Annika Mann doesn’t ever remember having a class at Northwestern where guys were in the majority.
“I’ve noticed my classes are either predominately female or roughly equal, but I have never had a predominately male class,” said Mann, a Weinberg sophomore.
She isn’t the only one.
Females are outnumbering males on college campuses across the nation. The U.S. Department of Education predicts that by 2008, women will outnumber men in undergraduate and graduate programs by as many as 9.2 million.
The gender gap has widened at each type of university — from public to private, large to small.
“This is happening nationally,” said Rebecca Dixon, associate provost for university enrollment. “It’s happening to a lesser extent at traditionally male schools, like the Ivies. But at schools that were historically co-ed, like Duke, Washington University and NU, there is a higher percentage of women.”
This year’s freshman class is 52 percent female and 48 percent male. There were 1,333 more applications from females than males. Dixon said NU does not consider gender when reviewing applications.
“This is quite a different picture from eight years ago when it was even-steven right across the board,” Dixon said.
Certain programs at NU reflect greater imbalance. Dixon said the Medill School of Journalism and the dance and theater departments in the School of Speech are overwhelmingly female. The McCormick School of Science and Engineering, on the other hand, is 70 percent male and 30 percent female.
The imbalance may indicate a difference in values between men and women, Dixon said.
“Women tend to look for other hallmarks of success than money, so they are more apt to pursue their passions,” Dixon said.
So why aren’t more males applying?
Dixon said one reason is that girls simply perform better in high school.
“Colleges are tending towards admission of women because they tend to show strength everywhere — in grades, leadership and extracurricular activities,” Dixon said. “There is a tendency of boys not to follow the rules to prepare themselves for college, like writing neat essays that college admissions officers like.”
At Bill Farmer’s high school in Grosse Pointe, Mich., girls were given better incentive to perform well academically.
“There were specific academic awards for girls, like women in science; there were no academic awards for guys,” said Farmer, a Weinberg sophomore.
Dixon also said a lot of males find high school and college too confining or limited.
Weinberg sophomore Kyle Bedell said this was the case at his high school.
“Guys I knew in high school were just inclined to skip college,” Bedell said. “They had a real interest in technical knowledge and didn’t see the need for the classical education you get at a liberal arts university.”
The huge growth of the computer industry also is siphoning males from colleges.
“One guy started his own business designing Web pages his sophomore year in high school,” Farmer said. “By his senior year he was making maybe $50,000. He didn’t go to college, and corporations were seeking him out.”
Even with all of these factors, Dixon said she isn’t worried about men being underrepresented at NU.
“For years, men outnumbered women 2- to-1. Why should we care now that women slightly outnumber men?” Dixon asked.
