All-women's colleges face challenges

At the beginning of this month, Sweet Briar College in central Virginia announced it would be closing next year, over a century after its founding in 1901. A small, private liberal arts women’s college, Sweet Briar is the most recent victim of the trend amongst women’s colleges that saw their numbers shrink from roughly 230, in the 1960s, to just 43 this year. The closure is the result of mounting costs, declining interest in small liberal arts schools and questions raised about the value of women’s colleges today.

Sweet Briar’s financial and enrollment troubles were two bigger obstacles to keeping the college open. College President James Jones cited an all-time low in enrollment and national market trends as crippling Sweet Briar’s financial solvency. Tuition dollars were vital to the upkeep of the college since $56 million of its otherwise considerable $84 million endowment were locked up for particular uses.

As we have written in the past, the debate about the value of liberal arts education continues as students seek more focused curricula. Additionally, small liberal arts schools are increasingly difficult for students to commit to given the rising costs associated with earning college degrees that demand compensation through employability.

But perhaps the biggest contributor to Sweet Briar’s problems is the question of what value niche all-women’s colleges offer to today’s applicants. The benefits are many and intuitive. An all-women’s school affords women the chance to be uniquely empowered by a welcoming community. This space for confidence and growth is fertile ground for the development of capable and influential women who go through an undergraduate experience largely insulated from the palpable academic and social gender bias constantly scrutinized at co-ed schools. But this separation can be a double-edged sword because graduates, particularly of geographically isolated colleges, largely fail to experience firsthand the gender inequities they may encounter later in their post-graduate careers, however well prepared they may be in theory.

Many would respond that students have the rest of their lives to engage with gender inequality and experience the consequent gender dynamics, but co-ed schools stand to offer this upfront without the diversity problems inherent to single-gender colleges. Duke’s Baldwin and WHO single-sex housing sections provide niches that balance spaces for female empowerment and development alongside a co-ed experience, emphasizing the benefits of an all-women’s school and an engagement of gender issues without the full-time insulating costs.

Unfortunately, this model of provisioning spaces for women in a co-ed university was not possible given Sweet Briar’s founding documents, but we applaud co-ed universities that prioritize ensuring this balance of spaces, signaling the lesson learned from the era of women’s schools and guaranteeing their core ideas carry forward as the landscape of higher education shifts. Yet, there might be a silver lining to find in the decline of these smaller niche universities if it indicates female applicants today feel more socially enabled to make co-ed schools their first choices compared to in 1901 and the 1960s.