Against Women's Colleges

State-sanctioned sex-based discrimination in education must end, obviously

The big points about liberalism I make here can be applied equally to men’s colleges. I won’t be focusing on them, however, because only three still exist, and none are nearly as prestigious as the best women’s colleges. Still, I believe men-only schools are also a moral and legal stain.

You can download and double-check all data used at shtein.net/data/awc.xlsx.

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1.

In the United States, there are 26 women-only colleges.

Most are small and inconsequential—but some are seriously prestigious, listed near the top of the US News & World Report liberal arts rankings, including:

• Wellesley College (#7)

• Barnard College (#14)

• Smith College (#14)

• Bryn Mawr College (#29)

These schools receive plenty of government funding too—just those four bring in around $27 million in government grants each year, minimum.¹

And yet their admissions policies are openly discriminatory against men.

How is this allowed?

Title IX is extremely explicit:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

But the courts have played extremely fast and loose interpreting this. In Mississippi Univ. for Women v. Hogan, which pitted a state-funded women’s nursing school against a qualified male applicant, the Supreme Court ruled that sex discrimination was permissible if it substantially served “important governmental objectives.”

The Court ruled that this specific nursing school’s arguments hadn’t established this standard—Justice O’Connor even wrote that their discrimination served “to perpetuate the stereotyped view of nursing as an exclusively women's job.”

But the ruling gave defenders of women’s colleges a clear goal—prove that their discrimination accomplished a clear objective of the state. They usually try to do this in one of two ways—either they argue that women’s colleges are necessary to correct for past discrimination and underrepresentation, or that they provide a special benefit to the women who attend them even now.

I think these both fail.

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2. Remedy for Underrepresentation?

It’s true that for most of American history women were systematically excluded from higher education. Most colleges were men-only well into the 1900s—but by 1970, there were only a few hold outs (and some schools, like Northwestern and WashU, went co-ed as much as a century earlier).

Still, even in 1970, only around 40% of bachelor’s degrees went to women.

Quickly, though, their representation as a share of degree earners crept upward:

Data from NCES. The trend from 1971-79 is presumed to be totally linear since the data’s missing.

Now women earn just over 60% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the US, and this is projected to continue to rise modestly.

If the imbalance in 1970 warranted affirmative action in favor of women—as the argument from past discrimination must hold to be true—then today’s imbalance must warrant affirmative action in favor of men!

Ah, but bachelor’s degrees aren’t the whole story! object the feminists. How about master’s degrees and doctorates?

Well, we have data for that too:

Same source; same linearizing in the 70s.

The trend in master’s degrees maps to that of bachelor’s degrees very closely, only it’s become even more female-dominated in recent years, reaching nearly 65% at its peak.

PhDs are more interesting—they most clearly represent women’s historical disadvantage in academia, and how that disadvantage has totally evaporated. In 1970, women accounted for less than 10% of all successful doctorates. But by 1980, they were earning 30% of American PhDs, and their share has risen steadily since then, reaching parity with men in 2006 and then quickly surpassing them.

The data very clearly indicates that women are not facing limited representation in academia anymore. I’m not really sure what could be meant by objectives like “remedying past discrimination,” then, other than punishing today’s men for the fact that the men of fifty years ago were overrepresented. The fact of the matter is that it’s never been better to be a woman in academia. At this point, women-specific interventions can only exacerbate inequalities.

Some feminists will make a case that the real issue is women’s lack of access to STEM education, where they remain somewhat underrepresented. I think the idea that this is due to structural challenges is highly suspect, but really it doesn’t matter for the sake of this discussion. Women’s colleges don’t specialize in STEM (in fact, they usually specialize in humanities fields where women are even more overrepresented) and so a successful defense of their existence would need to be made in general terms.

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3. Special Benefits?

A somewhat more plausible argument comes from the idea that a same-sex environment could help young women become more confident or develop a stronger support network which leads to substantive benefits later in their career.

