That anecdote was written this week. From a woman who attended SBC in the 80s and then left for UVA. That’s her description, not mine, but it synchs up with what SBC’s “brand” seemed to be at that time. That brand image was reinforced by a very good friend of mine (an extremely smart gal and serious student from an old VA family) who was a grad of another VA womens college (Mary Baldwin) that I’d never heard of until I arrived in VA as a UVA student.
LF – did you ever attend university in the Commonwealth of VA? I did. But I’m not from there and so only learned about that part of the world after I arrived as a student.
One famous alumni listed by SBC? Janet Bouvier – mother of the horsey Jackie Kennedy… Who didn’t attend SBC but did often take riding lessons there.
Also, you know where the Sweet Briar name came from? That was the name of the campus acreage when it was used in its former life as a…plantation.
May not be fair or true, but that was the brand. Nothing wrong with the brand, it just didn’t sell well enough.
My daughter applied many schools and included one WC in the mix. She liked everything about the school (except single gender thing) it was never really a true front runner because in her mind there was no way she’d sign up for all girls … Until she was faced with making a real decision based on cost and educational value. She choose the WC. Womens colleges, the good ones at least, bring a lot more to table then simply single gender education. For serious students, looking past proximity to Starbucks and getting puked on a frat party, womens colleges represent a singularly unique and intellectual value. The perks of grand pianos,roaring fires and milk and cookies are nice extras, but hardly the defining aspect of the WC experience. IMO there are no shortage of girls understanding and embracing the value of top tier education. When a WC stops offering a solid education. (57% grad rate) it looses a competitive edge. This is lesson for all colleges , not just WCs.
Adjacent to each other, but not in reasonable walking distance of W.
I never met a guy from Babson, nor did I ever hear of someone dating one. There was one Babson guy who was known for studying in the W library in the evident hope of meeting girls. He was regarded as a joke.
Speaking of stereotypes. Maybe things have changed…
I think that SBC would have had to start looking to the future by transitioning to a different kind of school decades ago. But I would not underestimate how difficult it would have been to bite the bullet and go coed, as Vassar and SLC did.
“Graduation rate doesn’t measure quality of education. One way to raise grad rate is to lower standards.”
Agree that grad rate does not measure the education quality.
Graduation rate primarily measures the quality of the incoming students. Best way to get high graduation rates is to have very high admission standards.
Princeton 97%; Harvard 97%; Yale 98%; Columbia 96%; Stanford 96%; Chicago 93%; MIT 93%; Duke 94%; Penn 96%; Williams 95%; Amherst 96%; Swarthmore 93%; Wellesley 91%; Bowdoin 93%; Pomona 96%.
@momneeds2no wrote “Another way to increase grad rate is raise the quality of instruction and engagement level in the class room.”
And you have presented no—let me emphasize, no!—evidence that SBC’s faculty weren’t doing this. Please provide such evidence, or stop coming back to it.
Pretty funny as Amherst has reputation for offering a broad range of “cake walk” classes, interesting and not that much work and easy exam if an exam was even part of the class…
For the umpteenth time- the college does not get to decide how to chop up the remaining assets and who to send them to. That’s a matter of law, and if there is anything left after the required payments are made, any professional judgements as to the corpus will be made by a judge or someone from the attorney general’s office. So sure, would be great if every cafeteria worker got a million bucks and the current students each got a parting gift of 20K in merit aid for next year. But payroll taxes, unpaid premiums on employees health insurance for this quarter, any and all contractual obligations (an annual contract for landscaping? property and casualty insurance on the barns?) all come first. So you can all quit whining “I sure hope they give merit money to the girls who need to find another college”.
Next- those of you who think that a second tier, rural women’s college is a phenomenal business model in today’s higher education market need a reality check. Plain and simple. You can all wax and wane about glorious traditions, but "For serious students, looking past proximity to Starbucks and getting puked on a frat party, womens colleges represent a singularly unique and intellectual value. " is fine and good- but in a competitive marketplace, there are not enough full payer or almost full payer women to fill all the seats. And frankly that “bring your horse to college” business- retro much?
And finally- since graduation rates correlate highly with selectivity AND family income, those of you claiming that SB should have been spending more on financial aid to fill its seats need to get a grip.
There will no doubt be some consolidation in higher ed over the next few years. Whether this is good bad or indifferent I can’t claim to know or predict, but I don’t think the arms race of the last decade is sustainable across the board.
The link @northwesty gave recently from InsideHigherEd from a “SBC alum” wasn’t actually from an alumna, but from someone (as @northwesty clarified in a later post) who started at SBC, then transferred out because it didn’t appeal to her.* She may have been spot-on in all of her criticisms of the place, but I would suggest that someone who transferred out because they were unsatisfied is a reasonable source to look at, but not necessarily someone to take as an authoritative or even a 100% reliable source on the problems an institution has.
To link to a different subthread, thus decreasing SBC's graduation rate even though she ended up earning a degree.
