Successful women: how to educate the world.

Perhaps no institutions better illustrate the interweaving of change, continuity, and renewed vision in the Catholic world than do the Neylan institutions - the colleges and universities founded by women religious. There are 118 such colleges in this country. (Originally they were all women's colleges. Today only 25 still are.) Since 1978, they have been united through the Neylan Commission, an alliance named for two sisters, Edith and Genevieve Neylan, who, enthusiastic about their own education, established a trust to support the work of the colleges thus founded. In Educating the Majority (Macmillan, 1989), Patricia Roberts Harris, former secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, called Catholic women's colleges - the Neylan colleges - "a luminous minority." What made them so outstanding?

First, as women's colleges originally, they shared the strengths of women's colleges in general: Their graduates achieved success at a higher ratio than women graduates of coeducational institutions, more often pursued fields like mathematics and the sciences, and were more likely to be self-confident and have higher aspirations. What distinguished them from other women's colleges and burnished their achievements, however, was that most of them educated a different segment of the population and were, as sociologist David Riesman has pointed out, successful in lifting the students who came to them from one educational place to another, thus promoting their students' social mobility. And because they dealt with students who might well have to earn a living, they differed from other colleges in emphasizing occupational and professional preparation as well as an education in the liberal arts.

Their founders, determined that their students would equal those in secular institutions, led the way for Catholic colleges in breaking out of cultural isolation. They sought accreditation in state, regional, and national agencies, and were represented in national education associations and in professional associations. And they saw to it that their students were eligible for the most prestigious of honor societies. Now that the overwhelming majority of Neylan colleges are coeducational, it is not clear that their women graduates still benefit in the way they formerly did. But it is very likely.

Educating the Majority found that "more and more male students are attending women's colleges as part-time students in special courses, as exchange students in consortia, or as graduate students. In addition to seeing women in administration and faculty leadership positions, they see women students as campus leaders and experience the more healthy give-and-take in classes where women are on an equal basis with men." In the same book, Notre Dame sociologist Robert Hassenger found that women at these colleges were generally more intellectual and more socially concerned than were men in Catholic colleges. Is this still true of the now coeducational colleges? The Neylan member presidents want to find out.

At the Neylan Commission meeting in Washington last month, members studied preliminary findings on a Neylan Outreach Activities/Projects Inventory - a measure of whether social concerns were still high on Neylan students' agendas. (Before the 1989 report, the Higher Education Research Association had estimated that Neylan graduates were 30 percent more socially concerned and oriented toward service than graduates of other institutions.) At first blush, the findings of the inventory indicate that Neylan students were still highly interested in serving the community. And since the activities and projects were those sponsored by the institutions rather than individuals, it would seem that the Neylan colleges inspired the students. There were 1,170 activities or projects that involved 37,201 people on Neylan campuses. They included helping in nursing homes, working on literacy programs, staffing food drives, building with Habitat for Humanity, and similar efforts to provide housing for the homeless and the poor - all evidence of a response to gospel values.

There is little doubt that these institutions, founded by religious women, are outstanding in producing graduates interested in participating in projects serving the community, but also in choosing service careers. In addition, as Taking Women Seriously (Oryx, 1999) states, in the reorganization of colleges that has taken place since the 1960s and in Catholic colleges especially, there has been an enhancement of the mission to serve the underserved, seen as students of color from the inner city, single mothers, "returning" women (those over twenty-two), and working women who cannot attend during regular collegiate hours. But the mission statements of these colleges promise much more - an education flowing from the charisma of their founders and striving to form "the moral and ethical conscience of the global community" (emphasis mine).

As a stated goal, that takes one's breath away. Even more astonishing is the decision taken at the Neylan Conference in 1986 that called for the establishment of a collaborative effort to serve women's educational needs around the world. As Brigid Driscoll, R.S.H.M., and Alice Gallin, O.S.U., reported: "A critical link was made between the education of women and the potential to solve the overwhelming, worldwide problems of famine, disease, and conflict."

It may seem an impossible dream but we can't discount the way dreams were made realities by women religious in the past. At the beginning of this century, the system of education for women (and later for women and men), today represented by the Neylan institutions, would have seemed unlikely, too.