Brinita Ricks, a Wilson College senior, is in many ways exactly the kind of student that women’s liberal-arts colleges have always said they exist to serve. She’s majoring in math and computing—disciplines that men have traditionally dominated—and she’s president of the math club at Wilson, where all the student leaders are women. She hopes to go on and earn a graduate degree in math, maybe even a Ph.D.
But she’s also a single mother from Washington who picked Wilson because of an unusual moms-with-kids program the college started in the 1990s. She and her 5-year-old son live in a two-room-with-bath suite in the program’s dorm, which is home to about 20 mothers and their children. The kids eat in Wilson’s dining hall and attend either local schools or a day-care program right in their dorm.
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‘Title IX ... Damn Near Killed the Women’s Colleges’
Like many women’s colleges, Wilson bolsters enrollment—and revenue—with programs that would have been unthinkable just a generation back. Besides the Women With Children program, there’s an evening and weekend undergraduate program open to both men and women. It attracted more students last year, 442, than the traditional day program, which enrolled 317. And some of the college’s longtime offerings have evolved to keep up with the times. Along with equestrian studies, for instance, students can now study veterinary-medicine technology and equine-facilitated therapeutics, in which horses become patients’ partners in therapy.
Still, these are trying times for Wilson and many other women’s colleges. Wilson, with an endowment of about $50-million, has a big science complex that opened in 2009, but it also has one empty dorm. The library’s steam-heating system is so balky that the building is only used for storing books—the library staff has moved to a temporary reading room in a spacious former coffee shop.
In 1960 there were about 300 women’s colleges in the United States, but they now number only about 45—the count depends on whose criteria you use. About a third are Roman Catholic. And although a handful—Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Scripps, Smith, and Wellesley—can count themselves among the nation’s richest and most selective liberal-arts institutions, most women’s colleges are small and tuition-dependent. Like Wilson, which would like to see enrollment grow from last year’s 759 to 1,000, they suffer from the same admissions, tuition-discounting, and deferred-maintenance challenges facing other small colleges. It’s hard to know whether their difficulties stem from their being single-sex institutions rather than from just being small.
One option, of course, is to admit men, Women’s colleges that have gone coed in the past 10 years include Chestnut Hill, Harcum (a two-year institution outside Philadelphia), Hood, Immaculata, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, and Wells. This summer Peace College surprised its students and alumnae by changing its name to William Peace University and announcing that it would begin enrolling men after more than 150 years as a women’s college. The chairman of the Board of Trustees, Todd A. Robinson, said Peace had “an operating model that could not be sustained economically without significant modification,” and he cited an oft-mention statistic: In surveys, only 2 percent of high-school girls say they would consider attending a women’s college. Some alumnae and students are protesting the change.
‘Passion to Learn’
A number of women’s colleges, though, have found mixes of traditional and nontraditional programs that let them diversify their revenue streams while preserving their single-sex undergraduate offerings. Among the most successful are Alverno College, in Milwaukee; Chatham University, in Pittsburgh; Simmons College, in Boston; and Trinity University, in Washington.
Patricia A. McGuire, Trinity’s president, took office in 1989, when the full-time undergraduate enrollment had dropped to 280. The college also had about 550 weekend-college and graduate students, whose tuition was essential to keeping the lights on, Ms. McGuire remembers. “Those were healthier revenue streams, but nobody was paying any attention to them, because they weren’t considered to be the main mission.”
Early on, she told the trustees that “if what we want to do is have 1,000 full-time, traditional, residential undergraduates, mostly Catholic, then we have to go coed.” If the trustees wanted to stick with educating women as the institution’s mission, though, there were “thousands of women on our doorstep": Trinity, instead of competing with Georgetown and Catholic Universities for well-off white Catholic girls, could look for students in the city’s large, and largely underserved, black and Hispanic communities. “This region didn’t need another midlevel coeducational institution,” she says.
The strategy has paid off, despite the misgivings of some alumnae and faculty members who complained that Trinity was abandoning its Catholic identity and its commitment to high academic standards. This semester the institution has enrolled 1,045 undergraduates in its traditional undergraduate program—out of a total of 2,631 students—and is generating a revenue surplus that will let it move ahead with a $55-million plan to replace its antiquated science facilities, which date to the 1940s, and add a pair of new elevators to its sprawling, four-story main building.
