Interesting article in the New York Times about the decisions facing small women’s liberal arts colleges like Randolph-Macon Woman’s College about whether to start admitting men:
Decades after Ivy League institutions like Yale and Princeton opened to women, the number of women’s colleges has shrunk from about 300 in the 1960’s to fewer than 60 today. The top institutions that do not admit men — Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke and Smith — say they are doing fine. But behind them are small liberal arts colleges for women, like Randolph-Macon, increasingly struggling against financial pressures to win applicants in an era of unbounded choice. And in recent months, their numbers have been dwindling precipitously.
Just before Randolph-Macon’s vote, Regis College outside Boston announced that it would begin admitting men next September. At Rutgers University, the women’s undergraduate college, Douglass, will cease to exist as a separate degree-granting institution at the end of this academic year. This spring, Tulane University merged its H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College with the undergraduate college for men.
Wells College, on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York, was established in 1868 and began admitting men last year. And at Marymount College for women in Tarrytown, N.Y., which merged with Fordham University in 2002, next spring’s graduation will be the last, after 100 years.
One of the pictures accompanying the story is of young women protesting the Randolph-Macon decision. They have black tape over their mouths.
Presumably, this is meant to symbolize that their voices are being silenced. Ummmm, sure. Hate to break this to you, but you’re not exactly being silenced. Your school is facing up to some ugly reality, which is that single-sex colleges are largely viewed as a remnant of the past, and unless they’re the elite women’s colleges, they’re having a hell of a time attracting students.
You’re not exactly in the position that women were in when these schools were founded — shut out of higher education altogether. Women today have choices about where to go to school, and most of them are choosing to go to coeducational institutions, or to women’s colleges at the top of the heap.
But college trustees and administrators say they have little choice. Only 3.4 percent of girls graduating from high school last year who took the SAT said they would apply to women’s colleges, according to the College Board, down from 5 percent 10 years ago.
That statistic is cited over and over by presidents of women’s colleges in interviews about their future. “The market is telling us young women don’t want to come to single-sex colleges,” Ms. Worden said.
She said Randolph-Macon, founded over a century ago, had paid a hefty price for staying single sex. To attract and retain students, she said, the college awards 99 percent of them financial aid, and the typical discount is 62 percent, much of it merit based. That means that despite tuition and fees of more than $30,000, the typical student pays $13,000, Ms. Worden said. These subsidies have been a persistent drain on the $140 million endowment.
Nationally, most women who attend single-sex colleges say they chose their institutions despite the absence of men, not because of it. At Randolph-Macon, 4 in 10 students transfer to other, usually coeducational, colleges or universities.
A 40% transfer rate is insane, as is a 62 percent average discount for 99 percent of students just to fill an incoming class — only to have 40% of them leave (I won’t even mention how insane the $30K tuition is in the first place). And now 200 more students have put in for transfers to protest the decision, meaning the student body will shrink to about 500 (which makes the entire school only slightly larger than my high school class).
So, in short, there’s really no market for so many small women’s colleges. However, that doesn’t mean there’s not a market for women’s-only higher education, as demonstrated by your Mount Holyokes and Bryn Mawrs. And the women who don’t transfer out after freshman year tend to be very engaged and highly motivated.
Susan E. Lennon, director of the nonprofit Women’s College Coalition, said the opening of once all-male bastions in the Ivy League and elsewhere and Title IX legislation that ramped up women’s sports programs have made it tougher for women’s colleges to survive. Yet national surveys show that women who attend these institutions are more engaged and successful academically than those in mixed environments, Ms. Lennon said.
Interestingly, though women at women’s colleges often thrive academically in the absence of men, marketers caution against trying to use that to draw students:
Mr. Strauss said women’s colleges often wanted to use this sort of research to present themselves as places where women could thrive without having to compete with men. But that marketing may not work, he said, because potential applicants do not see themselves as needing protection from competition with men.
“Their sense is that the women’s college has something of the broken wing, of women who need a cloistered environment,” he said. “High-performing young women tend to see themselves as high-performing students, and not as students in need of some kind of special care.”
They do a lot better when they emphasize opportunity rather than protection from competition:
In the uproar over Randolph-Macon’s decision, Sweet Briar College and Hollins University, sister institutions to Randolph-Macon for more than a century, publicly rededicated themselves to remaining single sex.
Elisabeth Showalter Muhlenfeld, president of Sweet Briar, said that since 2004 the college had focused on raising enrollment by emphasizing hands-on experience and opportunities to study abroad. So far, enrollment has grown to just over 600 students, from 557, and Dr. Muhlenfeld said she is hopeful that it can top 700.