Generally, points made in defense of this claim have to do with supposed structural inequalities in the US economy. Things like the persistence of the gender pay gap or prevalence of harassment and hiring discrimination against women in various fields.

I’m not gonna get into the weeds about those, because I simply don’t have to.² The only claim we need to discuss is that which says: “attending a women’s college will have a positive impact on a woman’s career.”

Proponents of this view like to trot out a series of papers by M. Elizabeth Tidball from the 70s and 80s. In “Women's Colleges and Women Achievers Revisited” (1980), for example, she determined that women-only colleges were very good at producing women who made it onto a list of accomplished people called Who’s Who in American Women. Here are her results:

(Tidball 511)

Wow! Looks like women’s colleges are many times better than coeducational ones at producing “women achievers,” and much cheaper than comparable men’s colleges.

Yeah, unfortunately, this is quite probably total nonsense.

In a 1991 article of the same name in the Journal of Higher Education, Judith L. Stoecker and Ernest T. Pascarella calmly eviscerate Tidball’s methodology:

Although Tidball's evidence is impressively consistent, it may be premature to conclude that her findings are the result of an environmental rather than a recruitment effect. Controls made for aggregate institutional factors such as student body selectivity, size, and faculty compensation may not provide for adequate control of individual student precollege traits such as academic achievement, socioeconomic origins, and educational/career aspirations, which are salient influences on individual career attainment. (Stoecker and Pascarella 395)

In other words, Tidball didn’t consider whether students who attended selective women’s colleges might just be smarter, richer, or more driven than their counterparts at co-ed universities, and so didn’t control for any of these obvious confounders.

Stoecker and Pascarella do their own analysis controlling for all these “individual student precollege traits” and find…

(Stoecker and Pascarella 403)

Bupkis.

Stoecker and Pascarella are cautious though, urging us not to take their non-result too seriously:

It would be a serious mistake, however, to conclude that the findings of this study refute all of Tidball's results. Tidball studied reasonably specific indices of women's career achievement whereas we focused more on general measures of attainment. This may account for some of the differences in our findings. (Stoecker and Pascarella 403)

A few years later, in 1995, Mikyong Kim and Rodolfo Alvarez picked up where they left off with “Women-Only Colleges: Some Unanticipated Consequences,” also published in the Journal of Higher Education.

Kim and Alvarez did find some modest positive effects of women’s colleges on self-reported academic achievement, though they caveat that part of this effect is probably just overconfidence in academic ability among women’s college students:

[W]omen-only colleges do indeed affect female students more positively than do coeducational institutions on our measure of self-reported academic ability. The beta for women-only college remains significant even after controlling for all other input variables. When peer intellectual self-esteem entered the equation, the beta for women-only colleges dropped (0.07 to 0.06), suggesting that a partial reason for the positive impact of women-only colleges is that their women students are surrounded by peers having high intellectual self-esteem. (Kim and Alvarez 651)

Though it was small, they found a positive relationship significant to p < 0.0001, which, you know, wow!

But academic achievement isn’t the whole game—getting good grades is one thing, successfully entering graduate school and the labor market is another. How did women’s colleges fare preparing their students for the rest of their lives?

First, there is no statistically significant difference between women-only colleges and coeducational institutions in preparing female students for graduate or professional school (p > 0.1 1). Second, attending women-only colleges, however, has a significant negative impact on acquisition of job-related skills (p < 0.075). Thus, the null hypothesis was not rejected. We conclude that attendance at a women-only college or a coeducational institution does not matter significantly regarding preparation for graduate or professional schools, but it does for acquisition of job-related skills. It appears that coeducational institutions are better able to provide their students job skills that are immediately usable at graduation. (Kim and Alvarez 655)

Well, that certainly chills the argument for an “important government objective” being served, doesn’t it? It seems like society has much less of a stake in whether you get good grades than whether you advance to do good research in graduate school or good work at your job.

