Chronicle of Higher Ed article on women's colleges
The recent announcement that Randolph-Macon Woman's College will admit male students next fall has triggered yet another round in the continuing debate over women's colleges. At Randolph-Macon itself, the news was met with the usual mix of public displays: As students and alumnae protested with signs reading "Coed is a four-letter word," administrators and trustees voiced the oft-repeated laments about declining enrollments and budgetary shortfalls. The media got right to the point and asked whether single-sex colleges are still relevant, or merely an outdated remnant of the old days before feminism and Title IX.
That seemingly simple question is indeed critical to the discussion. The answer, however, is less obvious and more contextual than the stock arguments on both sides reveal. To fully appreciate the complexity of the debate, one has to consider the historical background.
In the past, women's colleges were not only relevant but essential to women's advancement. Beginning with Mount Holyoke in 1837, private women's colleges were established to offer women educational opportunities that were then largely available only to men. That same year, Oberlin College, a pioneer in coeducation, opened its Collegiate Department to women. As the century wore on, more women's colleges were founded in the Northeast, where they educated the daughters of privileged families, and later in the South. Many of the latter institutions were small, were affiliated with Protestant denominations, and were essentially "finishing schools" concerned more with preparing women for a certain social position and the demands of motherhood than for the working world. The years following the Civil War witnessed the opening of institutions like Spelman College, in Atlanta, geared toward educating African-American women. At the turn of the century, a group of small women's colleges established by Catholic religious orders emerged as a counterpart to the likes of the University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University, while several Southern states established state-supported colleges for women.
Initially women's colleges lacked the intellectual rigor and broad programs of male institutions. Many of them focused on teacher training to support the burgeoning public-school system; others emphasized nursing or home economics. The opening of Vassar in 1865 marked a critical phase in setting high admissions standards and academic requirements comparable to those at the male Ivies and provided a model for what would later become the Seven Sisters. Through the first half of the 20th century, those colleges maintained their prestige despite the rapid growth in public and private coeducational institutions.
Many 19th-century women's advocates, heartened by Oberlin's success, championed coeducation as crucial to liberating women from a "separate spheres" ideology that consigned men to the public sphere of work, politics, and intellectual life, and women to the private sphere of home and family. Yet it would take another century and another women's movement for higher education to effectively respond to their demands.
In the late 1960s, a combination of social, legal, and market forces began to move most all-male institutions toward coeducation. On the heels of the civil-rights movement, segregation on the basis of any personal trait became inherently suspect to some degree. Meanwhile, litigation on behalf of women also made progress toward educational equality through legal action.
At the same time, Congressional debates leading up to Title IX, the 1972 federal statute barring sex discrimination in federally financed education programs, laid bare gross inequities that defied reason - particularly in college sports, where men historically received the majority of resources, including generous scholarships. And while the law exempted the admissions practices of most public undergraduate programs (if single-sex from their inception), and was silent on private undergraduate colleges, it placed into question not only the unequal treatment but the categorical exclusion of female students from the most elite institutions.
When an increasing number of male colleges yielded to those pressures and began admitting women, the impact on women's colleges was devastating. No longer able to justify their existence to a post-feminist generation eager to prove themselves equal to men, an increasing number reluctantly became coeducational to maintain a qualified applicant pool and protect their economic viability. Between 1960 and 1972, half opened their doors to men or closed completely. During the six-month period from June to December 1968, an astounding 64 institutions met one or the other fate.
By 1986 women's colleges had become an endangered species. The majority that survived were church-affiliated, primarily Catholic. By 1998 the number had plummeted to 80, down from a high of around 300 in 1960. Fewer than 60 remain today. A similar trend is evident in England. St. Hilda's, the last remaining women's college at Oxford University, voted last June to open its doors to men after a century of educating only women.
There is no doubt that women's colleges have lost their appeal for the vast majority of today's students. The old argument that women's colleges are a necessary safe haven for women to achieve academically and develop their leadership skills now rings hollow, as do many of the outdated statistics commonly cited by proponents. Although it is true, for example, that one-third of the female board members of the Fortune 1000 companies and 20 percent of the female members of Congress are graduates of women's colleges, many of those women were undergraduates at a time when women's colleges were their only choice, with few exceptions, for an elite liberal-arts education.
According to a Randolph-Macon study, only 3 percent of collegebound women would even consider single-sex education today. That figure is not surprising. The current generation of college-age women has benefited enormously from three decades of legal protections and educational programs to make women more welcome in coeducational classrooms, on the playing fields, and in academic disciplines that historically favored males, like math and science. In fact, 58 percent of students at two- and four-year colleges now are women; at law, medical, and dental schools, that percentage hovers between 44 percent and 49 percent. Even Harvard's freshman class this year is 52 percent female. Meanwhile, female students are holding top positions in student organizations and participating in sports and internships in record numbers.
There is also, of course, the matter of dating. Although women's colleges, to some extent, ease the pressures of the "rating and dating" or casual "hooking up" scene on many coeducational campuses, they undoubtedly limit their students' social opportunities to meet and develop positive relationships with men. And while open attitudes toward sexual identity and same-sex relationships prevalent at some women's colleges are self-affirming for some students, they can prove unsettling for others.
Yet the fact that women's colleges seem less necessary and appealing to most young women today does not mean that they have become irrelevant. As a 2002 study by the Duke University Women's Initiative revealed, at least some coeducational institutions are less than ideal environments for women. Duke students described the campus's social environment as one demanding that women be "smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular," and reported fears of assaults by male students. Tom Wolfe's novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, gave us a vivid description of the emotional stresses that women can experience at certain elite, coed institutions.
That is not to say that cloistering female undergraduates away in women's colleges is the solution to the problems plaguing coeducation: The vast majority of today's young women would recoil at that paternalistic suggestion, and rightly so. But such issues do explain why women's colleges still appeal to some young women. These colleges provide a more inclusive and relaxed social setting; broader opportunities to develop leadership skills and to work collaboratively with peers; greater curricular emphasis on issues that relate to women's lives; more opportunities for student-run organizations to address women's concerns; a wider availability of female role models and mentors, especially in traditionally male-dominated disciplines like math and science; and close relationships between faculty members and students. Many of those features are not unique to women's colleges. Yet they are understandably more accessible within an institutional culture that places women and their intellectual and emotional development at the center of all policies, programs, and activities.
Randolph-Macon Woman's College will undoubtedly not be the last to succumb to the realities of the marketplace. More women's colleges will close their doors. Others will stay afloat by adding part-time and graduate programs, or by reaching out to nontraditional-age, disadvantaged, or immigrant women - strategies that are becoming increasingly common among women's colleges struggling to survive.
Only institutions like Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr, with their large endowments and distinguished academic reputations, are certain to survive for the foreseeable future. Yet it would be a shame if someday only a handful of women's colleges remained, given that some female students continue to find them the most welcoming option in the diversity of higher education.
Rosemary Salomone is a professor of law at St. John's University School of Law and author of Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling (Yale University Press, 2003).
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 24, Page B20