Women's Colleges See Shift in Racial Makeup
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CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Tucked among mansions in this affluent Boston suburb, Pine Manor College was long a finishing school, a place for well-heeled women to receive an education and for Ivy League men to find wives -- earning it the pejorative nickname "Pine Mattress." Photographs around campus show alumnae clad in white gloves, pearls and shirtwaist dresses.
"It was an acceptable place to send your daughter," said Nia Lane Chester, dean of the college.
But quietly and deliberately, this small women's college has undergone a radical change, from a place that sought daughters of privilege to one that recruits underprivileged women who might not otherwise enroll in college.
"It's a real transformation," said the college's president, Gloria Nemerowicz.
And Pine Manor is not alone. A handful of small, private women's colleges, including Alverno College in Milwaukee, the College of New Rochelle in New York and Trinity Washington University in Washington, are shifting to enrolling and graduating low-income minority students.
The change was made in the past two decades largely as a survival tactic for small colleges in dire straits. Despite that, the institutions and observers say the shift is, at its core, another take on the mission of a women's college.
"Women's colleges were founded in the mid-1800s because of access. Women couldn't go to college, by and large," said Susan E. Lennon, executive director of the Women's College Coalition. "There's still an access issue. And while women's colleges are small in number, they're doing some extraordinary and in some cases revolutionary work that I think is a great model, not just for educating women, but for educating women who have been traditionally underrepresented."
U.S. News & World Report ranked Pine Manor as the nation's most diverse liberal arts school this year. More than half of the undergraduates identify themselves as black or Hispanic, and about 13 percent as white. About 7 percent of them are international students.
First Published May 30, 2010 2:01 am
