The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has recently opened an investigation into whether some four-year liberal arts colleges are accepting lesser qualified male applicants while rejecting better qualified female applicants to maintain a gender balance on their campuses.
Nearly four decades after the passage of the Title IX legislation which prohibits gender discrimination in education -including school athletics, for which the bill is most well known- more women are entering college than ever before. Not only are they attending college in greater numbers than men, their GPA's and graduation rates are higher.
According to the U.S. Dept. of Education, in the 2006-07 school year women earned 62 percent of all associate's degrees awarded, 57 percent of all bachelors degrees, and 61 percent of all master's degrees. The trend shows up at Mercer too. Mercer's Institutional Profile data for 2009 reports that of the students receiving associate's degrees, 64.4 percent of recipients were female.
There are many different opinions concerning the reason for this trend, according to Sociology Professor, Gianna Durso-Finely. One reason is that due to gender income disparities, women need higher levels of education in order to earn the same income as their male counterparts.
Another possible reason that women are out performing men in college is that due to high divorce rates and economic insecurity, women have learned that they need to depend on themselves to earn a living and support themselves and their families.
Other reasons often cited as possible causes of the problem are the fact that more boys than girls are diagnosed with learning disorders and that American school favors skills such as sitting and being quite that are nurtured more in girls than boys.
Some majors in college, such as nursing and education, do remain predominantly female while others, such as engineering, remain overwhelmingly male. At Mercer, third-year Aviation major Rajief Jobson said that his aviation classes were probably 80 percent male, possibly more. He is now finishing his general education classes, and the balance has shifted to about 60 percent female. He also said that often the men students don't want to answer questions even if they know the answer.
Higher numbers of girls are applying to college with better qualifications and transcripts than boys and admissions offices at some schools may be making decisions in order to maintain diversity in their student body and prevent it from becoming overwhelmingly female. If this does prove to be the case, it would be a violation of the Title IX legislation. In general, this isn't a worry at Mercer, which has an open admissions policy, but some psychologists suggest that students don't do as well when they perceive themselves to be out numbered by the opposite gender, a problem that is becoming more prevalent at Mercer each year.