By Valerie Strauss    November 17, 2009

 The Washington Post

 Is it easier for boys to get accepted into college than it is for girls?

You may be surprised to learn that the answer is yes, at least at some colleges.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has just begun investigating admissions practices to see if schools are favoring boys. It is starting by looking at admissions records from a dozen unnamed universities, mostly in the Washington, D.C. area, according to a recent report from Inside Higher Ed.

We know that girls constitute 57 percent of the students in higher education, and that females earn 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Many more girls apply to college than boys, yet colleges like to maintain gender balance, meaning that a larger percentage of male applicants are taken than female.

For example, according to data that is online in the Common Data Set, the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., receives almost twice as many applications from girls each year as it does from boys. While the statistics for the 2009 entering class are not yet available, stats for the freshman classes for the three previous years before show that the percentage of male applicants admitted to the college is much higher than for girls.

Here are some statistics from William and Mary, and two other schools, Harvard University and the University of Virginia, that show the different approaches by admissions. A reader told us about the stats, and I checked them on line at the university’s websites, where they provide Common Core data. The links are below.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY:

2008:
male: 13,660 applied; 1,073 accepted , or about 8 percent
female: 13,802 applied, 1,102 accepted, or about 8 percent

2007:
male: 11,389 men applied; 1,042 accepted, or about 9 percent
female: 11,566 applied; 1,066 accepted, or about 9 percent

2006:
male: 11,030 men applied; 1,024 accepted, or about 9 percent
female: 11,724 applied; 1,101 accepted, or about 9 percent

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA:

2008-09:
male: 8,380 applied; 3,014 accepted, or about 36 percent
women: 9,983 applied; 3,721 accepted, or about 37 percent

2007-08:
male: 8,121 applied; 2,742 accepted, or about 34 percent
women: 9,677 applied; 3,531 accepted, or about 36 percent

2006-07:
male: 7,218 applied; 2,680 accepted, or about 37 percent
women: 8,868 applied; 3,339 accepted, or about 38 percent

WILLIAM AND MARY:
male: 4,309 applied; 1,859 accepted, or about 43 percent
female: 7,327 applied; 2,107 accepted, or about 29 percent

2007-08:
male: 3,930 applied; 1,713 accepted, or about 43.5 percent
female: 6,923 applied; 1,942 accepted, or about 28 percent

2006-07:
male: 3,812 applied; 1,671 accepted, or about 44 percent
female: 6,910 applied; 1,797 accepted, or about 26 percent

An anonymous reader of The Answer Sheet called this “patently unfair.”

“If it wants to maintain gender balance in its entering classes, it should be developing academic and non-academic programs that attract more boys — not discriminate against girls,” the reader said.

Of course, colleges discriminate in their admissions for all kinds of reasons. And the relative merit of applicants isn’t always a matter of grade-point averages or SAT scores. Schools give preference to varsity athletes, to children of alumni, to exceptional musicians, and sometimes, even to women, such as those interested in typically male subjects like mathematics or computer science.

I asked William and Mary’s admissions dean, Henry Broaddus, about the numbers.

Here’s what he said:

“The issue of gender in college admissions is an especially hot topic right now. There’s an inquiry going on that you may have read about ….. Although to my knowledge W&M has not been named in that inquiry, I do have to be sensitive to what may be playing itself out on a legal front.”

He also said that he has written publicly about the issue and talked about it at national conferences, saying that college admissions decisions cannot be reduced to a single statistic and that it is not an issue “of equity” but rather of a school’s desire to create a community that serves both men and women.

He has been quoted as saying: “Even women who enroll ….. expect to see men on campus,” he added. “It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.”