Forget about the big man on campus. These days, colleges and universities are increasingly becoming a woman’s world. With female high school students nearly twice as likely to apply to college than their male counterparts, colleges are struggling to maintain a gender balance.

Many admissions officials have given up on the target of a 50-50 male-to-female ratio.

“There is not a chance to get back to 50 percent,” said Paul M. Cramer, the vice president for enrollment at Elizabethtown College, a private school where more than 63 percent of undergrads are women. “Nor do we have that as a goal,” he said. “Elizabethtown is very comfortable in its skin.”

There are many reasons for the bending gender balances on college campuses.

First and foremost, women have been aggressive about breaking down barriers to majors and professions once dominated by men, including business, accounting, sciences and engineering.

By contrast, many men remain reluctant to enter areas of study traditionally dominated by women, such as elementary education, social work and occupational therapy.

In addition, more men are seeking career opportunities that don’t require college degrees. And of the men who aspire to go to college, a growing number aren’t as strong academically as the college-bound women they are competing against for acceptance letters, officials said.

With fewer males on campuses, the dating scene is changing and it’s becoming less likely that men and women will meet their mates there. Some say this is helping drive women to focus even more on their college studies and their career opportunities.

“They have possibilities that we never had,” said Marianne Calenda, Elizabethtown’s dean of students, who sees the trends as empowering for women.

“Who knows where they are going to meet their life’s partner?” she added, seeing the notion of college campuses as matrimonial hunting grounds as a quaint anachronism. “Chances are, it may not be in college.”

Other colleges are doing all they can to keep their gender balances at least closer to even.

At private Lebanon Valley College, about 45 percent of the school’s 1,600 students are male, and William J. Brown Jr. has made it his mission as the vice president of enrollment to keep the proportion steady. “It’s been a struggle, frankly,” he said. “Males seem to be looking at college not as their top option, while a lot of women are considering college their top option.”

What is worse, the men who apply tend to have less stellar scholastic backgrounds, making it even more difficult to prop up sagging male enrollment. “Our acceptance rate is higher for females,” Brown said. “More of them have done a better job in high school.”

That’s why Brown is happy just to maintain the college’s 55-45 female-to-male ratio. “I picture our situation as being much more positive,” he said. “It has swayed much more to the female side at a lot of places. And the more you sway one way or the other, it snowballs. It becomes more and more difficult to recruit on one side of the ledger. It keeps going downhill.”

One way to boost male enrollment is to increase the number of African-American and Latino men who go to college. These racial subgroups have the biggest disparity in male-female enrollment. “Nationally speaking, African-American males have the biggest college gender gap,” said Jose Aviles, the associate director of admissions at Millersville University.

“There’s a lot of theories out there,” he said. “A lot has to do with their experience with education. They feel like they cannot ask for help and they will not ask for help. It’s a sign of weakness if you grow up in an urban environment.”

Millersville has been trying to remedy the situation by providing more support to its black and Latino men. But the biggest form of campus comfort is often found among a community of one’s peers — something that minority men don’t enjoy at many colleges.

“A campus can feel chilly if there’s no visibility of other folks who look like you,” Aviles said. “You have to overcome that feeling on campus. There is still a ways to go, but when you are intentional about increasing participation from any subgroup, it can happen.”

After all, admissions officials aren’t simply filling seats. They’re out to build a community of learners that can maximize the exchange of ideas.

“The beauty of an education experience is the difference in experiences and the difference in ideas,” Aviles said. “That’s where the exchanges really happen. You really want to have a balanced class that allows for those exchanges to happen.”

One place you won’t hear administrators bemoan the disappearing male student is Penn State University. The one-time agricultural college still has a masculine image, thanks to its perennially powerful football team and its rich tradition as an engineering school.

The result is an undergraduate student body at the State College campus that is 55 percent male, bucking the national trend.

“Penn State’s opposite position is mostly a function of our historical emphasis and heavy enrollments in engineering, the physical sciences and business,” university spokeswoman Lisa Powers said.

In fact, Penn State, is working to increase its female representation in science, engineering and math.