The panel charged with mapping a route to fiscal stability for Wilson College outlined a preliminary list of recommendations Wednesday morning at an all-campus meeting that attracted numerous concerned alumnae. The possibility that the 695-student college could decide to admit men to its traditional undergraduate program drew the most attention, and the most resistance, but the biggest surprise was a revised estimate of how many students Wilson would need to break even.
Just a month ago the target was 1,325, up from 1,000 in a 2010 strategic plan. But Barbara K. Mistick, Wilson’s president, opened the meeting by saying that as the college “drilled deeper into issues of enrollment,” it had become clear that the break-even point could be as high as 1,500.
The college, which has run deficits in three of the past four years, hopes to have its fiscal house in order by 2020, a year after it begins spending about $1-million a year to pay down a loan it took out to build a new science center that opened in 2010. Currently, Wilson is only paying interest on the debt.
Wilson, founded in 1869, is one of only 47 remaining women’s colleges. Its College for Women—the traditional undergraduate program—has 315 students this fall, down from a high of 732 in 1967. An adult-degree program and a 74-student graduate program, both open to men, supplement enrollment in the College for Women. Wilson nearly closed in 1979, but a lawsuit by alumni and students kept the college open.
The panel, called the Commission on Shaping the Future of Wilson College, includes faculty members, students, staff members, trustees, and alumni. Members have been working since last spring, when they divided themselves into five subcommittees to look at Wilson’s markets, programs, pricing, and quality of life, as well as at the experiences of other colleges that have found themselves in similarly difficult straits. The subcommittees outlined their recommendations Wednesday morning, but so far no effort has been made to combine the groups’ various suggestions and gauge how they would fit together.
The marketing subcommittee’s proposal to admit men was by far the most controversial. Michael G. Cornelius, an associate professor of English who leads the subcommittee, said no one at the college doubted the value of women-only classes. “The question is,” he said at an afternoon session devoted to the possibility of going coed, “whether we can afford the luxury of remaining a women’s college.” Admitting men, he said, would most likely raise enrollment significantly and also increase the number of women interested in attending Wilson.
Remaining ‘Women-Centered’
A number of alumnae objected, however, applauding loudly when a member of the Class of 1950 said it was “not a dirty word to be a women’s college.” Alumnae said repeatedly that they had become stronger students and better leaders because they were not in classes with men, and that if the college did admit males as traditional undergraduates, it should continue to refer to “alumnae” and insist on the college’s remaining “women-centered.”
But several current students who spoke up during the course of the day said they welcomed the perspectives of men already in their classes because of the adult-degree program and because both the sons and daughters of college employees are allowed to attend free. Students, colleges officials say, are less concerned about Wilson’s remaining a single-sex institution than about how they would preserve the college’s many traditions if it welcomed men.
The subcommittees are proposing, among many other recommendations, that the college:
- Add undergraduate health-science programs and undergraduate animal-studies programs, as well as graduate fine-arts programs that would require students to come to the campus only occasionally.
- Eliminate seven unspecified majors that attract few students.
- Consider offering more courses online.
- Accept high-school juniors and seniors into a new program that would let them earn associate degrees by the time they finish high school.
- Open a student center and improve student housing.
- Guarantee entering students that their tuition would remain unchanged for four years.
- Promise students that if they completed all their courses, the college would pay part of the amount they had borrowed to attend.
The commission is led by Leslie Durgin, a 1969 graduate who is a senior vice president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains and a former mayor of Boulder, Colo. She said the full commission would meet Thursday to begin sorting through the subcommittees’ many recommendations. Some, she said, were affordable steps the college probably should have taken already, while others were costly but possibly crucial. And some may be pie-in-the-sky proposals that would have to be set aside, at least for the time being.
The college’s trustees meet Friday, and Ms. Durgin said the commission expected to hear from them what information they’ll need to make informed decisions about the commission’s final recommendations, which are due to the board by December 1. Ms. Durgin said it was possible that the commission would need more time to provide the trustees with sufficient information.
