Coeducation

Coeducation is a term used to describe the mixed schooling of male and female students in the same institution. Whereas the vast majority of public elementary, middle, and high schools are coeducational, and most colleges and universities in the United States are at this time coeducational, with both males and females enrolled, this was not the case throughout U.S. history. As the landscape of this particular educational reform is related mostly to the realm of higher education, this entry focuses on that context.

Women were systematically excluded from an array of educational opportunities and institutions in the United States up until the mid- to late 20th century. Early feminists insisted that equal education meant simultaneous, mixed-sex educational experiences and worked to allow women to receive college degrees and eventually study in the same classes and universities as their male counterparts. In the context of higher education, many women's [Page 175]colleges opened in the late 19th century as an answer to women's exclusion from prestigious colleges and universities. Whereas several of these have merged with previously single-sex, male-only colleges—such as the case of Radcliffe and Harvard University—many of the women's colleges, like Smith and Mount Holyoke, have remained singlesex, female-only environments. Oberlin College in Ohio is the longest continually operational coeducational institution of higher education in the United States, having been open for both male and female students since 1833. The last state institution to become coeducational was Virginia Military Institute, in 1997. Many colleges and universities adopted coeducational enrollment and admissions policies out of economic necessity; others bowed to the public moral pressure to cease exclusionary practices.

Coeducation was, and continues to be, a bumpy road and not an easy or quick fix for larger social and cultural structures of gender inequality. Women were admitted to previously male-only institutions, but the attitudes of the male students and the male faculty remained, in some cases, problematic. Women received an education, but it was not without difficulty and in the end also without equal recognition or application of their efforts in the employment markets. Similarly, writings among second-wave feminists and some educational researchers suggest that women are actually at a disadvantage in the coeducational environment, and that both women and girls perform better and achieve more in single-sex, all-female environments. In sum, work remains to be done before the fruits of coeducational practices can be realized. Rosalind Rosenberg suggests, despite women's success within coeducation, they remain secondary figures within it. That subordination stems from the heritage of women's restricted right of entry to coeducation as well as from the inadequate nature of what access can accomplish by itself. During most of the past century, enrollment of females in higher education was limited—officially, as at Stanford University, or by social pressure. Only in the 1980s did women's presence at the university level become equivalent to that of men.

At the end of the 20th century, women began to outnumber men in attendance at coeducational colleges and universities as indicated in 2007 by the National Center for Educational Statistics. Nonetheless, it is possible that a closer examination may reveal that despite overall trends in general enrollment, men still significantly outnumber women in mathematics, sciences, and engineering fields, and that structure of sexist practices may have contributed to female attrition in these fields or female exclusion from their prerequisite areas of study in the K–12 arena.

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