The proportion of women among students enrolled in higher education pr

Yes, (D) is not sufficient but certainly a step forward and quite useful. The men and women split in the population isn't expected to be a whole lot different so with (D), we can better evaluate. It is certainly an important data point though not enough to establish the conclusion.

Hi IanStewart

Could you please help with this question?

Although I have found the correct asnwer by eliminating wrong answers, I still have some doubt with OA(D).

Conclusion:

The conclusion talks about women in general, but statistics are only about women between 20 and 21. Yet, How about other women, such as those between 22 and 25. (D) only talks about men 20 and 21. Even if the propotion of women between 20 and 21 rose and the propotion of men between 20 and 21 rose / decreased, the propotion of women who were between 22 and 25 and who were enrolled would decrease significantly, perhaps to zero.

Of course, (D) is the best one among other answer choices, but we cannot evaluate the argument even with (D).

The question seems quite old and so may have some problems.

Is it a typical characteristic of new C.R questions?

Could you please explain why (D) is correct?

Thank you very much beforehand!

The obvious issue with the argument is that it constructs a faulty comparison. It draws a conclusion about the fraction of students who are women at university. But it doesn't compare women with men. It compares women in the 1950s with women in the 1980s. We learn that 11% of age 20-21 women were enrolled in 1959, and 30% were enrolled in 1981. That tells us nothing about how the balance of women and men at university has changed -- maybe 11% of age 20-21 men were enrolled in 1959, and 30% of those men were enrolled in 1981, and universities have consistently been roughly 50% women for decades.

That's the most important issue with the evidence used to support the conclusion -- it really doesn't support the conclusion at all, unless we make the same comparison for men. So D is the right answer here.

The age issue you raise is potentially relevant, but it's a much less important issue. Sure, maybe people who go to university in the 1980s tend to be older or younger than those who went in the 1950s, or maybe the ages at which men and women tend to go to university differ, or differed in one of those two eras. So it's possible that one should not be comparing age 20-21 people in 1959 with age 20-21 people in 1981 to make an argument like this. But even if we knew the argument was making a fair comparison (say we knew that men and women both all go to university at the same ages in the 1950s and in the 1980s) the argument would still be making a faulty comparison. Unless we can compare men in 1959 and 1981, the data in this argument is meaningless, so D overrides every other concern, and you'd only want to look for an answer about age groups in a question like this if an answer like D was absent.

There can be a possibility that the number of men and women might be different in those corresponding years.

However, suppose if we take the total number of students who are aged btwn 20-21 in 1959 and 1981 are x and y repectively.

Proportion of women in 1959 = 11 * x / [11*x + (__) * x]

Proportion of women in 1981 = 11 * y/ [11* y+ (__) * y ]


(__) => % of men enrolled between 20-21 enrolled in university.

So D is right

(D) The percentage of men between twenty and twenty-one who were enrolled in college

“The proportion of women among student“
So we have check number of men enrolled in higher studies.
Suppose 11 women and 100 men was before but now 30 women and 5000 men are enrolled. May be percentage of women increase but proportion decrease.
ANSWER:D

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If we just need proportion of men's population studying in college, then we have to consider some population of men in the age group 20-21. Here you have assumed it as equal to women's population at age 20-21. Can you explain why you have done this? Because without the population assumption we cannot get the answer