BethAnne Shaup was a little nervous when she walked into the first class for her major.

"'Is there going to be another female here?'" Shaup remembers thinking. "Most of the time there's usually one to three, but that's it."

Shaup, a senior technology major, is in an unusual situation. There is no shortage of women anywhere else on campus. In fact, females now make up 61 percent of Kent State students, outnumbering men by about 5,000 students, according to statistics provided by Kent State's Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support.

And, according to the U.S. Department of Education, women account for 56 percent of the undergraduate student population nationally in 1996.

But many students don’t seem to notice.

“I think it’s mostly male. In my big lecture classes, it seems like there is a lot more guys,” freshman exploratory major Amanda Klonowski says. “Maybe it’s because there’s more men in the freshman class?”

The freshman class is 61 percent female, too.

“I wasn’t aware there was such a difference between the number of guys and girls,” says Nancy Sutherland, a senior intervention specialist major in the College of Education. “The bars are like meat fests. These hordes of men just follow you. It’s not like you couldn’t go out and find somebody.”

So maybe the bars aren’t the best way to look at the difference. But Eugene Walters noticed it in his classes. The sophomore fashion merchandising and design major says men are a definite minority in the program.

“I’d say the female-to-male ratio is about 20-1,” he says. “I enjoy it. Those are good odds.”