Since students of any race or ethnicity can enroll in HBCUs, it is not like they (or HWCUs for that matter) are currently suspect on grounds of being explicitly racially exclusive.
However, student self-selection in enrollment can make HBCUs and their corresponding HWCUs “bubbles” to some extent.
Note that, of the Seven Sisters, one is now coed, and another merged into another college quite a while ago (the combined college is coed). So only five of them would be under discussion about “whether the historical underpinnings for the existence of [them] continue to support the need for these institutions, and whether there are other, more contemporary, justifications, or not”, assuming you mean as all-women colleges. Of course, there are other all-women colleges, as well as a few all-men colleges, in the US.
In theory, a group of women, or a group of people sharing a skin color, represent a wide array of personalities, opinions, outlooks on life (philosophy, religion, politics, economics), upbringings (rural, urban, rich, poor), and therefore the intellectual experience is mutually enriching as a result of diversity along those axes. The same could be said about other “bubbles” like conservative/Christian (from the other thread) except by definition you’ve removed the axis of “outlooks on life” as applies to religion and politics, and possibly economics and philosophy as well. You’ve potentially added another axis, though (diversity of gender and race). So if a “bubble” school is any restriction along any axis, then I’d say most colleges are self-selecting bubbles of some sort, even the (so-called) free speech schools and (so-called) woke schools. The least self-selection occurs at the largest and most accessible schools, so I guess those are least “bubbly” but they often maintain the predominant culture of the home state (or the predominant culture of educated people).
I guess I view any college as a “bubble” that has a singular religion at its core and mandates courses that only discuss that religion and/or does not allow professors of other religions to work there.
And “woke” where I live is typically used to refer to those who are not homophobic and aren’t offended by pronouns. I do want the focus to be on academics. But I also think that people should not be hateful to gay or trans people.
A college education is about exploration and discovery. Confining oneself to a “bubble” is among the worst things that can happen, educationally. In this social media age, we already self-select/self-confine to our own social “bubbles”, consciously or unconsciously, creating great, and sometimes extreme, divisions in our society today, politically, socioeconomically, racially, and geographically. Do we really need another “bubble”?
Would a highly selective college be a “bubble” in that the students there are unrepresentative in their high school academic strength when compared to all college students? (Maybe that “bubbleness” is necessary if the college has a high minimum level of rigor that all students must handle, but there could be trade-offs involved.)
I was referring to social “bubbles” in an educational institution, and I don’t consider academic grouping by students’ abilities in various academic subjects to be “bubbles”. Students can still interact with others with different viewpoints and from different backgrounds.
I think everyone takes their bubble with them. They may jump from one bubble to another bubble, but people tend to like their bubble. How you feel about other bubbles and how others feel bout your bubble is often where conflict occurs.
Students can interact with others, but how often do they? Nobody in any bubble (university or adult life) is required to stay in a bubble. We all have the ability to interact with people with differences from us (whether academic, economic, racial, religious, political, etc). But how many of us do interact consistently and deeply with others who are outside of our bubble?
@ucbalumnus raises a good point about the nature of a highly selective/rejective university being a bubble with respect to the academic level present. Think about the thread where @fiftyfifty1 was mentioning how many aspects of the college admissions process that people on CC take as well-known facts about the process that are completely opaque and unknown to so many? But that can easily be expanded out to other aspects of life. Taking a look at our country, it has divided itself into bubbles where one side has lots of knowledge and experience on certain topics and very little on others, while other bubbles have lots of knowledge and experience on the other topics, but much less on the former. (Hope that’s clear…I’m trying to stay within forum rules.) But because people have been in their bubbles, they don’t understand what they don’t know and have a hard time understanding the perspective of the other side.
Frankly, I think there’s a lot of benefit to having as big a bubble (in the attempt to not have a bubble…though I think bubbles are kind of inevitable) is best. Getting perspectives from a wide array of different socioeconomic, religious, geographic, political, educational, vocational, racial, sexual, etc. backgrounds is ideal, in my not so humble opinion.
Students in a residential college, unlike many others, are almost compelled to interact with other students. They generally don’t have the option to live completely in their own socioeconomic or political “bubbles”. It’s different academically, of course, when they take courses with their academic peers.
I was the poster in another thread who made the comment about the 7 sisters and HBCUs. CC is a great place that challenges lazy thinking on a daily basis, but it can, at times, be a bit tedious insofar as it itself is a bubble where slang, generalizations and colloquial expression goes under the knife for exploratory surgery when it’s used to support a conclusion with which someone else doesn’t agree. Don’t get me wrong: I do it too and I’m here for it, so it’s all good. But let’s get a little context here.
