71 to 100?

I recently read an article about surging university enrolment across the country. The big story, however, is the increasing gender gap between men and women. In the 2001-02 school year, there were 403,200 women and 286,500 men registered in undergrad programs. That means there’s now 71 men for 100 women. That’s a significant change from 1992-03, where the ratio was 77:100. Things are about equal at the graduate level at the graduate level, as the numbers in this article presumably reflect students at every post-secondary level .

Over the weekend, I was talking to a friend of mine who does recruiting for the University of Victoria. We didn’t particularly discuss gender, but he said that there had been a huge growth in trades training and education. I wondered if that could account for some of this phenomenon. I checked out the registration figures for a popular community college, BCIT. Page 16 of the 2003 BCIT Facts and Figures report (PDF) shows that 72% of fulltime students are male. Apparently the men are still going to school, but not opting for universities. I couldn’t find any meanginful historical data to show if male registration has grown at BCIT, so my theory isn’t exactly well-formed.

The long and the short of this, however, is that young men have no excuse for not getting dates at university. Remove the standard 10% for gay men (presumably they have it worst off, variety-wise), and that’s 64 men for 100 women. All you need to be is clean, disease-free and breathing. That’s a tall order, I suppose, for many university males.