It is often assumed by the adversaries of coeducation that independent colleges for women may be trusted to introduce a course of study modified especially for women, but the experience, both of coeducational colleges that have devised women’s courses and of women’s colleges, demonstrates conclusively that women themselves refuse to regard as satisfactory any modification whatsoever of the usual academic course. At the opening of Vassar college itself it is clear that the trustees and faculty made an honest attempt to discover and introduce certain modifications in the system of intellectual training then in operation in the best colleges for men. They planned from the start to give much more time to accomplishments—music, drawing and painting—than was given in men’s colleges, and the example of Vassar in this respect was followed ten years later by Wellesley and Smith. These accomplishments have gradually fallen out of the course of women’s colleges; neither Vassar nor Wellesley allows time spent in them to be counted toward the bachelor’s degree. Smith alone of the colleges of group I still permits nearly one-sixth of the whole college course to be devoted to them. Bryn Mawr, which opened ten years later than Smith or Wellesley, from the beginning found it possible to exclude them from its course. In like manner Vassar, Smith and Wellesley in the beginning found it necessary to admit special students—students, that is to say, interested in special subjects, but without sufficient general training to be able to matriculate as college students; but their admission has been recognized as disadvantageous, and has gradually been restricted. In 1870 special students, as distinguished from preparatory students, formed 19.6 per cent of the whole number of the students of Vassar; in 1899 they formed only 3.9 per cent, and only 3.3 per cent of the whole number of Wellesley students. Smith since 1891 has declined to admit them at all, and Bryn Mawr never admitted them.[25] Again, Wellesley and Vassar in the beginning organized preparatory departments with pupils living in the same halls as the college students and taught in great part by the same teachers. The presence of these pupils tended to turn the colleges into boarding schools, and the steady and rapid development of Vassar as a true college began only after the closing of its preparatory department in 1888; until this time the number of students in the college proper had been almost stationary; Wellesley closed its preparatory department in 1880; Smith never organized one; Bryn Mawr never organized one; Mt. Holyoke, the Woman’s college of Baltimore, and Wells college have all closed their preparatory departments within the last seven years.[26]