"Some small American colleges, eager to attract men to increasingly female campuses, have taken notice of how many students...can be lured to attend by adding football teams. Officials at these colleges say football can bring in more tuition-paying students than any other course or activity - and not just players themselves.

'When you recruit a halfback, you get a few of his male friends, maybe his sister and his sister's boyfriend, too,' said JoAnne Boyle, president of Seton Hill University. A 123-year-old former women's institution in Greensburg, Pa., Seton Hill added football last year.

'I could have started a spiffy new major of study, spent a lot of money on lab equipment and hired a few new high-powered professors,' Dr. Boyle said. 'I might have gotten 25 more students for that. And I couldn't have counted on that major still being popular in 15 years.

'Instead, I started a football team, brought in hundreds of paying students, added a vibrant piece to our campus life and broadened our recognition factor. And in the long history of American higher education, one thing you can count on is football's longevity. Football is here to stay.'

Last year's freshman class at Seton Hill was the first with more men than women. Four years ago, when the college became fully co-ed, its undergraduate student body was 18 percent male; last fall it was 41 percent male.

At a time when the image of major college football has been sullied by academic, recruiting and sexual violence scandals - and as some prominent colleges eliminate football to cope with federal gender equity regulations for athletics - many smaller institutions have embraced the sport. Since their football players generally do not receive scholarships and are not blue-chip recruits, officials at small colleges say the players tend to exhibit less of a sense of entitlement, leading to fewer academic and discipline problems.

In the last 10 years, nearly 50 colleges and universities have instituted or re-instituted football, with more than 80 percent in the small college ranks. In the same period, about 25 institutions have dropped football, the majority being scholarship-driven teams from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's top tier, Division I."

"Because [Mr. Walton] had no trouble balancing his checkbook, he took himself for a math wiz. But he could barely remember the Pythagorean theorem and had trouble applying sine, cosine and tangent to figure out angles on the geometry questions.

Mr. Walton is not unusual. As the new school year begins, the nation's 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.

Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses.

...Michael W. Kirst, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of a report on the gap between aspirations and college attainment, said that 73 percent of students entering community colleges hoped to earn four-year degrees, but that only 22 percent had done so after six years.

'You can get into school,' Professor Kirst said. 'That's not a problem. But you can't succeed.'

Nearly half the 14.7 million undergraduates at two- and four-year institutions never receive degrees. The deficiencies turn up not just in math, science and engineering, areas in which a growing chorus warns of difficulties in the face of global competition, but also in the basics of reading and writing.

According to scores on the 2006 ACT college entrance exam, 21 percent of students applying to four-year institutions are ready for college-level work in all four areas tested, reading, writing, math and biology."

The increasing age of first-marriage among women might suggest that women today have become more like men in their interest in settling down, marrying, and starting a family. But a study of college students by psychologists at Indiana-Purdue University in Fort Wayne reveals that young women remain - even after a generation of feminism - significantly more motivated to marry than young men.

Polling nearly 400 students enrolled in introductory psychology classes, the professors found that while they expressed more liberal sex-role attitudes than did men (p<.001), women nonetheless scored significantly higher on a "drive to marry" scale that measured to what extent the students are "enthusiastically looking forward" to getting married (p<.05), even though both men and women valued their future marital role equally on a different scale. Women also outscored men in how they valued their future parental role (p<.05).

Women who expressed the most desire to marry were those who expressed more conservative or traditional sex roles (p<.05) and those who placed a higher value on their future parental role (p<.01). Women with a lower drive to marry scored higher on a scale that measured how they valued their future occupational role (although this correlation did not reach statistical significance), leading the researchers to conclude that spouse and worker role attitudes "exist in relative opposition to one anther in the minds of young women in a way that they do not in young men."

The researchers also found that higher scores on the drive-to-marry scale, lower scores on the Attitudes toward Women scale, and higher scores on the parental role value each translated into a woman's desire, once married, to wear a wedding band, adopt her husband's surname, and use the title "Mrs."

The researchers caution that their findings might be skewed as their sample represented predominately white, first-generation college students from middle- and working-class backgrounds and who are "somewhat politically conservative." Nonetheless, their study confirms that the reach of the sexual revolution has limits and that "family values" still exist, even on university campuses.