Published: April 01, 2007 12:16 am      

EDUCATION: A woman's world

Any male college student who has perused his classmates lately may have noticed that he’s surrounded by a lot of women.

He’s probably right — but that may not be the good thing he thinks it is.

A college campus in the 1970s was probably dominated by men; 1.5 million more males than females attended college at that time, according to the Iowa-based activist group Postsecondary Education Opportunity. The feminist movement in the latter part of that decade shifted the focus to women, though, and by the mid-1980s, women outnumbered men on college campuses, according to a report on the Public Broadcasting System program

“NewsHour.”

There are now 2.5 million more females than males on campuses

nationwide.

“It has to do with the focus on women,” said Thomas G. Mortenson, an analyst with PEO. “There doesn’t seem to be any interest in meeting the needs of young men.”

This defies logic in some ways, he said during a recent phone interview, because the industrial and farming jobs that many men went into after earning a high school diploma are disappearing.

“It’s clear that males should have been flooding into higher education,” he said. “Apparently, a very large number of males ... should be responding by going to college and aren’t.”

At the local level, most local schools are at or near a student body that’s

60 percent female.

“It seems to be a national trend,” said Harry Gong, director of admissions at Niagara University.

In his first year at Niagara after a decade at Hilbert College, Gong has seen more women than men enter college at both institutions; NU, he said, is traditionally about two-thirds female. He attributes this at least in part to the propensity of men to enter trades or the military rather than seek higher education.

“You tend to see that males are more apt to go right into work out of high school,” he said.

At least locally, there’s a simpler reason for the trend, according to Kathy Saunders, director of admissions at Niagara County Community College. The 2005 U.S. Census estimate found that the populations of Niagara County and New York state are both 51.8 percent female, while Erie County is 52 percent female.

“It has to do just with the demographics of the county,” she said. “You have to consider something so basic as general population trends.”

Future woes

While women are entitled to seek an education, Mortenson fears some females are being too short-sighted in their efforts to get diplomas. Mates tend to target people who are their peers, he said, and the influx of female college graduates will leave them with fewer options once they want to begin a family.

“We’re graduating about 215,000 more women with bachelor’s degrees than men (each year),” he said. “That tells me that each year, 215,000 college-educated women aren’t going to find a college-educated man to marry.”

While women focus on starting their careers, they put off starting a family, he said, assuming men will be there later on in life. As they get closer to the age of infertility, they realize that their options aren’t as plentiful as once thought. This is a contributing factor to more single-parent households, which he said benefit no one.

These single mothers are entitled to better themselves, Saunders said, and are another factor in the collegiate gender gap.

“We have a lot of women that are now single parents, and I think that those women are trying to provide for their families on their own, and they can’t do that without an education,” she said. “That motivates them to get some training so that they can be better employed.”

Pre-collegiate roots

Academic inequity seems to begin to take root before students enter college. The National Center for Educational Statistics found that in 2005, 2.1 million of the nation’s 3.8 million high school dropouts (56.8 percent) were male.

This is no fault of women, according to Gary Becker, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago. If females are more willing to put in the work in grade school, they should see the benefits, he said.

“On pretty much all objective measures, women deserve to have greater college representation than men because they study harder, get better grades, are more likely to graduate from high school, complete their school work in a more timely fashion, write better and in other ways outperform young men,” he wrote in an essay on his blogging site, becker-posner-blog.com. “Schools competing in trying to get the best students naturally respond to this and end up selecting larger numbers of young women than young men.”

While not sure this holds true in his building, Niagara Falls High School counselor Adam Bianco has noticed that girls are more likely to reach out.

“A lot of the times, girls are more apt to ask for help, whereas boys do not,” he said.

To help combat the trend, Becker advocates a sort of affirmative action plan for men, whereby male applicants have an easier time gaining admittance to a school. The idea — which none of the local schools practice or would consider, their representatives said — would give colleges another way to seek donor funds and improve females’ social lives by giving them more men from which to choose when seeking a date.

“Since affirmative action toward men would be supported not only by men but also by many women, easier standards for male applicants seems to be a desirable policy for many colleges,” he wrote.

Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, disagrees. She said in a story for insidehighered.com that such a policy discredits affirmative action’s original intent and trivializes what college is supposed to be all about.

“Affirmative action is intended to remedy past discrimination,” she said. “There is no past discrimination against ... males.”

Who’s studying what?

NCCC, which is 58 percent female according to The Princeton Review, features several programs such as nursing that are traditionally female-dominated; other local school with nursing programs, such as Daemen and D’Youville college, have student bodies that are more than 75 percent female.

If there’s a way to even out the gender figures, it’s to get more men to enter these traditionally female fields, according to Kate Felschow, a public information official at Erie Community College.

“We’re trying to recruit more men into fields like nursing and dental hygiene,” she said. “Our recruitment efforts at high schools are trying to target males for these programs, and that means our recruiters are being more program-specific.”

Other subtle methods such as highlighting athletics or male-oriented majors in brochures are used to entice men, Gong said, but by and large the two sexes are treated equally.

“We don’t really strategize toward getting males over females,” he said. “I don’t think anybody’s giving them any breaks.”

While men will not be ignored or passed over, though, reality dictates that you target the majority, Saunders said.

“If you know that there are more females in the general population than males, you will gear your advertising toward that particular market,” said Saunders, who added that men are by no means excluded from NCCC’s marketing efforts.

While local schools are trying to get more men into women-dominated majors and vice versa, there’s still a lot of progress to be made to achieve equity. That helps account for the exception to the gender rule that is the University at Buffalo, which is 46 percent female. That’s largely due to the school’s programs such as dentistry, engineering and medicine that are male-dominated, said Jeff Dutton, the school’s director of institutional analysis.

The national trend is beginning to take hold there nonetheless, he said. This year’s freshman class is 48 percent female, he said, and future classes are expected to creep toward gender equity.

“The times are changing,” he said. “As those classes ripple through, you will see those numbers change.”

Just as the pendulum swung one way over the past few decades, it could swing back as time goes on. For the foreseeable future, though, it appears as though there’s little colleges can do to regain gender equity.

“It’s not a new phenomenon,” Saunders said. “It appears to be a sign of the times.”

Reporter Daniel Pye contributed to this report.

Contact reporter Paul Lane at 282-2311, ext. 2251.