<p>What should women consider when choosing among coed colleges?</p>
<p>What would make a coed college a particularly suitable choice for women?</p>
<p>Well…it really depends on that women’s priorities…</p>
<p>Does she want to date alot? Look for a coed with a very good gender ratio(ie. Not Vassar)</p>
<p>Does she want the best education available-then simply look for the best school she could get into.</p>
<p>I’m personally an advocate of women’s colleges, but think coed are great for most girls</p>
<p>As a mom who went to a coed college and who has 2 daughters, I don’t know if any of us have ever thought about choices regarding a coed school any differently than we did for the college search in general. We came up with a check list in general for what our D was looking for in a school (in conjunction with the parental req’s) and none of them had anything to do with coed situations or male/female ratios.</p>
<p>BTW, my oldest refused to look at all girl schools, even though there were a few that I thought might be a good fit for her.</p>
<p>Not sure exactly where you are coming from with the question, because there are a number of levels.</p>
<p>On the most basic level, the student should decide what she is comfortable with in terms of housing and then make sure the college offers it. All girls floor? Mixed gender hall, but separate mens and womens bathrooms. Mixed gender hall and coed bathrooms? Not all schools offer all options and honor requests. If you care, research it.</p>
<p>On a more fundamental level, I believe there is a difference between an historically male school that started accepting women a few years ago and a college that has been coed from day one. I think there is a huge difference between a college that has a couple token women on the board versus one that is split 50/50. If you care, research it.</p>
<p>Strange question. Do you mean what would women look for that might not matter to a guy? Gosh can’t be that different than it was 3 decades ago…after the academics, profs, major and the normal college stuff etc. I looked for cute guys, women that seemed interesting and I’d want to be friends with. I looked for a campus that felt safe in a town area that I felt safe in. I looked for easy transportation to and from home and to and from a major metro area. I looked for clubs and activities that I thought I might want to join and a college that would let me continue performing with my instrument even though I wasn’t going to be a music major and ballet classes so I could keep dancing and the college I picked had a grand piano in the common area to play…that almost sealed the deal. Oh and did I mention cute guys?</p>
<p>Wouldn’t limiting herself to women’s colleges make it very difficult (or very easy I suppose)? I mean how many are there really? By far most colleges are co-ed and most of the best ones are. There are some great women’s colleges, but it just seems much too limiting in terms of choices for programs and locations, plus I don’t think it makes much of a difference anymore. Its a co-ed world.</p>
<p>When DD was a h.s. junior trying to determine if she preferred coed or all-women’s, she visited a sophomore friend at Smith College who gave her a guideline that helped her. </p>
<p>She said, “If your close circle of friends in h.s. included boys and girls, you will miss boys on an all-female college campus. If you hung with all-girls throughout h.s. you won’t miss boys.”</p>
<p>To me it seems that schools such as Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley have had the option for years to change into coeducational institutions but don’t. Evidently it’s a choice that works for many women and the alumni stand by keeping that option open for future generations. </p>
<p>I hear the career/alumni networking following college is extremely strong for graduates of all-women colleges.</p>
<p>ETA: Some coed colleges work hard to stay at 50% male/female, while others are 65-70% female. I think that’s important to know about each college. You might readily make the case that women at Smith and Mt.Holyoke, in all-women’s institutions within a Five-College Consortium that includes also 3 coed schools (Amherst, Hampshire and UMass) has better opportunities for women to study with, befriend or date men than someone attending a coed Liberal Arts College in a very isolated location with 65 or 70% women. So look at percentages of each gender; academic/social relationships with other colleges, geographic isolation, and size of institution as significant variations on Co-ed colleges.</p>
<p>Paying3tuitions: thanks for sharing that quote about who your close friends in HS were. My oldest Ds close friends are split about 60% boys/40% girls; she refused to look at girls schools and it disappointed me at first because there were a few that seemed to be a good fit. Guess she knew what she was talking about :)</p>
<p>Now my youngest has a really wide circle of friends but I can’t think of one boy that she hangs out with after school. So I guess that when her time comes, that women’s colleges may be a viable option for her.</p>
<p>I think payingthreetuition’s D’s friend was right, if you’re used to a social or academic environment predominated by the opposite sex, a women’s college is a big transition. But lots of young women who attend women’s colleges were girls with lots of guy friends in high school and they’re very happy and do very well. Naturally, the environment is different for them and new, but different can be good. Change can be good. </p>
<p>I think this is a somewhat odd question to ask, going back to the OP. Even for women’s colleges, I think if you can’t find merit in the college outside of the gender thing, if it’s not a good fit for you for other reasons, then you’re not going to do well there. Women should not attend women’s colleges just because it’s a single-sex environment, but also because the school is a good fit for them, offers them opportunities they might not otherwise be able to have, attracts them academically, is a place where they feel comfortable, etc etc etc etc. The same is true for coed schools. </p>
<p>But as a Smith grad, let me say: Women’s colleges are awesome.</p>
<p>Certainly many things are important to women in choosing a coed college. My question is: among those things, which ones (if any) would they be considering that men would not also and equally be considering?</p>
<p>If you are specifically looking at co-ed schools these are things to consider:</p>
<ol>
<li>Are there single sex dorms and do I want to be in one? Are they guaranteed if I want to be in one? Would I be happy if I was forced to be in one? If there are single sex dorms do men spend the night and use the bathrooms? Do I care?</li>
