Women, Higher Education of

Historical Perspectives

Higher education in the United States dates to the founding of Harvard College in 1636; women entered postsecondary education two centuries later through the establishment of academies and seminaries for women in the 1820s and 1830s. There is some debate about which institution should be counted as the first women's college, with arguments for Mount Holyoke (founded as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837, becoming Mount Holyoke College in 1893) and for Wesleyan College (chartered Georgia Female College in 1836, opened in 1839). By 1880, there were 155 women's colleges, a number that peaked at 214 in 1960 and has declined since as women's colleges have merged with men's and coeducational institutions or made strategic decisions to admit men. In 2006, there were fewer than 75 women's colleges, educating less than 1 percent of college-going women. Most participate in the Women's College Coalition (http://www.womenscolleges.org).

Coeducation—the practice of educating male and female students at the same institution—has a more clear-cut history, beginning when Oberlin College admitted women to its collegiate department in 1837. Coeducation at public colleges and universities happened later in the nineteenth century, beginning with the University of Iowa, which was coeducational from its 1855 inception. There was significant resistance to coeducation at several leading public institutions, including the University of Michigan.

The Civil War resulted in a dearth of available college-age men, which in turn led a number of institutions to admit female students, a trend that continued after the war was over. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 provided funding for public institutions and did not make any requirements for or against women's education. The normal schools, also public, made a substantive contribution to the higher education of women, enrolling coeducational classes from their start. Public, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were often coeducational from their start, and private Fisk University was founded in 1866 to educate male and female students.

Historically, women of color have had less access to higher education than have White women. The private women's colleges admitted very few known African American students, and legal racial segregation kept many public and private institutions closed to non-White women until the Supreme Court's decision on Brown v. Board of Education was enforced. African American and Latina students currently attend college at lower rates than do their White and Asian American peers. American Indian women are more likely than American Indian men to go on to higher education, but they remain less likely than women from any other racial group to attend college. As a group, Asian American women are as likely as White women to attend college, but within the Asian American community, differences in college attendance rates are apparent by ethnicity and generation in the United States (e.g., a third-generation Korean American is more likely to attend college than a first-generation Hmong woman).

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