Women's colleges work
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy WOMEN'S COLLEGES WORK YOU COULD LOOK IT UP t is graduation time at the nation's colleges and universities. But as the strains of "Pomp and Circum stance"...
...There are fewer than a hundred today...
...It is undoubtedly in recognition of these factors that a gradual return to the women's colleges is taking place...
...Tuition-hungry hitherto all-male institutions began to open their doors to women...
...There has been a sharp dip in the population of the college aged...
...and these were concentrated in the departments preparing students for traditional roles like teaching...
...Sixteen, years later, in 1989, Tidball wrote again on the subject: The women's college story is one of nurture, caring, discipline, high ex pectations, and appropriate rewards, all brought together in an environ ment that embraces the wholeness inherent in the academic, co-curric ular, and extracurricular facets of the collegiate experience...
...Educating the Majority, American Council on Education, 1989...
...What happens in a women's college is that women find themselves valued for themselves and learn that their education and preparation for mature life are very important...
...At a Jesuit institution where I spoke recently, for example, although some 56 percent of the student body was female, only about 30 percent of the faculty were...
...Individual colleges, including my own, report even more startling figures: 38 percent more applications than last year from those aspiring to be firsttime freshmen, for instance...
...As early as 1973, M. Elizabeth Tidball pointed out that women's colleges, based on a survey of Who's Who in American Women, had "an unparalleled record in graduating women who became `women achievers...
...A quarter of a century ago women's colleges went into a period of precipitate decline...
...Add to this statistical evidence the anecdotal evidence of the large numbers of influential women in journalism and executive politics like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Cokie Roberts of ABC News and National Public Radio, and Linda Wertheimer, also of NPR-all women's-college graduates...
...Surprisingly the trend has been reversed at women's colleges...
...That fact and the discouraging rise in college costs have sent even once highly selective colleges scrounging for enrollees...
...So are 20 percent of the Black Enterprise list of the most powerful black women in corporate America (see Sebrechts, Importance of Women's Colleges, SCAN, Saint Paul, Saint Catherine's Alumnae News, Spring, 1994...
...One-third of the women board members of Fortune 1000 companies did also...
...Twenty four percent of the women in Congress attended women's colleges...
...Women's colleges have developed, consciously or unconsciously on the part of their administrators and faculties, ways "Of course, if you have a fear of mathematics, that's a different story...
...Thirty percent of the Business Week list of the women who are rising stars in corporate America are women's college graduates...
...But as the strains of "Pomp and Circum stance" reverberate over the cam puses, they do not evoke emotions quite as happy as in previous years...
...And administrators, as they bid farewell to the seniors, are keeping an anxious eye on applications for the freshmen classes that will replace them...
...The rising tide of the new feminism encouraged women to enter institutions where they could supposedly compete equally with men and benefit from thealso supposedly-better preparation of men for success...
...Their full potential is not lost to society as it may be in institutions to which they have simply been added to a male population where they have few role models...
...8: 6 May 1994 Commonweal...
...Two basic questions may be asked about women's colleges in ac knowledging their unequaled record of producing high achievers: What do they do, and how do they do it...
...Their enrollment is rising...
...Jadwiga S. Sebrechts, executive director of the Women's College Coalition, says that, diminished in number as they are, now attended by only 3 percent of the women in college, "this small minority has a disproportionately large effect on society...
...What has happened...
...What they do is quite simple, but unique: women's colleges have, as their first priority, the education of women...
...for the past few years the number of applications to women's colleges has increased 14 percent...
...Subsequent research-also in the 1970s-documented that a larger number of women's college graduates received research doctorates in the arts, humanities, social sciences, or the natural sciences and were admitted to medical schools...
...There were 214 women's colleges in the country in 1960...
...Overall the data in favor of women's colleges are overwhelming, but still not widely known...
...Even as the decline began, results of research became available indicating that graduation from a women's college was a better predictor of success for women than any other variable...
...In most institutions those applicants have declined in number...
...Members of the class of '94 are all too aware that, whether they go on into graduate or professional schools or immediately into the employment market, their chances in that market are very uncertain...
...the incoming class will be smaller than the outgoing was at the time of matriculation...
...They are the only institution in all of higher education that do...
...She cites interesting statistics: Women's college graduates are more than twice as likely to receive doctoral degrees in any field...
Vol. 121 • May 1994 • No. 9
