Women's Colleges and Coed Colleges: Is There a Difference for Women?.
The nation and the higher education community are now engaged in vigorous discussions about quality in education and the assessment of quality. The issues are fundamental ones for the research community: what is the impact of different kinds of experiences and how can we assess that impact? In the 1960s and 1970s many women's colleges became coeducational, because it was believed that there were not enough women students who would be sufficiently convinced of the benefits of a women's college in the face of the many coeducational opportunities that opened to them during this period. In a now classic book Astin decried the apparent disregard of research evidence which suggested that women who attended women's colleges were: (1) more satisfied with most aspects of the experience (with the exception of social life); (2) persisted more; and (3) were more likely to attend graduate school [1]. At that time, the decisions of institutions were based largely on admissions marketing conditions rather than on the belief that the institutions were not of value. The evidence concerning women's colleges has been quite suggestive, though certainly not definitive. Tidball's classic study [16] demonstrated that graduates of women's colleges are much more likely to be represented in Who's Who than graduates of other institutions. Tidball pointed out that this pattern of success was as true for graduates of less selective schools as it was for the Seven Sisters. Moreover,