College Is Not a Dating Service

Andy tries to lure me into commenting on this U.S. News story (in the much-critiqued “America’s Best Colleges”) about the increasing female dominance on college campuses. Ok, I’ll take the bait. Here’s how the story kicks off:

The University of La Verne sits on 26 acres of suburbia between the city of Los Angeles and the mountains. It’s a small place, with just over 1,600 students, most of whom live in three drab and boxy-looking dormitories. A decade ago, one was exclusively male, one was female, and one was coed. But faced with a surge in women students (who made up 65 percent of the student body last year, up from 58 percent a decade ago), the school had to convert two thirds of the male facility for women’s use. “Everyone knows guys are scarce on this campus,” says Nick Solis, a sophomore, who adds that the women in his coed dorm have taken to using the men’s room out of convenience.

For starters, let’s just point out that this school is an anomaly. Across all colleges and universities in the U.S., the average male-female breakdown for traditional-age undergraduates is about 55% female to 45% male. (Women strongly outnumber men among older, non-traditional students, which is part of why the CUNY system, to which the author refers in the piece and which has 35% of students over 25, is about 2/3 female.) That’s still not parity, and the 60/40 female/male ratio among black students is concerning to many people. Butthis school is clearly an extreme.

The article trots through all the typical statistics and explanations about why women outnumber men in college, but it’s main focus is on how (and why) some colleges are now going out of their way to recruit more men, and, in some instances, appear to be using pro-male affirmative action to do so.

Why are colleges trying to recruit more men?

The university experience, after all, is only partially about academics, and students strongly consider campus climate when choosing where to apply. Anecdotal evidence suggests that once a campus reaches a certain ratio, say 60-40 women to men, both females and males are less likely to apply. “Frankly, students care about the dating scene on campus and no one wants to be outnumbered,” says Bari Norman, a former admissions counselor at Barnard College who now runs mycollegecounselor.com.

You see, college isn’t really about getting an education. It’s about the social life. And that means dating. And, potentially, finding a future mate. (As U.S. News so helpfully points out, “already researchers are thinking ahead to the long-term implications of a shortage of suitably educated peers for women to marry.”) Leave aside that most college students today don’t actually “date.” They hook up. And, while I certainly knew girls in college who were really there to get the MRS. degree (I went to Vanderbilt), that’s not why most people go to college (after all, no one ever argued that the Citadell or VMI should go co-ed because the crappy dating scene and lousy chances of finding a wife there were hurting male recruitment). People do still talk about college as if it’s a place to find a future mate, but that’s not the reality for most people: The median age at first marriage in the U.S. is 25 for women and 27 for men, and it’s older than that for those who completed college.

Of course, as Kevin and others have pointed out, since prospective college students don’t currently have access to information to tell them which college they might learn the most at, or which has the best record placing people in good jobs in their desired field, they’ve got to rely on other information, such as reputation, wealth and selectivity (what U.S. News measures), how nice the dorms or rec center are; and, yeah, the potential dating scene.

But the real meat of the story (to the extent there is any) is in the discussion of whether colleges are accepting less-impressive male applicants over more qualified women in an effort to maintain gender parity. For obvious reasons, no college wants to admit that they’re doing this, but the differential acceptance rates for males and females that the author trots out from several schools are quite striking. There are reasons, though, to proceed with some caution here. For starters, the competitive colleges the article cites represent only a tiny share of the college market. Top-ranked schools like the Ivies have near-parity in applicants and admissions rates for the genders. And the vast majority of college students in the U.S. go to noncompetitive schools that accept pretty much everyone who applies. Its also possible that some of these colleges are rejecting more women because more women from lower on the academic achievement distribution are applying to them.

But I wonder if articles like this contribute to something of a vicious cycle. Although there’s no evidence, a persistent theme–on both sides–in debates about why women are outstripping men on some academic indicators seems to be that at least some groups of women are more determined and are working harder because they’ve gotten a message that they need to do so in order to compete economically, provide for their future families, etc. It would be ironic if, as a result, prestige colleges really did start requiring women to be much better than men to be admitted.

Tagged as: Affirmative Action for Sexes, College Dating, Gender Gaps in Higher Education, Higher Education, Male Recruitment