Trinity’s students today include many who arrive unable to read a paragraph critically or do college-level math, Ms. McGuire says. “But they have this passion to learn, and they want to change their lives. They talk about ‘how I want my life to be different than the life my mother had.’”
Trinity, she says, has responded with a set of liberal-arts requirements far more rigorous than it had when Ms. McGuire was a student there, in the 1970s. “We realized that the traditional stairstep curriculum was exactly what these students need today. They can’t be choosing between Steinbeck and Henry James, because they wouldn’t have the skill set to do that.”
Ms. McGuire now spends less time persuading students that single-sex education is “normal,” because “we don’t get that pushback from the populations who have been historically excluded from higher education,” she says. “They’ve had plenty of men in their lives. They still have plenty of men in their lives.”
Meanwhile, the graduate and adult-education programs remain important elements of Trinity’s diversified-revenue strategy. “Graduate education is a big moneymaker, because it’s much less infrastructure-intensive,” Ms. McGuire says, noting that 90 percent of Trinity’s services are consumed by its full-time undergraduates. “That’s who’s here all the time. Maintaining that infrastructure is very, very expensive.”
In graduate programs, she adds, “You can adjunct a lot of the coursework, and it’s a pretty lucrative piece of the business. And students want graduate degrees because that’s part of getting ahead at work.”
Changing Minds
Susan E. Lennon, president of the Women’s College Coalition, says many of the organization’s member institutions “are looking more and more like Trinity—they’re offering very comprehensive programming, and they’re looking at who the face of higher education is now.”
She adds that she tires of explaining that the point of women’s colleges isn’t to exclude men but to focus on the education and success of women. “It’s about helping young women think about their future selves in ways that might go against what their peers and the culture is telling them,” she says, noting that women are still underrepresented in the sciences, in business, and in government.
Ms. Lennon is among many women’s-college advocates who question the assertion that only 2 percent of high-school girls will consider women’s colleges. Elizabeth Kiss, president of Agnes Scott College, in Decatur, Ga., says some 17-year-olds who don’t think they’re interested in women’s colleges change their minds after reading the admissions materials.
“I see our market as well beyond the students who would initially say they were interested,” Ms. Kiss says. “Last year we had the largest first-year class in the college’s history. The year before we had the fifth-largest.”
Mary Ann K. Naso, Wilson’s vice president for enrollment, doesn’t make a big deal in admissions materials about the college’s being a women’s institution. Instead she concentrates on getting prospective students to visit the campus and sit in on a couple of classes, so they can see how the absence of men alters the dynamic of discussions.
Still, she says, Wilson and other women’s institutions have to contend with a stereotype that’s not discussed much in public: that women’s colleges cater to lesbians. The dean of students, Ms. Naso says, responds with a disarming observation: ‘Some of our students like women, some of our students like men, and some don’t like anyone at all.’”
What all students like, says Barbara K. Mistick, Wilson’s new president, are career possibilities. “Parents and students value a liberal-arts education, but they want to leave with a practical skill.” Wilson, she says, needs to keep an eye on job-market trends, particularly in health care, and to be “much more nimble in responding to market factors.”
Even some women’s colleges that have stuck close to their liberal-arts roots are exploring alternatives. Carol Ann Mooney, president of Saint Mary’s College, in Notre Dame, Ind., says it is looking at offering small graduate programs. She is, she says, “fairly optimistic” about the future of women’s colleges. “I’m troubled by the visions of doom that I sometimes hear from people. I think they’re exaggerated.”
Ms. Mooney says that her college’s students are its best sales force, and that Saint Mary’s competes for freshmen with its neighbor across the street, the University of Notre Dame, as well as with Boston College and Purdue University—but not, for the most part, with other women’s colleges. Many women’s colleges say their top competitors are nearby public universities; few compete with other institutions in the Women’s College Coalition.
Ms. Ricks, the mother of the 5-year-old, says she enrolled because Wilson offered a program she was interested in, not because it was a single-sex institution. The same is true for Leslie Hoover, a junior accounting major who grew up on a farm in Lancaster County. During two visits, she enjoyed meeting with professors in Wilson’s business department, and she liked how the Victorian and Collegiate Gothic buildings face a spacious green. “That it was a women’s college just came along with the package,” she says.
She has since found that attending a women’s college has benefits she didn’t anticipate, says Ms. Hoover, who is an officer in the student government as well as captain of the dressage team. Wilson’s focus on women, along with its small size, means there is “so much support for you to go ahead and try whatever you want to try,”
