GLORIA SHELLER
Assistant Perspectives Editor
It’s not hard to see when walking around campus that there are clearly more women than men at Pepperdine. There are more women’s freshmen dorms, more sororities and even more women working at the Graphic.
In a meeting with a member of the administration, it was said that Pepperdine is looking to admit more men to Seaver.
At first, of course, that sounded like a great idea. I too was angry that Pepperdine had such a prominence of one gender on campus. But more men means fewer women; less women who could be qualified. Not to say that any of the men walking around aren’t qualified to be here, but Pepperdine shouldn’t just admit men for the sake of evening out the clearly unbalanced ratio.
According to Pepperdine, there are about 1,827 women at Seaver, which is 60 percent of the student population. Some might call for Perpperdine to right this wrong and accept more men.
Typically, affirmative action comes to mind when people talk about women and racial minorities (but I guess in this case men are a minority) who need an increase of representation in an educational setting or workplace. This always causes controversy for the exact reason that some people just aren’t good enough to represent their group.
Look at what happened at the University of Michigan, when they began to turn away white students who were as qualified as admitted black students. That’s ridiculous. What is the world coming to? Any person who meets the bar set by admissions ought to be considered, despite their race or sex.
It really comes down to the fact that there are more women in the world that want to further their educations. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, women are dropping out of high school at a rate of 9 percent as opposed to men’s 12 percent. More women are applying and going to more colleges.
Male enrollment has fallen from about 82 to 75 men for every hundred women, with numbers projected to slip even further in 2007. With numbers like these, there isn’t any reason why there shouldn’t be more women than men at Pepperdine.
Let’s face it; the women’s world is upon us. Embrace it. The ratios we see at Pepperdine and most college campuses only reflect how things really are. Women want to succeed and move up in the world.
If we wanted a generic even-steven kind of school, it would be hard to find one. These days, women are the majority, about 56 percent of the student body, on college campuses. Whether the ratio is as slanted as Pepperdine’s is a different story, but don’t think that Pepperdine is the only school with an abundance of women.
There aren’t crowds of men on campus demanding that more of them be accepted to Pepperdine.
If anything women are complaining that there are too many women. This is disheartening because we have fought so long to be equal. Now we are in a position of power, where women are dominant in numbers there are more women are represented in SGA, but we are unhappy. Come on.
Pepperdine says it’s looking for academic and personal excellence in students that they accept to Pepperdine. Everyone went through the admissions process. It was long and tedious, but the strong prevailed and here we are at Pepperdine. If they see more academic and personal excellence in women, that’s fine.
Pepperdine accepting more male students only to even the ratio is like Pepperdine accepting students simply because they are Church of Christ.
Why further ourselves from excellence by admitting an unqualified Church of Christ man over a woman with no religious preference, simply because it is right. It isn’t right. They shouldn’t do it.
Pepperdine doesn’t want to get the reputation of a school that just let’s any average Joe in. We pride ourselves on being a selective university with high standards. Men just need to meet them.
03-30-2006