I know it seems like we do this a lot, but it’s time to start wringing your hands again about women who go to college. Apparently there are too many of us! And now we can’t get boyfriends!
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.
In terms of academic advancement, this is hardly the worst news for women — hoist a mug for female achievement. And certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for men, but because they want to earn a degree.
But surrounded by so many other successful women, they often find it harder than expected to find a date on a Friday night.
Fifty-seven percent female feels “eerily like a women’s college”? Really?
The line “And certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for men, but because they want to earn a degree” is also an instant classic. Way to go, New York Times.
Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”
These sorts of romantic complications are hardly confined to North Carolina, an academically rigorous school where most students spend more time studying than socializing. The gender imbalance is also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as “Girlington.”
It’s “Girlington” because it’s 55 percent female? I think something else is going on here, and it’s not “there are too many ladies around.”
I went to New York University, which does skew female. And yes, my female friends and I joked about the dearth of single straight men on campus (NYU is also pretty LGBT-friendly and pulls in a lot of gay students). But when you look at the actual numbers of women vs. men on campus, it’s not so unbalanced that dudes are pulling five chicks a night. It seems to be a problem of perception more than statistics — if there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in a room, or if there are a few more women than men, we perceive the situation as thoroughly female-dominated. The same phenomenon happens with race. We’re used to seeing men (and white men in particular) as the standard; we’re used to them dominating higher education and the workforce. When we up the numbers of non-men in a situation where men have traditionally made up large majorities, the perception is that no more men exist — even though men are nearly half of the room.
So I am hesitant to believe that “Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.”
It gets even worse than that, though, the Times warns. Not only are college women lonely, they’re also “hooking up,” as the kids say, in an effort to find love:
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