Julia Zelinger didn’t plan to attend a women’s college. As a high school senior, the suburban Cleveland resident visited several colleges across the country. After visiting Columbia University, Zelinger went across the street to Barnard College, a private women’s liberal arts college. She was instantly smitten.
“They have an incredible women’s studies program and amazing professors,” says Zelinger. “Once I got there, I saw that there was a ton of incredible benefits for women and lots of opportunities for women’s leadership.”
Now a junior studying sociology, Zelinger says she’s glad she chose Barnard.
“The classes tend to be a lot smaller,” says Zelinger, founder of “FBomb,” a blog and online community dedicated to women’s rights that is targeted at teenage girls. “The professors are incredibly engaged. They really do care about education and invest in their students. They make an effort to get everyone involved in the classroom.”
Zelinger adds she loves that co-eds at women’s colleges don’t have to compete with men, particularly for high-profile leadership opportunities such as student government.
But women like Zelinger are an exception.
Women make up the majority of the student body on most college campuses, with numbers as high as 70 percent on some campuses. Even so, women’s colleges are a hard sell. They educate only about 2 percent of American women. In the last 50 years, the number of women’s colleges has fallen by about 75 percent, from approximately 200 colleges to about 50 — a number that continues to drop. It’s a startling transformation. For more than 150 years, women’s colleges have stood at the vanguard of the fight for women’s equality and have educated some of the nation’s most distinguished female leaders.
