Women Are More Likely to Apply to College and More Likely to Be Accepted for Admission Than Men

New data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that in 2019, four-year colleges and universities that do not have open admissions received 6,556,559 applications from women and 4,907,067 applications from men. (Many individuals apply to and are accepted at two or more colleges and these figures are not unduplicated.)

Some 3,835,050 women were accepted for admission at degree-granting, four-year institutions, compared to 2,682,816 men. From these figures, we can calculate that at degree-granting institutions that do not have open admissions, the acceptance rate for women was 58.5 percent. For men, the overall acceptance rate at these schools was 54.5 percent.

These institutions enrolled 891,129 first-time, degree-seeking women, and 710,975 men. Thus women were about 55 percent of all first-time enrollments in degree-granting institutions without open admissions policies.