The women’s colleges, so called, included in division B of these
reports, are in reality church and private enterprise schools, as a
rule of the most superficial character, without endowment, or fixed
curriculum, or any standard whatsoever of scholarship in teachers or
pupils. What money there is to spend is for the most part used to
provide teachers of music, drawing and other accomplishments, and the
school instruction proper is shamefully inadequate. Few if any of
these schools are able to teach the subjects required for entrance to
a college properly so called; the really good girls’ schools are, as a
rule, excluded from this list by their honesty in not assuming the
name of college. The U. S. education report for 1886–87 gives 152 of
these colleges in division B, the report for 1897–98, 135. When it is
said that separate colleges for women are decreasing, the statement is
based on this list of colleges in division B, which are not really
colleges at all; and when it is said that women students are not
increasing so rapidly in separate colleges for women as in
coeducational colleges, it is the students in these miscalled colleges
who are referred to; for precisely the reverse is true of students in
genuine colleges for women. It is happily true that since better
college education has been obtainable, women have been refusing to
attend the institutions included in class B. Between 1890 and 1898
women have increased only 4.9 per cent in the college departments of
such institutions, whereas, in these same eight years, they have
increased 138.4 per cent in women’s colleges in division A. The value
of statistics of women college students is often vitiated by the fact
that women studying in institutions included in division B are counted
among college students. Many of the colleges for men only and of the
coeducational colleges included in the lists of the commissioner of
education are very low in grade, but few of them are so scandalously
inefficient as the majority of the girls’ schools included in division
B. I have, therefore, in my statistics taken no account whatever of
women studying in institutions classified in division B.
Footnote 21:
See pp. 1821, 1822, 1888, 1889. Bryn Mawr had not 300 undergraduate
students in 1897–98, but the next year, 1898–99, passed the limit. I
have excluded Western reserve as it is not coeducational in its
undergraduate department, and, in 1899, had only 182 men in its men’s
college and 183 women in its women’s college.
Footnote 22:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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