@northwesty Of course 99.99% of the students entering those institutions stay there which certainly helps to raise the graduations rates…not that I’m taking anything away from the quality of students entering.
Because selectivity drives grad rates, USNWR actually measures schools based on actual grad rates vs. projected/estimated grad rates based on the school’s demo.
Duke has a high grad rate but merely meets expectations. Yale outperforms by 3 points. UVA is +5. Penn State is +9!! Case Western is -8 points.
SBC was -11. : (
I don’t think that is all on the profs. Case, for example, is also a big merit aid tuition discounter (albeit in the context of a much stronger school). Kids accepting big scholarship discounts may not be all that psyched to attend that school. They may be going there largely because of relative affordability.
Unpsyched kids who are not especially strong academically adds up to bad grad rate performance. But bad teaching could be in there too.
P.S. Blossom is right. The state attorney general, creditors and perhaps a bankruptcy judge will decide where the money goes.
Hope this isn’t too off topic, but I wanted to chime in on using graduation rate as a metric of whether a school is doing its job. @dfbdfb wrote a nice post (#319) about this, and I agree with a lot of what he wrote. I also have a different take on why it’s a bad idea for us or the government to focus on this metric too much.
If the government starts judging whether a college is successful by its graduation rate, then I know one thing will definitely happen. Colleges will find a way to get their graduation rates up, and it will almost certainly be by lowering standards. Eventually a college degree will be as devalued as a high school degree is currently. I’d say it’s already starting – two generations ago being a high school graduate was usually a signal that someone had gotten a pretty good education. Now, it means absolutely nothing. Today, most middle class families (correctly) believe that they must give their children a college education at all costs, and it’s straining them to the breaking point to afford it. But being a college graduate no longer means what it once did. If this keeps up, kids will have to get graduate degrees to signal that they’re smart and hard working.
We are trying to send about 65% of the population to college, and more than 1/3 don’t get any degree (even a 2 year degree). Many studies have shown that the kids who go to college but don’t get their degrees are worse off after taking into account all the time and money they’ve wasted. (Of course, there’s a huge difference between students who drop out for financial reasons and those who shouldn’t have gone to college in the first place. But those are two very different problems).
But lowering standards to give everyone degrees is a huge mistake, which will be what will happen if the government simply puts pressure on colleges to get their completion rates up. The U.S. is rich, but we’re not that rich that we can afford to waste $200,000 per kid to send them to college for 4 years to get a worthless credential.
Higher education is often a victim of well-meaning but completely wrong headed interventions. Personally, I’m convinced that a significant cause of the dramatic rise in the cost of college is the widespread availability of government guaranteed loans to “help” kids get a college degree (it’s not the only cause though). The only thing that happened is that colleges raised their tuition and pocketed the money.
We laugh at small children who believe they can repeal the laws of physics and fly. Unfortunately, adults who believe they can repeal the laws of economics get elected to public office.
Many here have commented on the remote location of SBC. I think it may be more that that. I am here in population-dense New Jersey where there are a bunch of mediocre private colleges who do a lot of deep discounting, and, of late, many are having a difficult time filling their quotas. Acceptance rates at these colleges have risen, along with falling stats of entering students, and as @xiggi noted, anyone armed with a google search can check out these details in a second. We have a couple of public liberal arts colleges in the state that are increasing in popularity, and are becoming more selective each year.
When my public regional university advertises even for a one-year position, we get many more applications than we used to. Many have track records of only multiple one-year positions at small LAC’s. Academia as a job destination is no longer what it used to be.
"Next- those of you who think that a second tier, rural women’s college is a phenomenal business model in today’s higher education market need a reality check. Plain and simple. You can all wax and wane about glorious traditions, but “For serious students, looking past proximity to Starbucks and getting puked on a frat party, womens colleges represent a singularly unique and intellectual value. " is fine and good- but in a competitive marketplace, there are not enough full payer or almost full payer women to fill all the seats.”
Which is precisely why the remaining Seven Sisters represent a “good value” from an admissions standpoint - as they have higher acceptance rates than comparable co-ed colleges. Why do you think Wellesley’s admissions rate is 28%, compared to Amherst at 14% and Williams and Swarthmore at 17%? Precisely because it’s NOT an easy sell and the applicant pool is self-selected amongst a smaller group of women.
I’m a personal fan of the idea of a women’s college – heck, my D is at one! - but unlike momneeds2no, I’m at least realistic about its niche appeal these days.
Sure, there’s a market for women’s colleges, but the market is small enough that the students can choose ones that offer everything a rural one can PLUS Starbuck’s. Why would I pick an option with only some of what I want when I can have everything?
You know how the proverbial “they” say that if you’re going to go to a law school, go to a top 14 or don’t bother?
I think the same is true of women’s colleges. Either go to the top (the current remaining Seven Sisters, Scripps, Spelman) or don’t bother. It’s just quite niche these days. I think my D’s W education has been top notch, but I look at the prospects for Wellesley compared to the prospects for her twin’s top research university and there’s no comparison.
Maybe things have changed…