Women's colleges work: you could look it up.

It is graduation time at the nation's colleges and universities. But as the strains of "Pomp and Circumstance" reverberate over the campuses, they do not evoke emotions quite as happy as in previous years. Members of the class of 94 are all too aware that, whether they go on into graduate or professional schools or immediately into the employment market, their chances in that market are very uncertain. And administrators, as they bid farewell to the seniors, are keeping an anxious eye on applications for the freshmen classes that will replace them.

In most institutions those applicants have declined in number; the incoming class will be smaller than the outgoing was at the time of matriculation. There has been a sharp dip in the population of the college aged. That fact and the discouraging rise in college costs have sent even once highly selective colleges scrounging for enrollees.

Surprisingly the trend has been reversed at women's colleges. Their enrollment is rising; for the past few years the number of applications to women's colleges has increased 14 percent. Individual colleges, including my own, report even more startling figures: 3 8 percent more applications than last year from those aspiring to be first time freshmen, for instance. What has happened?

A quarter of a century ago women's colleges went into a period of precipitate decline. Tuition-hungry hitherto all-male institutions began to open their doors to women. The rising tide of the new feminism encouraged women to enter institutions where they could supposedly compete equally with men and benefit from the--also supposedly--better preparation of men for success. (There were 214 women's colleges in the country in 1960. There are fewer than a hundred today.)

Even as the decline began, results of research became available indicating that graduation from a women's college was a better predictor of success for women than any other variable. As early as 1973, M. Elizabeth Tidball pointed out that women's colleges, based on a survey of Who's Who in American Women, had "an unparalleled record in graduating women who became |women achievers.'" Subsequent research--also in the 1970s--documented that a larger number of women's college graduates received research doctorates in the arts, humanities, social sciences, or the natural sciences and were admitted to medical schools.

Sixteen, years later, in 1989, Tidball wrote again on the subject:

The women's college story is one of

nurture, caring, discipline, high expectations,

and appropriate rewards,

all brought together in an environment

that embraces the wholeness

inherent in the academic, co-curricular,

and extracurricular facets of the

collegiate experience.

Two basic questions may be

asked about women's colleges in acknowledging

their unequaled record

of producing high achievers: What

do they do, and how do they do it?

What they do is quite simple, but

unique: women's colleges have, as

their first priority, the education of

women. They are the only institution

in all of higher education that do.

(Educating the Majority, American

Council on Education, 1989).

It is undoubtedly in recognition of these factors that a gradual return to the women's colleges is taking place. Jadwiga S. Sebrechts, executive director of the Women's College Coalition, says that, diminished in number as they are, now attended by only 3 percent of the women in college, "this small minority has a disproportionately large effect on society." She cites interesting statistics:

Women's college graduates are more than twice as likely to receive doctoral degrees in any field. Twenty-four percent of the women in Congress attended women's colleges. One-third of the women board members of Fortune 1000 companies did also. Thirty percent of the Business Week list of the women who are rising stars in corporate America are women's college graduates. So are 20 percent of the Black Enterprise list of the most powerful black women in corporate America (see Sebrechts, Importance of Women's Colleges, SCAN, Saint Paul, Saint Catherine's Alumnae News, Spring, 1994).

Add to this statistical evidence the anecdotal evidence of the large numbers of influential women in journalism and executive politics like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Cokie Roberts of ABC News and National Public Radio, and Linda Wertheimer, also of NPR--all Women's-college graduates. Overall the data in favor of women's colleges are overwhelming, but still not widely known.

What happens in a women's college is that women find themselves valued for themselves and learn that their education and preparation for mature life are very important. Their full potential is not lost to society as it may be in institutions to which they have simply been added to a male population where they have few role models. (At a Jesuit institution where I spoke recently, for example, although some 56 percent of the student body was female, only about 30 percent of the faculty were; and these were concentrated in the departments preparing students for traditional roles like teaching.)

Women's colleges have developed, consciously or unconsciously on the part of their administrators and faculties, ways of educating that recognize differences in the ways women learn. Recent research has shown that girls and women prefer cooperative learning; boys are more competitive and individualistic. Interestingly enough in coeducational institutions where it is held important that the full potential of both sexes not be lost to society, faculty are now experimenting with single-sex classes and/or increasing the number of women in certain classes so that they have peer support as they would have in institutions for women.

At Saint Stephen's and Saint Agnes's, an Episcopal school in Alexandria, Virginia, the faculty have divided all sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade math and science classes by sex. The result: the girls do as well as the boys! At the University of Maryland where women were dropping out of the engineering department at greater rates than men, although their SAT scores were higher, professor Deborah Goodings experimented by doubling the number of women in one class section. The result: a higher number of women from that section stayed in engineering. Douglas College--the women's college at Rutgers--and Penn State have established dormitories for women in math and science where they have both peer support and graduate mentors.

These efforts respond to the need expressed by Myra and David Sadker, authors of Failing at Fairness, How America's Schools Cheat Girls (Scribners), "If the cure for cancer is forming in the mind of one of our daughters, it is less likely to become a reality than if it is forming in the mind of one of our sons."

Nevertheless, these coeducational school experiments in trying to replicate the way in which women's institutions nurture women's talent, are meeting opposition from doctrinaire feminists. Creating special groups will damage women's self-esteem, the critics say, and they will be unprepared to cope when they go into the real world. It seems obvious that these predictions fly in the face of the documented achievements already made by the graduates of women's colleges in male-dominated arenas. The experimenting faculties and administrations are learning what male faculty at women's institutions have already learned: how women of achievement are nurtured.