There is a common misconception at BYU–Hawaii that there are seven single female students to every male student. Before being told the actual numbers, 10 students in the Cafeteria were asked how they perceived the unmarried female-to-male student ratio.
“The odds are in our favor,” said Amona Autele from American Samoa, a freshman studying supply chain. He guessed the female-to-male ratio is five-to-one.
Wealthia Apao, a female senior studying music from the Philippines said she thinks the ratio is 10 females to one male. “It’s hard for us to find a guy,” said Apao.
Some students didn’t mention a discrepancy between the number of girls to guys. “It’s 50/50,” said Cole Embrey, a freshman male studying business management from Utah.
Courtney Eames, a female sophomore elementary education major from Utah, disagreed with Embrey. “There are way more girls than guys,” said Eames, “seven-to-one.” The seven-to-one ratio is a popular guess.
The man with the correct numbers is James Faustino, director of Admissions & Financial Aid. “Oftentimes I hear there is a perception that the female to male composition is a seven-to-one ratio,” said Faustino.
When asked if this helped his chances of finding a woman, Chance Owen, a male undeclared freshman from California lamented, “But nobody wants to go on any dates.”
Faustino admits, “We do have more females than males, Just by way of the structure of the university, it is set up to house more females than males. If you were to look at the way it is set up by wards, maybe it might be that way, I don’t know geographically. But as a whole, we’re like 60/40.”
Faustino’s 60/40 estimate seems conservative, but he has the numbers to back it up.
“We can do this off of live data, right now,” said Faustino as he accessed the school database to calculate the number of students currently enrolled, filter them by marital status, and divide them by gender. In this circumstance, single is defined as never been married.
As Faustino reported, the actual ratio of single females to single males on campus is approximately 60/40 or in other words, three girls to every two guys.
Two students correctly guessed the actual ratio when they were interviewed in the Cafeteria. Sala Sasagi, a female studying business management from Samoa guessed “three-to-two,” and Sou Mizobuchi, a male freshman from Japan studying accounting guessed “60/40” saying, “There’s too many girls.”