<li>Are there single sex floors or dorms and would I want to be in one? Are they guaranteed if you want to be in one? Could you be forced to be in one if you didn’t want to be in one?</li>
<li>Are bathrooms shared or within suites? Do I care if I have to share with a man?</li>
<li>Is there a culture of hook-ups? Or boyfriend/girlfriends that are practically married? Do people date? </li>
<li>How dressed up do you have to be to fit into prevailing culture? Do you put on pearls to go to footballs games? (They did at Washington and Lee when my parents lived there, but not sure if they still do.)</li>
<li>Are there sororities on campus? What are they like? Would you want to be part of them? Would you feel out of things if you weren’t? Again at W&L something like 80% of women belong to a sorority.</li>
</ol>
<p>There aren’t right or wrong answers to these questions. I think boys should be considering these questions too.</p>
<p>But see, there’s nothing that women /all/ think about that men don’t. Different kinds of girls will care about different things. One-size-fits-all generalizations are irritating.</p>
<p>I didn’t go to an all-girls college, but I did go to an all-girls high school. There are many wonderful aspects to that - which were fine for high school.</p>
<p>However, I had no interest in going to an all-girl college. High school was fine - all leadership positions were held by girls (obviously…LOL). Those opporutunities were awesome, because (at the time) boys held a lot of the leadership roles in co-ed schools. Girls weren’t afraid of “looking smart” in class at my all girls school. </p>
<p>But, in college, those issues didn’t exist.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Fine, I can rephrase my question probabilistically:</p>
<p>*Which things at coed colleges (if any) would women be likely to be considering that men would not also and equally be considering? *</p>
<p>Maybe it turns out that there really are no such things, that men and women would or should consider all things at coed colleges equally.</p>
<p>My D felt the opposite of Paying3’s. She had one woman friend and all guy friends besides her. She didn’t want to go through life without women friends. She has a much easier time with guys. She chose a women’s college on purpose just to make life long women friends. And she did.</p>
<p>She has emerged from college with about four or five really strong female friends. I know she really treasures them.</p>
<p>She also has a boyfriend and kept up many relationships with guys.</p>
<p>Barnard was perfect for her.</p>
<p>She did have co-ed schools on her list. I don’t think any of them were chosen in any way differently from my son. Her top schools were Brown, Bard and Sarah Lawrence. She wanted to be in the east coast corridor, she wanted a level of rigor, she is a bit of a hippie … actually you can just see her value system when you add Barnard, her ultimate destination to the list.</p>
<p>For me as a woman I find the esthetics of Vassar more appealing than those of Williams a former women’s college vs. a former men’s college, now both co-ed, but S’s GF chose Williams over Vassar (as did S.) </p>
<p>I guess their divine rose parlor wasn’t important to her.</p>
<p>
I don’t know how many women are “likely” to consider some things that men do not consider, but maybe they should…</p>
<p>There are some academic areas that are historically “overrun” by men. Many colleges today make a special effort to make women more comfortable going into the fields of math, science and engineering. Philosophy, on the other hands, is still an “old boys’ club” at many colleges. </p>
<p>Women going into “traditionally male” majors may want to see how many women do these departments have on faculty, how many women graduate with these majors every year, etc.</p>
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<p>mythmom,
the same is true for my daughter, except she had no female friends at HS at all, and chose to go to COED college, as being surrounded by only women was way too scary for her…</p>
<p>I think there is a fundamental difference in relationships between women in HS and in college…</p>
<p>There are so few single-sex colleges now that a young woman who does not want to attend a co-ed college is severely restricting her choices. For some women applicants, this is OK: there are women’s colleges that offer what she wants. But for others, the limitation is unacceptable. </p>
<p>My daughter thought all women’s colleges were unacceptable because she didn’t want to meet men only in artificial social situations. She wanted to meet them naturally – in class, in extracurricular activities, in the dorms, in the dining hall. Also, she preferred a large university environment to a small college environment, and there are no single-sex large universities. So she only applied to co-ed colleges.</p>
<p>Thirtysomething years ago, I did the same thing, for similar reasons. To me, as to my daughter, a single-sex environment seemed unnatural.</p>
<p>For most Americans, there is nothing special about co-ed colleges. They have become the norm. And women in college aren’t a special group – they’re the majority, nationally. However, for members of some cultural and religious groups, co-ed environments may pose problems. If this is the case, the question is whether the college can accommodate the student’s specific cultural or religious needs, not her needs as a woman.</p>
<p>I’m surprised that no one mentioned safety as more of a concern for women than men at a co-ed college, or any college for that matter. Not that men aren’t victims of crime on campuses, but in my opinion, women on campus have more safety concerns. As the mother of a college-bound daughter, we have looked at the safety record of the schools that she applied to, and took ones off her list if there were any concerns about how safe the campus was or what kind of neighborhood the school is located in.</p>
<p>I don’t really see why that would be less of an issue for men. There was an armed robbery on my campus this week, a male student was beaten in the head with a baseball bat for hesitating to hand over his backpack. My idiot boyfriend is convinced that because he is a guy nobody is going to bother him, and that could not be further from the truth. In the past year, in this city and in the neighboring ones (including where his school is), actually most of the crime reports I have read have all been robberies and assaults by men against other men. While women at times may seem more vulnerable to crime, an idiot with a baseball bat is equally dangerous to everybody. I am more concerned about him being in an unsafe environment than I am about myself, because (perhaps as a woman) I know better than to think I am untouchable and young men make that mistake all the time, in my observation even more often than young women do.</p>