An Interview With Dean of Admission James Miller

On September 14th, 2006, I interviewed James Miller, Brown’s brand new Dean of Admission. We spoke about gender balance in the Brown admissions process and how it relates to a fascinating national trend of declining percentages of
males in colleges. ?e following is a precise transcript of our conversation. Due to space constraints, however, several redundant segments have been omitted.

1. According to the BDH, the applicant pool for the Class of 2010 was thirty-nine percent male. But according to brown.edu, the matriculating class was forty-nine percent male (?fty one percent female). Is there any reason to think these statistics are incorrect, ?rst of all?

No, they’re accurate.

2. Concerning gender and quality in admissions, you have said in the past that the admissions committee “pays more attention to quality than to gender” (from a February 3 2006 article in the BDH). Knowing this, can I take the next step and say that male applicants for the Class of 2010, seeing this gap, that male applicants were of higher quality, and that’s why they were brought to parity with females?

Actually there are a couple of reasons why the class balanced out the way it did. One was we had a much higher yield on males than we anticipated. The male yield was up about four percent higher than we thought it was going to be, which translated into a much greater population of males enrolling. We’ve had that for two years in a row. We thought your lass was an anomaly, because we had a higher yield on women before, and all of a sudden we’ve had a higher yield on men, and this years male yield was signi?cantly higher. And we don’t know why – it’s one of the things we have to tease out. ?e other thing is that in our admissions process we’ve been focusing a lot on sciences and , you know, it’s a big part of what we’ve been trying to do in the institution and with the Plan for Academic Enrichment. We’ve been focusing –not a seismic shift – but sort of an emphasis on science. Men at the moment are more likely to evidence interest in physical
sciences than women. So, the admit rate as we’re looking at candidates, we’ll tend to admit – there will be more males on the science side of the equation, so we’ll tend to admit more males. So those two things, the yield and the focus on science, tend to counterbalance the lopsidedness of the applicant pool.

3. Looking at past years, and looking at what other colleges have done, we’ve had somewhat of a gender balance (?fty-four-forty-six, ?fty-two-forty-eight, or something like that) it appears like there’s some level of balance throughout all the years, nothing as glaring as the national statistics are. So, I was wondering, is having an adequate gender balance an
objective of the admissions process?

It’s hard to de?ne “adequate gender balance.” I don’t think anybody quite knows what that means.

I guess I would say ?fty-?fty

No. There’s no expectation were going to have a quota or balanced gender in the college. It wasn’t true when we were sixty-?ve-thirty-?ve male. Nobody was pushing to go ?fty-?fty. I think that we really every year play it as it as we see it. There may be years where we have more males than females or may be years where we have more females than males. It really is a function of the applicant pool and the decision making process, and there’s no – no one has ever said to me in the year I’ve been here “we need to be ?fty-?fty.”

4. So, you would say that these factors - the yield and the interest in sciences – they’ve been able to counteract what really has been an incredible national trend? Females greatly outnumber males.

I think that this year but what will happen in future years is hard to tell. Certainly this year because the yield was so high, we ended up much closer to ?fty-?fty than we anticipated even when we sent out our admission offers. And next year is a different ear, so it’s hard to know what will happen. But you know, every year whatever shows up shows up in the admitted class.

5. You said in the Herald, and I quote again, tat the reason why you see this gap is that “most males mature intellectually a bit behind most females.” So I was wondering why you believe male intellectual maturation has slowed down only in the last generation.

That’s an interesting question. That’s probably about eight PhD. dissertations and that’s just one person’s observation over twenty-?ve years. One of the things I think is true – there’s a bunch of literature about adolescent development which is really pretty interesting – but one of the things that’s happened is college, like places like this, have gotten signi?cantly more competitive. The need to plan early in one’s career I think has become more important. For example curricular choices – starting in the right sequence of courses in the ninth grade, getting engaged in activities and stuff like that – and women just seem to do that earlier than men. And I think all the literature would indicate that
they do mature at different points. So the process we’re currently in does demand that people think about it. When I applied to college we didn’t think about college till senior year. It was never on our radar screen till senior year. Now the process is backed up and requires a lot more planning and again, my sense is that women are ready to do that at an earlier age.

6. Do you see the trend as reversible?

Yes. I think it’s gotten a lot of attention. I think there’s a lot of recent interest in male-only academies and male-only classrooms – I don’t know if that’s the answer. It’s also I think you’ve got to look out and see that women are actually doing really well. I think women seem to recognize and somehow stepped up to the demands of applying to these places

7. Just a hypothetical: If the pool of male applicants for the Class of 2011 fell thirty percent, do you think it would be appropriate to engineer gender equality in numbers for diversity purposes?

No, I think that’s a really hard thing to do. I think that’s a dangerous way to go. I think obviously you want to build communities and communities are complicated entities, so you’ve got to have a sense of what’s an appropriate and healthy community. ?ere are varied ways to de?ne that. If that means thirty percent males, that may be what it means. It’s hard to quantify but it’s something to worry about when you’re building communities always.

