I was looking at Male/Female ratio at UMich across the years and ...

[kd*]

Why does it spike like this from 2017 to 2018?

I've seen similar discussions on reddit about Emory and others and a lot of people chalk it up to males being more interested in engineering/cs. But that type of shift doesn't happen in 1 year, so what's going on?

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[CyrilFiggis]

Who cares? You are looking at 5 year old data and one isolated change. And even if this ratio continued, what are you trying to figure out?

 

[kd*]

Who cares? You are looking at 5 year old data and one isolated change. And even if this ratio continued, what are you trying to figure out?

That's when the gigantic shift happens, the trend continues from 2018 to now (they posted recent year stats). Just trying to learn the process that's all.

 

[LunaOri]

Was there a change that made the school more desirable to females or less desirable to males?

 

[SooConfused]

Was there a change that made the school more desirable to females or less desirable to males?

Hard to believe that would be the case. Given the extreme high desirability of a school like Michigan, and the teeny tiny admit rate for both sexes, it is inconceivable that the school would not be able to curate an incredible class with any ratio it chooses.

Which leads to the question of why it chooses a 1/3 to 2/3 ratio, not whether or not more or less males are applying than in the past. My guess would be that it is totally blind to sex (after all, there is no reason for it to prefer such a lopsided ratio), and it just so happens that roughly 65% of its top candidates are female.

 

[Goro]

Fewer males are going to college.

In in your case, one datapoint doesn't mean anything.

 

[kd*]

Fewer males are going to college.

In in your case, one datapoint doesn't mean anything.

Those numbers appear in a shift that presents in 1 cycle? Across a good number of medical schools?

 

[Goro]

Those numbers appear in a shift that presents in 1 cycle? Across a good number of medical schools?

I was referring to UG schools.

 

[Mr.Smile12]

I was referring to UG schools.

Also: More women than men are enrolled in medical school (2019).

Admissions trends can be a fickle thing, but ...

 

[LizzyM]

We don't know how many offers were made by gender and if the discrepancy is a random variation in the proportion of men vs women who accept the offer (e.g. if men are more likely to get offers they perceive as better, they may gravitate toward those other schools leaving UMichigan out of balance.) Sometimes a school can even things out using the waitlist but if Michigan tried this strategy it was unsuccessful. It did matriculate 9 fewer students in 2018 compared with 2017. If 9 additional male students had matriculated, the gender distribution would have been similar (p>-0.05) to the previous year.

 

[kd*]

We don't know how many offers were made by gender and if the discrepancy is a random variation in the proportion of men vs women who accept the offer (e.g. if men are more likely to get offers they perceive as better, they may gravitate toward those other schools leaving UMichigan out of balance.) Sometimes a school can even things out using the waitlist but if Michigan tried this strategy it was unsuccessful. It did matriculate 9 fewer students in 2018 compared with 2017. If 9 additional male students had matriculated, the gender distribution would have been similar (p>-0.05) to the previous year.

I would agree if 2018 was an outlier year. But the ratio shifts dramatically from 2017 to 2018, and more importantly, stays there every single year after. Even looking at 2020 and 2021, the ratio gets more lopsided.

 

[deleted1102547]

For 2021-2022, female applicants represented 52.1% of all applicants and represented 56.7% of all matriculants at Michigan. (Source) It is extremely difficult impossible to make any meaningful determinations from such limited information from a single school. Obviously, there can be variances from any given year that can just be due to chance (and not some internal agenda to recruit more females).

Also, as others have stated, women represent the majority of medical school applicants and students since a few years ago. For 2021-2022, they accounted for 56.8% of applicants and 55.5% of matriculants.

https://www.aamc.org/media/6021/download?attachment

https://www.aamc.org/media/9576/download?attachment

 

[Mr.Smile12]

It is also a trend in undergraduate admissions for quite a while...

Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment. Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work. Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment. Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work.