OUR VIEWS Consensus Opinion

At first glance, the statistics on this fall’s incoming freshman class-as detailed in a recent press release on the Georgia Tech homepage-sound like a cause for excitement. “Almost 800 women and 108 Hispanic students will join the freshman class in August, a jump of 30 percent and 52 percent, respectively,” the release stated.

However, smart Tech students who take a closer look and do some number-crunching of their own might find that the numbers are somewhat misleading. Though the number of women in the incoming class has increased since last year, part of the reason is because the size of the freshman class has also increased by 15 percent to 2,550 students.

This means that overall, Tech’s infamous “ratio” has not really changed all that much: last year’s incoming class was 27 percent female, and this year, it is 32 percent. Thus, the ratio, unfortunately, still hovers around 7:3.

In addition, many of the increases in female freshmen are in majors that have already have a high percentage of women. For example, the largest increases this year were seen in Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Architecture and the Ivan Allen College. Majors such as Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, however, still attract a very low number of women.

So what is the Institute’s goal? Is it simply to get more women on Tech’s campus in general-or is it to attract more women to engineering? If simply decreasing the ratio is enough, then we may be getting there, and some of this credit may very well go to the increasing strength of our liberal arts programs.

However, Tech is still, decidedly, an engineering school, and thus efforts should be made to get more women to enroll in traditionally male-dominated engineering majors, majors where a female presence is lacking and sorely needed.

Though there are several existing programs that address this, such as Women in Engineering and the College of Computing’s “Women@cc” program, these are all at the college level. The focus needs to be on recruitment at the high-school level, and the effort should be made by both individual colleges as well as the administration as a whole.

Women aren’t the only minority where the statistics sound overly optimistic. Though Tech has a reputation for its diverse student body, the numbers indicate otherwise. African Americans will make up only six percent of the incoming freshman class, and this percentage is even lower (a little more than four percent) for Hispanics. It’s true that these numbers are increasing slowly every year-but they should also remind us that we still have a long way to go.