Catholic women's colleges
McCarthy, Abigail
ABIGAIL MCCARTHY OF SEVERAL MINDS CATHOLIC WOMEN'S COLLEGES Looking at their future In 1968, there were over 190 Catholic women's colleges in the United States. Today there are 28. The decline...
...Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana, for example, has used its 1600-acre campus as a base for an earth-literacy degree...
...Trinity College in Washington, D.C., once imperiled, is now a thriving institution of 1,500 students and is listed as among the best...
...They achieve this through continuous "self-assessment...
...Their very number may have been a weakness...
...In September, scholars, college presidents, faculty, and administrators gathered at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., to consider the future role and the impact of Catholic women's colleges in this country...
...the problems of funding and development...
...Their representatives at the September conference did not wonder about survival but about how they might best continue to serve women "of all ages...
...Some of the most innovative have made creative use of their unique locations...
...As long ago as 1918, Dean Mary Mol-loy of Saint Teresa's College in Winona, Minnesota, spoke at a national meeting of the National Catholic Education Association, pleading for an end to the proliferation of small women's colleges and proposing the establishment of strong regional colleges instead...
...Among the most successful colleges is Alverno College in Milwaukee, located in a working-class area of the city...
...they have low student-to-faculty ratios...
...There has been an atmosphere of denial about the disappearances...
...Educators have also named it one of the best regional liberal arts colleges in the Midwest and West...
...When their number was highest the average student enrollment was only around 600...
...The decline would seem disastrous, were it not for the strength of the remaining few...
...and are more likely to be self-confident and entertain high aspirations...
...In addition, with the weakening of Catholic cultural ties during and after the 1960s, Catholic students tended to seek admission at prestigious secular institutions...
...The opening session, called "Finding the Future in Our History and Tradition," relied on a current Lilly Foundation project at Yale-a study of colleges founded by women religious...
...The report stressed that the surviving colleges had been innovative in dealing with change...
...First, the women's colleges sustained a tremendous blow when their supposedly brother colleges for men adopted co-education, for the most part without consultation or warning...
...Tracy Schier and Melanie Morey, scholars participating in the project, have examined the institutional histories of the colleges for insight in planning the future...
...They established graduate programs and programs for older women...
...As early as 1959,37,000 women were in these coed institutions as compared with 50,000 in the women's colleges...
...They will continue to provide educational and leadership opportunities to women of all ages and backgrounds, while at the same time remaining true to their missions as faith-centered institutions...
...Cynthia Russett, lead historian of the project, and Drs...
...News & World Report lists four of them among the very best, seven among those considered the best value, and nine among those commended for diversity...
...Like many of their secular contemporaries in the Women's College Coalition, they pioneered in continuing education, in part-time programs, and in weekend and distance-learning programs...
...are more apt to enter professional schools and pursue doctorates...
...The Lilly reviewers, however, made the point that the closing of so many women's colleges has not been adequately dealt with by either the sponsoring religious communities or the Catholic community...
...and they have an impressive female presence in administration and faculty...
...Third, the women's colleges experienced a loss of their traditional constituencies...
...Many of the graduates of the academies that had been their "feeder" schools began to choose the newly coeducational Catholic colleges...
...At Alverno students do not receive grades...
...Second, during the 1960s the colleges' sponsoring communities abruptly changed mission, often choosing to return to the community's roots-serving the poor and helpless-and abandoning higher education...
...To graduate they must prove they have achieved competence in eight "abilities": communication, analysis, problem solving, valuing, social interaction, taking responsibility for the global environment, effective citizenship, and aesthetic response...
...Between 1918 and 1968,190 four-year and junior Catholic women's colleges were established...
...and the resolution of the conflict posed between the papal letter on education, Ex corde ecclesiae, and the norms and history of American higher education...
...Instead of competing against one another, today the women's colleges are joining in seeking solutions to their common issues: the relationship to their sponsoring religious congregations...
...The strengths of these colleges at their numerical height, it was pointed out, are also among the strengths of those that remain today: They serve an underserved population...
...They recruited minority and foreign students, to the distress of some of their alumnae...
...The future of the colleges that remain ultimately depends on a recognition of what happened in all of its various elements...
...These colleges constituted the largest group in higher education consistently led by women...
...The surviving women's colleges turned, as they had when founded, to new constituencies, new populations...
...What happened...
...In addition, the great and unexpected exodus from the convent in the 1960s and 1970s drained the colleges of their sister faculties...
...It has also compensated for its comparatively isolated location by its external degree programs, including, of all things, a model program for air-traffic controllers...
...Whatever their problems, these colleges still share the strength of women's colleges in general-strengths uncovered almost too late by researchers like M. Elizabeth Tidball of George Washington University in the 1970s: Their graduates achieve success at a higher ratio than women graduates of co-educational institutions...
...Because of the unfortunate competition among communities of women religious, her proposal was ignored...
...Consider the facts...
...Catholic women's colleges are as important today as when they were first founded a century ago," said Trinity College President Patricia A. McGuire...
...the articulation of their Catholic identity and their commitment to women...
...In one city, for instance, where two Catholic men's institutions went co-educational, four women's colleges and junior colleges disappeared, and a fifth was driven almost to extinction...
...News & World Report calls it a college "on education's leading edge" and "one of the three most innovative schools in the U.S...
...As an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education put it in 1989, the vanguard of a national movement in higher education is to be found in "a small Roman Catholic women's college...
...The conference was titled "Catholic Women's Colleges: Models for the New Century...
...Thereafter, the decline was steady...
...As Harvard sociologist David Riesman said in the 1960s, their sister leaders had been among education's most adventurous, and the colleges themselves were phenomenally successful in lifting their students from one educational plane to another...
...But Patricia McGuire tells with rueful humor of lunching with alumnae who would speak proudly of their daughters at schools like Brown and Yale and then ask her why Trinity had changed so much...
...The annual rating of colleges in U.S...
Vol. 124 • November 1997 • No. 20
