Are Women's Colleges Passe'?

It is no secret that the past president of MUW was doing her best to move the W from being a women's college that admitted men to a fully-coed school.  It is also no secret that Mississippi's First Alumnae Association opposed that goal.  Because of that opposition, we were labeled as living in the past and being unwilling to move toward the only reasonable future for MUW.

Today's Washington Post had a column about women's colleges and I'm going to excerpt it below:

According to a multi-year study by Hardwick Day, alumni of women's colleges are more likely than all other graduates to serve in a leadership role within their undergraduate college or university.

What's more, while women's college graduates make up only a small minority of the college-educated population, one-third of the women board members of the Fortune 1000 companies are women's college graduates, and women's college graduates are twice as likely to earn Ph.D.s., more often going on to study the sciences and attend medical school. Of Business Week's list of rising women stars in corporate America, 30 percent are women's college graduates and of women members of Congress, 20 percent attended women's colleges. 

Colleges that have long catered to both genders are seeing the value in creating mini women's colleges internally. Just this spring, I presented a workshop to Duke University's Baldwin Scholars program, a 4-year initiative where 18 women are selected each year to be mentored, attend academic seminars, and are given the opportunity to live together as a group on campus....Many other schools have created women-centric programming, among them UCLA, Northwestern, and Babson College.

When one studies in an all female environment, there is less reliance on someone sailing in and fixing everything. Women are not waiting to be saved, believing that outer forces will help them, rather they are steering the ship, making cause and effect moves that actively sculpt their lives. Is it any wonder then that women's college graduates have developed a self reliance that serves them time and again in their careers?

If research continues to tell us that graduates of women's colleges outperform their co-educated peers in speaking their minds, achieving career goals, and attaining more happiness, tell me, where would you want your daughter to go? 

(You can read the Hardwick-Day study here)