That thread in which my comment was made was about a parent looking for a place to fit her son, for whom conservative Christian values and avoidance of “woke” faculty etc. is important. That is, IMO, looking to be surrounded by people who share your politics and general values and outlook. Someone else said “bubble” and all hell broke loose. Then came the comparison to the all-women and HBCUs.
My point in response to that was to suggest that those colleges exist with the profiles they have for historical reasons that go well beyond contemporary politics and that it is at least a slightly inapposite comparison. Neither Wellesley nor Howard represent a monolithic view on politics or religion, which I suspect the original poster knows. I don’t think the primary aim at Wellesley is to avoid men. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but it doesn’t seem “bubbly” to me on that basis.
I think a better argument for that poster would have been to just say that a lot of kids apply to the schools to which they apply because they know them to be liberal and progressive and that’s what they want. And that’s probably true for a great many applicants.
But I am enjoying the surgical parsing of the word “bubble”. I learn something here every time I log on.
I tend to think the application of the term “bubble” was not apt when first applied in this conversation in the other thread. More apt would be to say “echo chamber.”
“Bubble” implies to me a protected area where people can feel protected. In the case of all-female schools and HBCUs, both were founded to ensure students had a place to attain a college education without being constantly denigrated and possibly physically assaulted, among other transgressions. Further, both were created largely in part because the majority majority majority (white Christian men) did not allow women and African-Americans to attend colleges.
In present days, it seems silly to me to compare religious and/or politically conservative colleges to HBCUs and all-female universities. Christianity remains by far the majority religion in America and white people (who make up 90%+ of the student bodies) remain the largest demographic in America. Those demographics do not require a protective bubble.
Families/students seeking this type of school aren’t looking for a bubble. They are looking for an echo chamber, where their viewpoints (on religion and sociopolitical issues) will not be challenged and will be constantly echoed. If that’s what the parent/student wants, that’s fine. But that’s not a bubble - it is an echo chamber.
This is exactly what I mean. How many students at Top X universities are having meaningful interactions with students who had a 3.0 GPA in high school? Or 2.0? Or who did a GED after dropping out of high school? Or who took 5 or 10 years off after high school before starting going to college? Or people of the same chronological age who have no intention or desire to go on to college (admittedly, most people in any 4-year college are unlikely to have many meaningful with this group? By narrowing their pool down to students who score in the top 2% for standardized tests, have no less than a 3.85 unweighted GPA, and have superlative extracurricular and leadership activity in high school, that leaves out a whole lot of people. So yes, the university may be covered geographically, racially, religiously, etc, but there’s about 98% of the population that students in the Top X schools will have very little forced interaction with.
I really like how you spelled out what I couldn’t quite pinpoint - echo chamber is spot on for many.
My youngest son mused about it once in a way that stuck with me too. He said (gist vs exact), “So many people comment about kids going to college and changing their views. Did they ever consider that being intelligent and seeing evidence is why they shifted their beliefs? A few can be brainwashed, but when it happens over and over again across many different places and people, is it really brainwashing or seeing reality?”
To anyone who might assume he gave up his faith after attending college, nope. He’s a very strong believer - who can keep his faith and still see reality vs parroting what might be expected from someone like him stereotypically.
While the historic need for women’s colleges is no longer given, they are still justified in contemporary times. (And I would suspect similar arguments for HBCUs might apply.)
Clearly, we are still far from having reached parity as far as income levels, leadership opportunities - even pay scale and facilities for professional soccer teams when far outcompeting their male counterpart.
Given that, spending formative 4 years in an environment that does away with male bias at every level (e.g., where college presidents, deans and faculty are at minimum 50% female - and get the job done) may empower these young women to challenge the status quo in their future careers, and life in general - and pushing harder for necessary changes in society as a whole.
I wouldn’t describe it as a “bubble” at all - given that Barnards campus, facilities and classes are used/attended by co-ed university students - I would rather think of it as a “future simulation”.
And, if the “market” is any indication, parents and young women agree. Within the undergraduate schools at Columbia University, Barnard College has been showing above-average growth for very many years, often outperforming their peer schools in increased alumni commitment, application rates, etc.
Barnard’s decision and fight to maintain its organizational independence from the University, rather than allow itself to become absorbed (like Radcliffe) has proven right decades later.
PS: My own bias and perspective on this subject changed from when my daughter had applied to my great surprise. Looking back, it truly was the absolute best choice for her, and the college still being very much a necessity.
environment - I ranked the three schools listed with Furman as the one that fit best.