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Gender Issues/Single-sex Institutions
With two-thirds of all undergraduate degrees and 60 percent of master's degrees now going to women, many believe it's only a matter of time before that trend influences the upper echelons of the STEM fields. Already, statistics from the Council of Graduate Schools show that women, overall, earned slightly more than half of the doctorates handed out in all disciplines in the United States in 2009 and 2010.
Maria Klawe's transformation of this small liberal arts college has sent ripples from Seattle to Silicon Valley, where startups and technology giants are desperate to find talented developers, even as the unemployment rate hovers above 9 percent. In the U.S., women hold less than 25 percent of jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math -- or STEM -- fields, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. On her watch, the percentage of female computer science majors at Mudd, one of California's prestigious Claremont colleges, has more than tripled, to 42 percent.
College enrollments and degree completion will continue to boom for the rest of this decade, but who enrolls (and finishes) will vary widely and, without a major change, far too few Americans will complete college to achieve the ambitious goals that President Obama and others have set for the country.
Deep Springs College, a small, unusual institution that is among the last all-male colleges in the United States, has decided to admit women.
Brinita Ricks, a single mother from Washington, picked Wilson because of an unusual moms-with-kids program the college started in the 1990s. She and her 5-year-old son live in a two-room-with-bath suite in the program's dorm, which is home to about 20 mothers and their children.
What is it about the small, little-known Trinity Washington University outside of D.C.? Many of the country's most powerful women went there, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Pat McGuire, president (and alumna) of Trinity Washington University told Here & Now‘s Robin Young, that her college re-invented itself by returning to its radical mission, a college "for women who could not have access to higher education."
Bryn Mawr College is in the top 10 among all colleges and universities in terms of the percentage of female graduates pursuing doctorates in the STEM fields. When we ask our STEM majors what it is about Bryn Mawr that encourages them to pursue these male-dominated fields we consistently hear two things - being exposed to role models among our faculty, alumnae, and their fellow students, and the positive effect of being in a classroom in which they aren't the lone woman.
At a time when women surpass men by record numbers in college enrollment and completion, they also have a more positive view than men about the value higher education provides, according to a nationwide Pew Research Center survey. Also, while a majority of Americans believe that a college education is necessary in order to get ahead in life these days, the public is somewhat more inclined to see this credential as a necessity for a woman than for a man. Some 77% of respondents say this about women, while just 68% say it about men.
Title IX - requiring schools at all levels across the country to offer girls and women equal access to athletics - has produced a wealth of progress since it was enacted almost four decades ago. But scores of schools still fail to abide by the law. For those schools, there is little chance their shortcomings will ever be investigated, and even if they are, few will be meaningfully punished. According to a review by The New York Times, the Office for Civil Rights allows cases of suspected discrimination to drag on for years, long after the affected athletes have graduated.
Peace College has announced that once it admits men, some courses will remain single sex. The official announcement said that "the new coeducational institution will continue to be student-centered. One way is ... to offer select single-gender courses in targeted disciplines where research shows that women and men learn differently and that each benefit from a single-gender classroom." Several legal experts on gender discrimination in higher education said that there are significant legal questions about the idea.
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