A professor who brings a strong sense of women’s issues into the classroom can make a difference in how a young woman perceives her college education, according to a recently completed study of women who graduated from women’s colleges and coeducational institutions.
Educational satisfaction comes down to having the right faculty, according to the study by Mt. St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles, one of 82 women’s colleges in the U.S. More than 80 percent of the women in the study who graduated from women’s colleges were happy with their educations, while 60 percent of women graduates who attended coed colleges reported being satisfied with their educations.
“It used to be the goal was to find the opportunity to get women-centered classrooms, but you can do that in a coed environment with the right faculty,” says Emily Langdon, student activities director at Mt. St. Mary’s, who finalized the study from data collected in a study begun in 1985 at UCLA.
Langdon’s 1994 follow-up study of more than 500 women who graduated from 20 women’s colleges and 30 coed colleges in 1989 shows that it was the faculty who helped students in their drives to achieve by offering opportunities to participate in college activities, she says.
“If the faculty member takes a serious stance on including gender in discussion and addresses issues of women, it does not have to be a single-sex classroom,” says Langdon. “If they include writings in the syllabus with a diversity orientation and a research agenda valuing women, it is not impossible to serve women well in a coed setting.”
