Separate by Degree by Leslie Miller-Bernal

The reasons for Trinity’s acceptance of women were a mutually beneficial decision for both the college and the students the dean of faculty, Robert Fuller, proposed said reasons to President Lockwood, to explain how Trinity would benefit from accepting women. Waiting over 100 years to co-educate after Oberlin College, Trinity College officially became a mixed-sex college in 1969.

In coeducational institutions, the gender demographics affect campus climate outside of the classroom, as well as inside of it it is important to investigate how coeducation of women affected the gender demographics of student majors, by potentially further developing female-dominated majors, or bridging the gap to male-dominated fields.

Coeducation, while it plays a large part in how men and women were, and are currently, educated, also affects in what ways the students are educated. This banner of controversy that Miller-Bernal goes on to describe is one of the many reasons why single-sex colleges merged to become coeducational institutions, to avoid some negative connotations that might have been associated with their schools, as well as to attract more potential applicants who might have been more interested in the school had it been coeducational. In her book, Separate by Degree: Women’s Students’ Experiences in Single-Sex and Coeducational Colleges, Leslie Miller-Bernal states, “women’s colleges have always lived under a banner of controversy…as they developed and became an important part of American higher education, stereotypes have often been used to describe them…but they have also been damaging in their ability to obscure the educational value of women’s colleges and to confuse, if not terrify, potential applicants” (Miller-Bernal p. However there were some universities that stayed single-sex, such as the Seven Sister schools, which praised all-female education, and found that their students would thrive separated from men. Following Oberlin, other colleges across the United States began to open their doors to female undergraduates. Having officially accepted women to their undergraduate program in 1837, Oberlin College was the first university postsecondary institution to become coeducational.

Separate by Degree by Leslie Miller-Bernal