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BY JENNY FEDOR | CENTRAL FLORIDA FUTURE (U. CENTRAL FLORIDA)

In print | March 20, 2008

(U-WIRE) — In an effort to maintain a balance between male and female students, universities may be relaxing admissions standards for male applicants, according to an NBC report.

Fifty-seven percent of the nation’s college students are female, according to the recent NBC report. In an effort to promote gender balance, some schools are lowering their standards for male applications and admitting men even when there are more-qualified women applying.

“I think in our environment, and particularly in a public environment for higher education, we have not moved in that direction to skew our admissions process toward men to make up gender balance,” said Gordon Chavis Jr., associate vice president of UCF Undergraduate Admissions. “We have not done that.”

The Office of Institutional Research Web site shows that UCF has a student body of 48,989 students as of spring 2008. About 45 percent of those students are men and 55 percent are women.

“Colleges are admitting boys with lower grades and lower scores relative to the girls they’re admitting, and in essence, that’s rewarding boys for underperformance,” said Bari Norman, an education consultant, in the interview with NBC.

From 2002 until 2007, the number of men accepted to UCF has remained between 5,203 and 5,969. The number of men applying in that time increased from 8,161 to 11,487, according to the OIR Web site. The number of women accepted in the same time period stayed in the range of 6,720 to 7,282.

Two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, said Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, in an editorial she wrote for The New York Times.

“We have told today’s young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men,” Britz wrote.

But many colleges are hesitant to do away with the goal to stay gender balanced because of a lack of interest from students when a school becomes overwhelmingly dominated by one sex. Schools that have a 60 percent or greater female student population notice less interest from both men and women applying to college, according to the NBC special.

“It would be horribly unfair for them to lower the standards for men to accommodate a balance,” said Kelly Nedimyer, a pre-dentistry major at UCF. “I say, men, step it up, because if you don’t, we women will.”

Gender balance is more of an issue at smaller liberal arts colleges where programs appeal more to female applicants.

“In a large public university like ours, where we have almost 48,000 students with 93 different college majors, you really have to be as even handed as you can across the board to be able to build a community of students who can satisfy all those interests,” said Chavis, who has worked in admissions at various schools for 23 years.

But if the trend continues and girls consistently perform better then their male counterparts, gender balance could be an issue that plagues all schools, even the largest universities, forcing them to choose between a primarily female student body or having different admissions standards for men and women.

“Acceptance to any program or institution should be based solely upon the performance and abilities of the applicants in question,” said Brent Wakelin, a musical theater major at UCF. “Lowering standards for men is the same as accepting a student because they belong to a certain minority. Affirmative action is no longer necessary in America. Opportunities should be given to those who deserve them, period.”

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