Colleges struggle to recruit more men

As a white male from the suburbs of New York, Brendan Scheld had never felt like a minority.

But that was before he enrolled as a freshman at the University of Delaware.

In last semester's calculus course of 40 students, he said, only five men would show up for class.

"We'd all kind of look at each other, and we'd have each other's backs," Scheld said over a recent lunch at the university's crowded food court, where he and a fraternity brother were the only pair of men sitting together.

Not that he and his friend, Ryan Helthall, are complaining. "We both have girlfriends we met here," said Helthall, a senior from Sparta, N.J. "We did not have slim pickings."

When it comes to finding enough men to fill their freshmen classes, it is the nation's admissions officers who have to hunt hard.

Twenty years after women became the majority on campus, college administrators are struggling to strike a gender balance even as female applicants outnumber men by nearly 30 percent.

Nationally, as at Delaware, about 58 percent of college undergraduates are women, with some campuses at 70 percent.

That's well beyond the point where the character of a college shifts, and may make a school less appealing to some of the highly qualified students it seeks to attract.

"Colleges will then be unable to attract the female students they want most - or so they fear," wrote Gail Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Alerted by media reports that some admissions officers may be accepting less-qualified male students over female applicants, the Civil Rights Commission is investigating whether women are being discriminated against in college admissions.

"Everybody should feel very uncomfortable by the notion that it is more difficult for a woman to get into a college than a man," Heriot said in an interview.

Last year, the commission subpoenaed the admissions records of 19 colleges, including the University of Delaware and five in Pennsylvania. All but one were picked at random within different categories, including elite universities, religious schools, and historically black universities.

The University of Richmond was chosen after U.S News and World Report said its admission rate for men was 13 percentage points higher than for women.