Towson University recently dropped a program designed to attract students with higher SAT scores but lower high school GPAs.
Towson officials did not give the exact reason for the cut, but said only 70 percent of students in the program stayed at Towson after the first year. The university's normal retention rate is 90 percent, according to Deborah Leather, the acting director of the Family Studies and Community Department and an associate professor at Towson.
The Academic Special Admissions Program affected mostly prospective male students, who have statistically lower high school GPAs than their female counterparts, according to Jan Lucas, the associate director of university relations at Towson.
Only 39 percent of Towson's 12,799 full-time undergraduate students were male, according to the Spring 2007 University Data Journal published by Towson's Office of Institutional Research.
AU has a similar female-dominated student body-63 percent of undergraduates are female, according to the Academic Data Reference Book, an annual statistical publication of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.
Towson did not implement the program to attract more males, despite the current imbalanced gender ratio at Towson, Leather said in an e-mail.
The program gave men and women with lower high school GPAs the opportunity to be successful in college, she said.
A policy designed to attract men is "gender discrimination," said Ashley Zielinski, a freshman in the School of International Service.
AU has never based its admissions criteria on anything other than academic merit, extracurricular interests and overall fit with regard to the spirit of the institution, according to Cristan Trahey, acting director of admissions at AU.
"AU has been majority female for more than 25 years," Trahey said in an e-mail. "The university's administration sees no problem with this currently."
The Towson program admitted students who had high school GPAs of 2.70 to 2.99 and SAT scores of 1050 to 1600. Students were required to carry nine credits and maintain a 2.0 GPA, according to The Towerlight, Towson's student newspaper.
"More boys than girls don't do well in high school but do well on the SATs," Lucas said.
The ASAP program was not in congruence with Towson's usual policy of focusing on GPA scores as admissions criteria, Lucas said.
"[Universities] should have an equal admissions policy for guys and girls," Zielinski said.
Although Towson's program was not exclusively for males, 85 percent of students in the program were male, The Towerlight reported.
AU's lack of certain male-dominated majors, such as engineering, and lack of a varsity football program probably contribute to the low number of male students on campus, Trahey said.
Tushar Bhargava, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, cited better athletic programs as a way to attract more male students to AU, but said the university should not go out of its way to institute special policies.
The U.S. Department of Education reported that 58 percent of college students nationwide in 2006 were women.
A report by the American Council of Education showed a higher likelihood in women to take a college preparatory class in high school than men, according to Trahey.
