PHILADELPHIA - A federal civil rights agency investigating possible gender discrimination in college admissions will subpoena data from more than a dozen mid-Atlantic universities, officials said Thursday.

The probe by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is focusing on whether some colleges favor men by admitting them at higher rates than women or by offering them more generous aid packages.

Commission members voted Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for 19 universities within a 100-mile radius of where the commission meets in Washington - the geographical extent of their subpoena authority.

The schools represent a mixture of sizes and include public, private, religious, secular, historically Black and moderately selective to highly selective institutions. There are six in Maryland, five in Pennsylvania, three in Washington, two each in Virginia and Delaware and one in West Virginia.

Women outnumber men nearly 60 to 40 percent in higher education nationally. The probe grew out of anecdotal stories that admissions officials are discriminating against women to promote a more even gender mix, said commission spokeswoman Lenore Ostrowsky.

Spokespeople for several schools on the list declined comment Thursday since they had not received the subpoenas.

Statistics from a few colleges on the list reveal varying percentages of men and women on campus.

Gettysburg College in central Pennsylvania, a highly selective liberal arts school, reports virtually an even gender split this year in its student body: 1,345 men and 1,338 women, according to its Web site.

The college's ratio slightly favored women in each of the previous four years, with about 1,400 women and 1,200 men, the statistics show.