Kim and Alvarez conclude:

public policy makers would be well advised to continue support for women-only colleges. (662)

I’m more skeptical. It seems like public policy makers ought to care less about the positive effects that Kim and Alvarez found—good grades, slightly higher self-confidence—and more about what these students can give back to society through their research and work.

At best, the evidence for this argument is extremely mixed—mixed enough that I don’t think it justifies deserting liberal egalitarian principles by creating sex-segregated federally-funded institutions.

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4.

And that brings me to the most important objection to the existence of women’s colleges: the state should not be discriminating against anyone!

There’s no equivalent carve-out in case law for racial discrimination—the standard for permissible sex-based discrimination is inexplicably put to “an intermediate level of scrutiny between rational basis review and the strict scrutiny used in cases of racial discrimination or fundamental rights” (from Mississippi Univ. for Women v. Hogan).

In what world does this make sense? Why is it a fundamental right to be treated equally under the law on account of race, but not on account of sex?

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court decided to take its responsibility to liberal non-discrimination principles seriously, and ended race-based affirmative action.

I’m not even advocating for an end to sex-based affirmative action (which is absolutely everywhere, by the way)—just a recognition that the right to non-discrimination and non-exclusion on the basis of sex is a fundamental American value.

The United States used to have a system of universities that only served black students. After the success of the Civil Rights movement, these universities were legally integrated and became known as “historically black colleges and universities” (HBCUs).

Despite their inclusive legal status, HBCUs remain, for the most part, very black. Whatever dubious benefits are said to be garnered from that can still be garnered. If you really want a homogenous student body, you can create one via cultural norms that guide individual choices, not state-backed mandates. (BYU is another great example of this.)

I’d like to see women’s colleges go the way of HBCUs. I’d like to see them do away with their explicit and illiberal prohibitions—but if they really want to try to maintain a women-first culture, great, go with God. It’s just insane for the maintenance of that culture to be backed up by a threat of state violence.

If a white person wants to go to Howard, we let them. So if a man wants to go to Wellesley, what right do we have to stand in his way?³

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Lukethoughts

(Possibly the last Lukethoughts, in the not-wildly-unlikely event that this one catches me a lot of shit with mutual friends… Enjoy Lucas while you can!)

• “Rumors. How do they start? How do they spread? Most of the time, they serve no real purpose—just entertainment at someone else’s expense. The explicit effect of a lie is usually unnecessary, often harmful, and yet, people keep them alive. For what? A quick thrill? A moment of superiority? It’s absurd when you think about it. A whisper turns into a wave, and suddenly, what was never real becomes real enough. Dumb. Just dumb.” (Ed. note: Was that kinda poetic, or is it just me? Anyway, rumors & gossip seem pretty fundamental to our humanity, so I dunno about “dumb” in general. But the way they’re done in high school? Oh yeah.)

• “How is math hard for anyone…? I’m sorry it literally is just a rulebook, can’t be THAT confusing…” (Ed. note: Math is such a strange thing… for some people, it just clicks. For others, it never does. In any case, I’ll always love and recommend to everyone “A Mathematician’s Lament.”

• “I hit a wpm of 116 on monkey type today and I am incredibly pleased with myself.” (Ed. note: Damn, good for him.)

• “I used to think Ethiopia was an element on the periodic table. I realize I was deeply mistaken.” (Ed. note: ???)

1. Wellesley, Barnard (FY 2023 is most recent available), Smith (precise amount not stated, but “$7.6 million” alluded to as a lower bound), Bryn Mawr.

This isn’t a huge amount of money by any means, but it’s still money the government has earmarked for explicitly discriminatory institutions. That sort of thing seems pretty illegal.

2. But I will very quickly say:

• The gender pay gap is probably mostly due to lifestyle and career choices (and costly family-related choices like becoming a mother) at this point.

• Sexual harassment is bad and we should obviously be doing it less. Don’t have much to say about this one.

• Gender discrimination in hiring is increasingly unheard of.

3. Ah, and you get to dodge all the trans controversies. Honestly, that might be a strong enough reason in itself.