The higher education of women in America is taking place before our eyes on a vast scale and in a variety of ways. Every phase of this great experiment, if experiment we choose to call it, may be studied almost simultaneously. Women are taking advantage of all the various kinds of education offered them in great and ever-increasing numbers, and the period of thirty years, or thereabouts, that has elapsed since the beginning of the movement is sufficient to authorize us in drawing certain definite conclusions. The higher education of women naturally divides itself into college education designed primarily to train the mental faculties by means of a liberal education, and only secondarily, to equip the student for self-support, and professional or special education, directed primarily toward one of the money-making occupations. COLLEGE EDUCATION Women’s college education is carried on in three different classes of institutions: coeducational colleges, independent women’s colleges and women’s colleges connected more or less closely with some one of the colleges for men. =1. Coeducation=—Coeducation is the prevailing system of college education in the United States for both men and women. In the western states and territories it is almost the only system of education, and it is rapidly becoming the prevailing system in the south, where the influence of the state universities is predominant. On the other hand, in the New England and middle states the great majority of the youth of both sexes are still receiving a separate college education. Coeducation was introduced into colleges in the west as a logical consequence of the so-called American system of free elementary and secondary schools. During the great school revival of 1830–45 and the ensuing years until the outbreak of the civil war in 1861, free elementary and secondary schools were established throughout New England and the middle states and such western states as existed in those days. It was a fortunate circumstance for girls that the country was at that time sparsely settled; in most neighborhoods it was so difficult to establish and secure pupils for even one grammar school and one high school that girls were admitted from the first to both[1]. In the reorganization of lower and higher education that took place between 1865 and 1870 this same system, bringing with it the complete coeducation of the sexes, was introduced throughout the south both for whites and negroes, and was extended to every part of the west. In no part of the country, except in a few large eastern cities, was any distinction made in elementary or secondary education between boys and girls[2]. The second fortunate and in like manner almost accidental factor in the education of American women was the occurrence of the civil war at the formative period of the public schools, with the result of placing the elementary and secondary