College of St. Elizabeth, Last Women’s College in N.J., Will Go Fully Coed

The College of Saint Elizabeth, which the website NJ.com described as New Jersey’s last degree-granting institution for women, will admit men to its day classes for the first time in the fall of 2016. Male students already attend the college’s evening and weekend courses. The college would seem to be the victim of some of the same financial troubles afflicting small colleges and women’s colleges across the country — woes that, for example, led the trustees of Sweet Briar College to vote to close the Virginia institution this year. But the College of Saint Elizabeth’s president, Helen Streubert, said the main reason for the policy shift was the decline in the number of New Jersey high-school graduates, a demographic trend affecting colleges in many states of the Northeast.

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• Source: NJ.com

The school has cut more than 30 faculty positions since 2013 and enrollment declined from about 2,100 to 1,411 over the past five years. Last year, the school reported that independent grants had dropped from about $627,000 in 2008 to just $30,000.

Read more at: www.nj.com