Colleges struggle to recruit men

November 25, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA

As a white male from the suburbs of New York, Brendan Scheld never had felt like a minority.

But that was before he enrolled as a freshman at the University of Delaware.

In last semester’s calculus course of 40 students, he said, only five men would show up for class.

“We’d all kind of look at each other, and we’d have each other’s backs,” Scheld said.

Not that he and his friend, Ryan Helthall, are complaining. “We both have girlfriends we met here,” said Helthall, a senior from Sparta, N.J.

When it comes to finding enough men to fill their freshmen classes, it is the nation’s admissions officers who have to hunt hard.

Twenty years after women became the majority on campus, college administrators are struggling to strike a gender balance even as female applicants outnumber men by nearly 30 percent.

Nationally, as at Delaware, about 58 percent of college undergraduates are women, with some campuses at 70 percent.

That’s well beyond the point where the character of a college shifts and may make a school less appealing to some of the highly qualified students it seeks to attract.

“Colleges will then be unable to attract the female students they want most — or so they fear,” wrote Gail Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Alerted by media reports that some admissions officers may be accepting less-qualified male students over female applicants, the Civil Rights Commission is investigating whether women are being discriminated against in college admissions.

Last year, the commission subpoenaed the admissions records of 19 colleges, including the University of Delaware and five in Pennsylvania. All but one were picked at random within different categories, including elite universities, religious schools and historically black universities.

Frank Mussano, a dean at York College of Pennsylvania, thought his institution was in deep trouble when he heard it would get a subpoena. Then he realized the picks had been random. At York, 54 percent of freshmen are women.

“We are completely gender blind, so there is no reason the commission would be worried about bias at this institution,” Mussano said. “We admit students when they meet the admission requirements, and we admit them until we are full.”

WHERE ARE THE MEN?

Ivory Nelson, president of Lincoln University in Chester County, Pa., one of the subpoenaed schools, said that he would love to have an even gender balance but that his historically black college had long been 60 percent female.

Fewer men make it to graduation, too. Nelson shakes each graduate’s hand as seniors cross the stage, and recently he caught himself counting the men graduating from a college that once served only male students.

“The women outnumber them, 4 to 1,” he said. In truth, 65 percent of graduates last spring were women.

Why? Because minority men have the highest high-school dropout rates in the nation, face crushing urban poverty and land in prison at alarming rates.

Margaret Anderson, a sociology professor and an acting associate provost at Delaware, echoed a common sentiment among students and administrators when she said women seemed more motivated to go to college and more assertive about how to get in.

“I think women do know they need some education to have security in their lives,” she said. “If you don’t get an education, you know you’re going to be dependent on someone.”

DISCRIMINATION?

Heriot, who is leading the Civil Rights Commission’s investigation, said Title IX bars sexual discrimination on college campuses with one exception: in admissions by private liberal-arts schools.

The commission selected a mix of schools as a starting point.

The trick is in the law, the numbers, and the ripple effect. If liberal arts colleges do legally discriminate in admissions to achieve gender parity, that means even fewer men are available for the public institutions, where such discrimination would be illegal.

If widespread discrimination against women is found, Heriot said, the commission will likely ask the college presidents for ideas on how to ease the man shortage in other ways, such as adding more disciplines attractive to them.

Any illegal activity would be turned over to another agency for enforcement.

A final report is expected in 2011.