Why women’s colleges are still relevant

Kateri Benjamin, a 2009 graduate of Barnard College, hadn’t planned to attend an all-women’s school, but the high-caliber academics, sophisticated student body and opportunity to live in New York beckoned. Still, her friends didn’t make her choice easy. “They said, ‘Are you a feminist? All feminists are lesbians. You’re going to come back a lesbian,’” laughs the 22-year-old New Jersey native.

“I looked up ‘feminist’ in the dictionary and it said that feminists believe women are equal to men,” says Benjamin, confident and poised in a fitted red sweater and black pencil skirt. “That’s me.” Benjamin, who’s already landed a full-time job in public relations, is thrilled with her college choice. “It’s the best decision I’ve made,” she says.

Decades after Smith College and Mt. Holyoke became symbols of radical feminism, women’s colleges are still thought of as academic convents. Susan Lennon of the Women’s College Coalition (WCC), which counts 53 public and private, independent and church-related colleges in its membership, acknowledges these schools have image work to do.

“We still face the idea that there aren’t any boys” in an all-women’s college experience, says Lennon. “But it’s a different world now. Most of these colleges are part of a consortium.” Students at Bryn Mawr College outside of Philadelphia, for example, can take classes at nearby co-ed Swarthmore College, Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania. Wellesley College students can cross-register at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or even earn a double degree: a B.A. from Wellesley and an S.B. degree from MIT over the course of five years.

Women’s colleges tend to attract a very competitive and driven student base, and that’s the group you are surrounding yourself with during these critical years,” says Valerie Saunders, a 40-year-old Smith College grad who owns a successful photo agency in Jersey City, N.J. “That’s where you are developing your work ethic and your first goals as an adult.”

A recent study funded by the WCC bears this out. The report, released in March 2008, surveyed 1,000 women’s-college alumnae and their female peers from liberal arts colleges or public flagships. In several key areas, women’s colleges performed higher, including in the proportion of entrepreneurs produced and leadership training received. Additionally, far more graduates of women’s colleges than of co-ed liberal arts colleges (66% vs. 55%) said the reputation of their school played a major role in getting into graduate school or obtaining their first job.

So should your daughter or niece apply to Smith? Not necessarily. Even alumnae caution that the single-sex school experience is not for everyone.” It attracts a certain type of woman,” says Benjamin. “Not as much of a partier. Not so much the frat/sorority crowd, more intellectual.

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