Michigan Tech approaches an enrollment milestone: 30 percent women

More women are enrolled at Michigan Technological University this fall than at any point in its 137-year-history: 2116.

That’s 29.9 percent of the student body, roughly one woman for every 2.34 men on the Upper Peninsula campus. It makes Michigan Tech the third most male campus in the state after Kettering University, where the ratio is about 1 to 4, and Yeshiva Gedolah of Greater Detroit, which doesn’t admit women at all.

It’s also a huge increase from a decade ago, when women’s enrollment hovered at around 25 percent.

“There’s a concerted effort there,” said John Lehman, vice president for university relations and enrollment at Michigan Tech. “If we’re not engaging in that, we’re missing half of the potential market for students.”

Abby Mello says she knew what she was getting into when she came to Michigan Tech two years ago to study chemical engineering.

“I was going into a career field that was going to be largely male dominated, and I guess I looked forward to Tech as being somewhere that could prepare me to work with all different kinds of people and face any challenges that that might bring up,” she said.

Still, the gender imbalance worried her. She has indeed found herself in a lot of mostly male spaces. She is the only female coach in the Physics Learning Center this fall, for instance. But she says it hasn’t made for a bad experience.

“I’ve never felt like I was being held back because I’m a woman,” she said.

And she’s excited that women’s enrollment is trending “in the right direction,” because “that enrollment has to do with how many women really want to be pursuing engineering.”

Kristin Arola grew up in Dollar Bay, just across the Portage Canal from Michigan Tech’s campus in Houghton. When she was a high school senior, she said, the overabundance of college men was “awesome.”

“The saying among women was, ‘The odds are good, but the goods are odd,’” she said.

When she returned as a graduate student in 1999, women made up just a quarter of the student body and the imbalance could be “pretty startling,” said Arola, who is now an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University.

“There was a lot of machismo going on, a lot of that kind of high-fiving culture, even though they’re mostly nerds,” she said, “and I mean that in an endearing way.”

She contributed to a feminist newsletter called Technobabe Times, which she described as “pretty unpopular.”

“The point was just to rattle things a little bit,” she said, “to show that there were people on campus who had those viewpoints and also to give folks who had those viewpoints a place to talk and write, have a community,” she said.

The fact that women’s enrollment is up is a good thing, she said, because being around people with different experiences matters for education.

“But 70-30 is still pretty harsh.”

It didn’t take long for Michigan Tech to start admitting women. Margaret McElhinney and Mary Louise Bunce started taking classes at what was then the Michigan Mining School in 1889, just four years after it opened.

But their numbers grew slowly. Women’s enrollment was 3 percent in the mid-1940s, even with thousands of college-age men away at war. It was 7 percent in 1965.

By contrast, the University of Michigan briefly crossed the 30 percent mark for women’s enrollment during World War II and then again in a more enduring way in the 1950s.

And that period of Michigan Tech’s history is still visible, for instance, in the small numbers of women’s bathrooms in some older buildings.

But it’s also true that the university’s most famous graduate is Roxane Gay, the author “Bad Feminist” and “Difficult Women,” and that people who have been on campus for a long time say the culture is shifting.

Back in the 1990s, a committee on campus sponsored a bulletin board contest for Women’s History Month, encourage students to create bulletin board in their dorms or lab space that was devoted to women’s contributions, said Patricia Sotirin, who arrived on campus in 1994 and retired last fall as a professor of communications.

They got a lot of pushback from people who wanted to know when there would be a bulletin board contest for men’s contributions,

“Nowadays, we don’t do something as silly as a bulletin board contest,” she said. “We don’t have to.”

In 2019, Sotirin and two colleagues, Victoria Bergvall and Diane Shoos, taught what she believes was the first and only undergraduate course on feminism at Michigan Tech.

“We had a full class,” she said, “and we had everybody from people who knew what feminism was, who had their own specific kinds of interests in sexuality and difference, to some very traditional male students.”

Every one of them found some connection to feminism, she said.

Aerith Cruz is a junior and the president of the Michigan Tech chapter of the Society of Women Engineers, which has about 50 members.

The organization functions as a support network, does outreach to Girl Scout troops and tries to raise awareness of barriers women face at school and at work, she said.

It’s work cares a lot about. As the university brings in more women, she said, it also needs to ensure that they’re supported in and out of the classroom.

She’s found Michigan Tech welcoming, she said.

“But, that might attribute to the fact that, after being the only girl in the room for so long, you kind of get used to it.”