I’m not going to name any specific colleges in order to avoid this thread turning into a “Criticizing-specific-colleges-as-opposed-to-debating-the-thread-topic,” but there are some women’s-only colleges that offer federal financial aid to their students.
I thought colleges that receive federal financial aid cannot discriminate on the basis of gender. A women’s-only college, by definition, discriminates on the basis of gender. Is there a loophole that allows them to receive federal financial aid, or is this a case of “Shouldn’t be this way, but everyone lets it be?”
I believe that Title IX allows single-sex private colleges, but I’m not sure what exactly to look up in order to provide a citation. There have been some cases about this, see United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996) and Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, 458 US 718 (1982) re: state schools; it looks like those aren’t allowed. I don’t know if private schools have been challenged.
IIRC there are still 3 freestanding men’s college left (excluding religious seminaries) in the US, and they get federal funding on the same basis as any other private liberal arts college.
I attended Texas Woman’s University twenty years ago, and it’s the largest public university for women in the US. However, in the small print, they always state that it’s primarily for women. At the time, men were accepted into all graduate programs and into undergraduate nursing, occupation therapy, physical therapy, and IIRC deaf education programs. Those programs were chosen because they were the highest ranked programs in the university. The nursing program at TWU was nationally recognized. The year I graduated, the Regents of the university decided to accept men into all the programs.
Twenty years later, demographic statistics haven’t changed much. Men make up about 11% of the population, a little more than when I was there.
Title IX specifically applies to “institutions of vocational education, professional education, and graduate higher education, and to public institutions of undergraduate higher education”. Note that this language specifically excludes private, undergraduate-only programs from consideration.
That’s true. I graduated from one, Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. As noted, it’s a private four-year institution. It certainly offers Federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants and the like, presumably because Title IX doesn’t apply to it for the reasons MikeS noted. I would assume this is true of women’s four-year colleges as well.
To save everybody some Googling, the other two men’s colleges are Hampden-Sydney in Virginia, and Morehouse in Atlanta.
Its like William Woods was before it went coed. Yes, it was a womens college, but men could and sometimes did take classes there. The dorms, dining areas, and sports were all women. There was a mens college nearby and sometimes they would take each others classes.
Really I dont think their are very many womens-only colleges anymore. The market for them just isnt there.
I thought of Wabash as soon as I saw the thread title – I grew up in Montgomery County, and my grandmother lived about a block outside of the Wabash campus. In high school, we weren’t too happy about some of our hottest female classmates dating Wabash guys, but I guess they didn’t have much choice!
It’s pretty crazy to me how rare all-men’s institutions are these days, given how normal it seemed growing up.
Some of the women’s colleges are very closely associated with men’s colleges. E. g., Columbia and Barnard. When I was an instructor at Columbia I was assigned to teach a Barnard class. It was all women. Somewhat less closely associated is Bryn Mawr with Haverford. They were allowed to freely cross-register for each other’s courses. I am not sure whether the fact that Haverford now admits women has affected this. On the other hand, Radcliffe has effectively disappeared into Harvard. When I was started out at Penn in 1954, there was a separate College for Women and some of the multi-section courses, like beginning calculus had separate sections for men and women. But this had completely disappeared by the time I graduated and became a TA teaching calculus. While CW still had a formal existence (and had slightly different requirements from the men’s college), it was a shell that quietly disappeared sometime in the 70s.
That was the same in Fulton Missouri which had all womens Williams Woods and all mens Westminster. Neither college was very large - about 1200 students each. so students took some classes at either campus. Both are coed now.
Quite apart from the law, the reason all-women’s institutions continue to exist is that there are almost no men clamoring to get INTO such institutions.
When women fight to get into an all-male club or an all-male college, they’re rarely doing so because of the qualities of the club or the school. They do so because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that membership brngs certain rewards that aren’t available anywhere else. They believe certain elite schools and clubs give members a chance to rub elbows with bigwigs, to make valuable connections that could further their business careers, to do some networking, to meet and socialize with important people who could help them out later.
A young female lawyer or exec may look at an all-male club and think, “THAT is an important outlet of the Old Boy Network. If my male colleagues are admitted, they can wine and dine clients there. If I can’t do the same, I’m at a big disadvantage.” But are there any all-female clubs that offer similar benefits? Nah, not really. NO young male exec looks at all-female clubs and worries that he’s missing out on anything important.
Similarly, IF most of the leading businesses and law firms in the hypothetical state of West Dakota were run by graduates of all-male Macho State University, you’d EXPECT young women in West Dakota to start breaking down the doors to get into that university. But are there any all-female colleges that give their alumnae a similar edge? Nah, not really.
Meaning… there aren’t NEARLY as many males eager to get into all-female institutions. UNTIL such time as all-female insttitutions offer major benefits and perks, men just won’t bother trying to get in, and the status quo will remain.
Women who try to break into all-male schools will usually succeed. Men MIGHT succeed if they tried really hard to get into all-female schools, but they lack the incentive to do so.
While this may be true as a general rule, there have been cases where a man has sued for admissions to a women’s college. See, for example, Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, in which Joe Hogan, a male nurse, sued for admission to a nursing program at MUW. This case established that for sex-based discrimination at public institutions, the onus was on the government to prove that the gender discrimination served a compelling purpose.
Since I’m pretty familiar with MUW as an institution, I’d like to note that this is a special case that really proves astorian’s larger point, since 1) MUW has a notably prestigious and competitive nursing program; and 2) alumni of the nursing program do in fact have a fairly powerful “old girls’ network” – which is not likely to be the case in most traditionally male-dominated professions, but is sometimes true for female-dominated ones. There’s a reason why men were clamoring to get into the nursing school and not the business school, in other words, and it does have to do with perceived benefits and desirability.
If discrimination laws with respect to Federal funding don’t apply to gender, is there anything that would allow a private school to, at least in theory, discriminate on some basis other than gender and still receive Federal funding? E.g. a brony-only school, a school officially restricted to persons of German ancestry (documented pedigree or DNA test results required for admission), a school that doesn’t accept anyone over 30, a University of Cartman for People Other Than Gingers, Jews, Hippies, and People Who Don’t Respect His Authoritah, or a Fox News School of Journalism that accepts only Teabaggers?
Whether or not such a university would be economically viable is out of scope.
How about the religious schools? Does being Catholic directly help you get into Notre Dame in the sense of giving you extra points toward admission or something?
It likely did in the past. But currently, Notre Dame uses the common application, and adds on a 3 essay supplement to it. Of the 3 essays, you have to choose 2 of 4 (rather mundane subjects) to answer, and then everyone answers “Why Notre Dame?” Certainly there is room in the last one to expound upon how important a Catholic education is to you. However, it has been my experience (alum, plus 10 years of volunteering for our local alumni club at college fairs) that the large Catholic population at ND is a result of self-selection bias, rather than the other way around. Talking with our Admissions Office reps confirms that (the rates of Catholics in the admitted pile is about the same as the rates of Catholics in the entire application pool).