College fair... starting young

So, this week I participated in a college fair which I thought was going to be for high school students (possibly because the email invitation I received said it was going to be for high school students). Yes, I did find it a little confusing that the location was the middle school next door to the high school I thought it was going to be for... and didn't I already do a college fair for this high school's district, last fall?

Things started to make more sense when students arrived and turned out to be middle schoolers.

I think the other college representatives at the fair, of which there weren't many really, may have felt a little baited-and-switched. I sure did, at first.

But for me, this was a great opportunity. I actually prefer, in some ways, to do recruiting among younger students. In this part of the state, and in this part of the country generally, parents and counselors have almost no good information about how to prep for admission to a highly competitive college. It's very satisfying to give them advice while there's still time to use it. (Take the PSAT early and often! IB is preferable to Running Start in most cases! There's such a thing as need-based financial aid! Look out of state!) It just took me a few tries to get my spiel switched over and figure out how to talk to these much younger kids and their parents.

I think the community outreach organization that helped put on this college fair is in a bit of a bind... baiting and switching isn't cool, but if they worried that most colleges wouldn't bother to come for middle schoolers, they're probably right. A companion problem, however, is that most full-time professional college recruiters don't have a spiel for younger kids and their parents. I'll be interested to see whether this particular fair takes off or crashes next spring.

Gender bending and breaking

The NY Times had a great, detailed article on the subject of F2M transgendered students at women's colleges ("When Girls Will Be Boys", March 16). This is a topic with which I was already slightly acquainted on account of Smith's SGA changing some important charter document to gender-neutral language a year or so ago, baffling we alums who were under the impression that Smith is still a women's college (it is).

The article mentions that colleges are dealing with trans issues more directly nowadays specifically because "adults who wished to transition historically did so in middle age. Today a larger percentage of transitions occur in adolescence or young adulthood."

I was inclined to some eye-rolling about all this before, but the NYT article brought me up short a little bit by pointing this out:

"In a sense, transgender and genderqueer students could be said merely to be holding women’s colleges to their word: to fully support women’s exploration of gender, even if that exploration ends with students no longer being female-identified."

Oh, right. That Women's Studies major I did, it said something about all that.

(Pwned! By the NY Times! On the subject of gender conformity! Oh, the shame.)

Anyway, I've read and heard now a few different attempts to explain or understand this new trans* generation:

1. It's a natural extension of postmodern feminism, in which the very foundations of gender (and, often, biological sex itself! I've done it!) are seen as social constructs open to be questioned. (In other words, it's my fault. :) )
   


2. It's a fad. Possibly a dangerous fad, given the longer-term implications of hormones and even surgeries. Being queer, being "bi-curious", getting pierced, whatever, no longer edgy enough... so trans* is the next envelope-pushing idea. (In other words, it's my fault. LOL.)

Something kinda strange occurred to me the other day, though, when I started putting this together with the huge amounts of reading I've been doing lately on the marketing of gender roles.

I guess I can't substantiate, but I believe, that our culture is imposing gender roles on children a lot more than was commonly done in the 1970s and 1980s. Even parents and aunties who don't want to participate actively in this phenomenon are fighting an uphill battle (see "Unisex Baby Hell", December 2006). Just yesterday on outside the (toy) box was this:

"...my wonderful nanny recently told me about a friend who asked her pediatrician what to do because her son kept asking for a stroller. Not a boy with a stroller! Someone DO something!"

What if, by pressuring our very youngest children to conform to restrictive gender roles, we're sending them the message that if they are interested in anything remotely gender-nonconforming, their only solution is to become a conforming gender?

What would that mean? If gender roles are constructed, does that make it a bad thing to want to uphold the construct but just switch to a different one? Don't we go into a culture war with the culture we have? I've even heard it suggested that those who transition might even be selling out the rest of us who nonconform in the bodies we were born with! I don't think that can possibly be the case... it's not like extremely conservative/traditionalist types love trans* people for upholding all of their preconceptions about gender. :D

I wonder what the complementarians think...?!

Great Experiments in Sexual Orientation

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Another reason to give women's colleges a look?

NYT: To All the Girls I've Rejected

(Women find higher hurdles at college is identical; NYT doesn't always expire their op-eds, but just in case.)

To sum up: at many competitive co-ed colleges, female applicants outnumber male ones, but the colleges want to maintain gender parity in the classes they admit. The result is pretty simple math: well-qualified girls will be rejected to make room for less-qualified boys.

This is a challenge. I'm an alumna of a women's college and I have been working to encourage high school students in my area to consider not only my alma mater, but highly competitive colleges in general and women's colleges in particular. On the one hand, if female applicants are at a demographic disadvantage at co-ed colleges, that's a rock-solid argument for them to look at women's colleges instead. On the other hand, it's hard to brag about a college being easier to get into, at least among the caliber of students I'm trying to attract.

"Be surrounded by all the girls who were almost good enough to get into Kenyon"?

But, wait. That's only half the story. What about going to Kenyon and being surrounded by all those even less qualified boys?

Now which campus is looking more competitive?

It's interesting, because Smith takes a big hit in the U.S. News rankings for having too high an acceptance rate. (I don't think that's the only reason Smith has been slipping for the last many years, but that's the most glaring difference between itself and its peers.) Smith loses that one on two fronts, because its applicant pool is half the size of its co-ed counterparts', but its incoming class is twice the size of its single-sex competitors! I'd love to see us back in the top five again, but I think I'd rather brag about the wealth of opportunities we offer to a truly diverse pool of amazingly talented women and girls.

In any case, I shall be curious to see what effect the demographic shift has on Smith and women's and co-ed colleges alike, in the coming years. Maybe female-dominated campuses will be the wave of the future for all of us. ;)