8. You’re willing to accept the possibility that the school could be thirty percent male if that’s the trend. However, as an admissions office, your office has not been willing to accept the possibility that the school could possibly have ?ve to ten percent less minorities. How do you reconcile those two things?

We’re building a community and there’s lots of ways to de?ne building a community. We’re always looking to put together the best group of people or the group of people we think will interact and teach each other and learn from each other. ?ere are minority males, there are minority females, there are lots of ways to think about putting together a community. I think that we’re always trying to build a community that re?ects the values of the country and the world. We also have to take what’s in the applicant pool. There are years when we’re going to have up years and down years in students of color. We’re going to have up years and down years in kids in Rhode Island. We’re going to have up years and downs years in engineers. It doesn’t mean, for example, we’re going to stop recruiting males. It doesn’t mean we’re going to stop recruiting minority students. We’re always going to do the very best we can. If we were to have a real dropoff in students of color it would be unfortunate but, if that’s what it is, that’s what it is. If they’re not in the applicant pool, would have to dealwith that. So I think it’s important for us to continue to recruit males. I think that it’s important for us to continue to recruit all kinds of people.

9. Obviously, women faced incredible discrimination in the past in college. Colleges took real action, I believe it can be said, to move women up and encourage them to apply to college and obviously affirmative action was done for females in the past. In a different time, why would you favor one gender over another? What makes the promotion of women in this one time more important than the promotion of men at this other time?

I didn’t want to imply that the promotion of men is not important. I said that we’re going to continue to recruit really hard….

But you’re willing to accept lower percentages, whereas in the past…

We were willing to accept lower percentages of women in the past too. What changed was the number of women going into the applicant pool. It’s because we’re reaching out – there’s no difference in the way we’re reaching out to women thirty years ago and men today. We’re still pushing really hard as many of both in the applicant pool as we can. I think women ended up in large numbers in places like this because their applicant pool grew and people really reached out to them and I think we’re going to do the same with men. Nobody wants to just lay back and say “we’re not going to recruit the very best people we can.” And I think going out an recruiting males is an important piece of
that.

10. Affirmative action is highly controversial and it’s so easy to argue about the tiny bits of it – I’d rather not do that. It’s not important and it’s not pertinent to the basic question I’m asking. Knowing the basic goals and aspirations of affirmative action, which is to promote diversity which you believe can build a better college community and learning environment, I’m wondering: how can you reconcile the goals of affirmative action with the possible promotion of males who have received humongous historical advantages in institutions, and everything else?

I’m not sure I understand your question.

I guess part of the goals of affirmative action can be said to compensate for historical legacies of discrimination. Why should you be working for more men in there – because you said before you’d like to work for more men – why should you work for more men being at Brown when men have clearly had a big advantage through all of history?

Why shouldn’t we be trying to recruit the best of everything we can ?nd? That’s what it boils down to essentially. We’re one of the great intellectual centers of the world and I think our goal is to get the most of everything we can get. If seventy percent of the applicant pool is not male then clearly we’re missing some chunk of the population who we ought to at least be able to consider as being Brown students. That’s true for women, that’s true for men, that’s true for every group you can ?nd. If there are low numbers of men that means there are a number of great males who ought to be here and that’s what we should be about is getting the best kids into our pool and into the college that we can get. For us to ignore a group or to say a group has an advantage is inappropriate, and I think that’s not doing our job.

11. I do have another question: If you look at SAT scores over time, typically males have outperformed females (on the new SAT they changed it a little bit, but still males outperformed females) for some reason or another, yet women get better grades than men. Seeing that, and knowing the trends over time, some positive selection must have occurred in the 1970’s to bring more women on campus, possibly accepting applicants with lower than average SAT scores. Correct?

I don’t think that’s correct. I was in an admissions office in the seventies, the late seventies, I was doing admissions at Harvard. So I can’t speak to what was going on around the country. But never in my recollection was there a point where people said “let’s lower standards, let’s keep recruiting.” If you look at the progression of women in these places, it was a function of their numbers in the applicant pool, not “we have to admit twice as many women, so we can have a critical mass.” It was a very steady progression that re?ected their numbers in the pool and not because people said “let’s
dip to have x number of women.”

12. Do you see the re?ection of the number of applicants in the pool as more important or getting the most intelligent applicants?

I think both happened at the same time. I think the more students you’re able to bring in the better chance you have of getting high quality students.

13. One more question, when you say that the reason why there was this big difference in this recent class was because of yield and because of an emphasis on the sciences can you prove that to me? You gave me the four percent yield number, but is there anything you can show me to prove it to me?

Not anything we would reveal publicly.

14. Do you have the yield percentage for women- can you give me those numbers?

The male yield was sixty-one and the female yield was ?fty-six.

15. Do you have the absolute numbers of male-female applicants? The applicant pool was [eighteen thousand three hundred]. It was thirty-nine point four and…sixty point six.