Female Supremacy Articles - Page 8

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The national trend holds true in Illinois, where 56 percent of the state's 652,732 college students last year were women. Women outnumber men at all major undergraduate universities in the state except for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Southern Illinois University and the Illinois Institute of Technology. At some major Catholic schools in the Chicago area, the campuses are almost overwhelmingly female: 70 percent at St. Xavier, more than 66 percent at Loyola and 60 percent at DePaul. "They're downsizing every year,"' said DePaul commerce major Vanessa Mendez, 21, speaking of the male population on campus.

The fortunes of the two sexes are headed in such opposite directions that some experts believe America's education system is failing males. But most aren't calling yet for affirmative action for men. Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, notes that while the number of bachelor's degrees earned by men has increased 20 percent in the last three decades, the number earned by women has increased 117 percent. "Women have made nearly all the educational progress," he said. "Males are stuck where they were 30 years ago."