by cmsellers » Sun Jun 07, 2015 5:51 pm
This article immediately made me think of several things. The first is that it's always sad when old colleges close. I remember when Antioch College closed in 2008, though they've since re-opened. The author is right that it's a "specialist college in general" issue. (Antioch is a liberal arts college, but it also has a rather unorthodox academic setup, or at least did before closing.)
The second thing is that the closure is likely not to go through. Like I said, Antioch reopened, and Sweet Briar has a larger endowment than Antioch. As a woman's college Sweet Briar also has the option of admitting men to remain open. I'm not saying they should admit men, if they can afford not to. However going coeducational doesn't mean you double your potential pool of applicants; the effect is likely far greater. When I was applying to colleges, I remember two statistics which stuck out. The first was that the majority of young women will not apply to a college that is more than 60% female. The second was that only three percent of American women will even consider applying to a single-sex college.
I wish I'd bookmarked those articles back in '06, so I can check their veracity now, but both sound plausible to me based on the large numbers of international students at Smith and Mt. Holyoke (both among the top tier of women's colleges) and my own intuitions.
However if a private college is financially sustainable and either the trustees or majority of the student body wish to keep the school a women's only school, it has every right to do so, and I don't really see it as problematic. Yes, it's sex discrimination, and yes the "male classmates intimidate women from learning" argument is anachronistic. However I've grown up near Smith College, which I believe may be the best liberal arts college in the country, as well as Mt. Holyoke. I've also grown up near Amherst College, which is usually considered one of the best liberal arts schools in the country.
Amherst has single-digit acceptance rates, and those numbers are even smaller if you're from the Northeast, if you're not a legacy student, and if you're white (excepting legacy students) or Asian. I haven't met a single non-Asian Amherst student who was not an athlete in high school. I've also found that most Amherst students who were not legacy admissions (and many of those who were) tend to be the kind of student who pads their resume with activities they actually take very little part in, and makes all their decisions based on how things will look to future employers and/or law and business schools. I was continually amazed at how intellectually incurious the majority of Amehrst students were. They got good grades and have the social savvy to go far in life, but Amherst students were usually vapid, condescending, and generally obnoxious. Amherst, to me, represents everything that is wrong with Ivy League-style education in a nutshell.
By contrast Smith College, because far fewer women are willing to apply, is a school that any local girl who gets decent grades and has a handful extracurriculars can get into, and can usually get into with a significant scholarship. Smith also has programs for non-traditional students, meaning that there are a large number of single mothers, mothers from lower-socioeconomic strata, and poor immigrants (as opposed to the rich international students Amherst recruits from Asia and the Caribbean). Though I met interesting students with an interest in learning at all the Five Colleges (exactly two of them in the case of Amherst), Smith seemed to be composed of only such students. I never met a Smith student who wasn't interesting to talk to.
And yes, I would have loved to have been eligible to apply to Smith College. However if Smith were coeducational, it would likely have an acceptance rate similar to Amherst, and the student body might well have become another collection of stuffy, supercilious, robotic, resume-padding athletes, rather than the vibrant and interesting community it is today.
Mount Holyoke isn't quite as impressive as Smith. A substantial portion of its student body seemed to be spoiled rich girls, and I never met any international students from poor backgrounds, foreign students who were in the US when they were admitted, mothers, or older women. However there were still a lot of Mt. Holyoke students who were interesting to talk to, and I think that the intellectual curiosity of the student body was similar to that Hampshire (a school which actively strives, often unsuccessfully, to admit interesting and intellectually curious students). Mt. Holyoke also offers full scholarships to a handful of local girls each year, and partial scholarships to many others. Considering that Mt. Holyoke is already displaying some Amherst-like tendencies, there's no question in my mind that a co-educational Mt. Holyoke would be at least as unpleasant at Amherst where the student body is concerned.
Any rate, this is my way of saying: yes it's a shame that Sweet Briar announced its closing and I hope that they don't see coeducation as a fate worse than closing, but women's only colleges in general are awesome, not because men hold female classmates back, but because the knee-jerk aversion of most women to a single-sex learning environment means that they present an awesome educational opportunity for more open-minded young women.