Towson University has discontinued a special admissions program designed to bring in more male students after more of those students dropped out than did their classmates who were accepted under general admissions standards.

Towson began its Academic Special Admissions Program in the 2005-6 academic year, and has enrolled 190 students — 85 percent of them men. The program, which was designed as an experiment, was aimed in part at raising the number of men on the campus. As at many colleges, female undergraduates outnumber their male classmates at Towson, where men make up only about 40 percent of the enrollment.

The idea was to give a break to young men who may not have earned good high-school grades but performed well on the SAT. Colleges typically do exactly the opposite, as high-school grades are known to be a better predictor of college success than are SAT scores. A Chronicle article found that students admitted under the special program had an average score of 1222 on the SAT and an average GPA of 2.8, compared with an average SAT score of 1075 and an average GPA of 3.4 earned by Towson’s regular student body.

According to today’s Baltimore Sun, only 70 percent of the students enrolled under the special admissions standards stayed at Towson for more than a year, about 15 percentage points lower than the rate for all other students.

“More of them were successful than we would expect for students like that,” Lonnie McNew, senior associate vice president for enrollment management, told the Sun. “Still, they were well below the norm for our freshman class.” —Robin Wilson