a committee’s consideration of other factors such as extracurricular involvements and writing samples, I’d hesitate to say with any certainty.

What I can say is that our committee admits only those it believes will be successful at William and Mary, and our high retention rates show that we have an excellent track record by that measure. At a larger level, here’s what I personally believe about the matter of gender and college admissions:

1) I stand by the assertion that institutions that market themselves as coed, and believe that the pedagogical experiences they provide rely in part on a coed student body, have a legitimate interest in enrolling a class that is not disproportionately male or female. On a residential campus intended to foster community among a diverse group of students that includes both men and women, this interest strikes me as entirely appropriate.

2) I believe that self-selectivity within applicant pools is an often overlooked factor to consider. In the data U.S. News reported in its article, MIT exhibited the largest relative discrepancy between the admit rates (in 2006) for men (10%) and women (22%). Now, should the public believe that MIT’s admissions office holds its women to lower standards for admission than those employed for men? Of course not. Women who apply to MIT are a highly self-selected and academically capable group despite being a comparatively small group within that particular applicant pool.

3) I believe that the difference in admit rates alone as a basis for comparing any two groups within an applicant pool is overly reductive, because when it comes to the calculation of admit rate, the quality of the numerator matters far more than the size of the denominator. If we admit everyone with the surname Allen in our pool and nobody with the surname Smith, it’s just as likely to mean that the Allens were stronger applicants or that the Allens comprised a smaller group of applicants more prone to statistical inflation, than it is to mean we have any bias against Smiths.[/quote]

But beyond the larger percentage of women in the W&M applicant pool, which we all concede, what's your point?  Are you saying something about the overall quality of two very different institutions?  [b]Are you saying UVA is a paragon of virtue here and W&M is cynically manipulating the admit rates to get the balance they want?[/b]  For both these schools the self selection that truly matters is an academic one.

Realistically no institution that practices holistic admissions is going to be either gender neutral or truly need blind no matter what they say.  amiright?
 [/quote]

I'm certainly not saying that UVA is a paragon of virtue about anything.  But I AM saying that William & Mary is absolutely, positively tipping the scale heavily in favor of male applicants in order to maintain as even a male/female split on campus as possible -- and even there it's not doing all that well.  Year after year of data leaves no doubt that many more women are interested in the school than men, and given the school's academic reputation it's hard to believe that, year after year, thousands more less qualified women than men are applying to the school.  Why exactly do YOU think that, year after year, a much higher percentage of men are admitted than women?  How do YOU explain it?  Holistic admissions?  Sure, but holistic admissions that TAKE GENDER INTO ACCOUNT as part of a holistic review.

UVA is on record as being gender neutral on admissions.  William and Mary is not.  And when the Justice Department started looking as schools for possible discrimination, William and Mary was the ONLY public school that became part of the inquiry.  So I'm not the only one who thinks the numbers look funny.

Finally, no I don't think the quality of the schools is that different.  All I think is that it's unfair for a state institution to give preference to an applicant with a penis.   [/quote]

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