We've all heard about the gender gap in higher education: Nationally, women enroll in college and complete degrees at higher rates than men do. But new research reveals that for decades women have been underrepresented at the nation's most-selective institutions. And the apparent culprits are standardized tests.
Admissions offices' reliance on SAT scores has created "de facto institutional preferences for men" at the nation's most-competitive colleges, according to the results of a longitudinal study to be published in a forthcoming issue of Research in Higher Education. In 2004, for instance, women made up more than half of undergraduates attending all types of four-year colleges except for the most-selective ones, as categorized by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. Within that tier of 65 institutions, which accepted no more than a third of applicants, women accounted for 47 percent of students that year.
"It's perplexing," says Michael Bastedo, an associate professor of education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a co-author of a report on the study. "You would think that women's advantages nationally, with their higher high-school grades, would translate into larger advantages at elite colleges."
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/what-keeps-women-out-of-elite-colleges-their-sat-scores/39109