About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Men's college

Encyclopedia : M : ME : MEN : Men's college

A men's college is a college or university whose students are exclusively men. With the advent of co-education within almost all public and private universities in the United States, men's colleges have become scarce, although dozens of women's colleges still exist. Men's colleges are still commonplace in the Middle East, among other places.

Contents

History

In the United States, co-education did not become the standard until the 1960s and 1970s. Prior to that, the majority of private colleges and universities were gender-segregated. Among public universities, the University of Iowa was the first men's college to begin admitting women, doing so in 1855.

By the 1960s, and particularly in 1969, many single-sex institutions began to admit women. Some of the most prestigious men's colleges began to admit women during this time period, including Georgetown University, Princeton University, and Yale University. Franklin & Marshall College, which was originally chartered as the co-educational "Franklin College," also returned to co-education in 1969, after having become a men's college due to financial issues.

Many colleges that are currently co-educational have only become so within the past few decades. Columbia College of Columbia University did not admit women until 1983, three years after Haverford College admitted their first female students. By that point, most men's colleges had already disappeared from the American academic landscape.

The most notable men's college to begin admitting women in recent years is the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), which had been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1990 for discrimination. The Department of Justice argued that since VMI was a public institution, it could not prevent women from attending based on gender alone. Due to United States v. Virginia, VMI admitted its first female cadets in 1997. Notably, public women's colleges such as Douglass College at Rutgers University are exempt from such discrimination laws.

Although most non-religious men's colleges now face the question of co-education, some new men's colleges have been proposed. One of the most frequently discussed is the Southern Military Institute, which has been proposed as a new men-only alternative to the now co-educational VMI and The Citadel, the latter of which admitted its first female students in 1993.

American men's colleges

As of 2005, there are four institutions in the United States that are most commonly recognized as men's colleges. These are:

Some universities separate their undergraduate students into individual, gender-conscious colleges. Yeshiva University oversees the all-male Yeshiva College as well as the Stern College for Women. The University of Richmond has Richmond College for men and Westhampton College for women. At Tulane University, Tulane College is for men and H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College is for women, though they will likely be merging as one college as of the 2006-2007 academic year due to the financial devastation to the university after Hurricane Katrina. In each of these cases, the individual colleges have their own residence systems, advisors, staff, student governments, and traditions separate from their male or female counterpart.

In a slightly different arrangement, Hobart College is all-male and is the "coordinate," or partner, college of William Smith College, a women's college. They are collectively known as Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Unlike the single-sex colleges at Yeshiva and Richmond, they are not considered to be two colleges within one larger university, but instead two independent colleges joined together in a partnership arrangement, much like the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in Minnesota and Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York.

Additionally, a number of seminaries in the United States are open only to males for theological reasons, including The Master's Seminary in Sun Valley, California and the Saint Meinrad School of Theology in St. Meinrad, Indiana.

College Board list

As of April 2006, the College Board lists 66 colleges in the United States as being officially men's colleges. These are mostly Rabbinical colleges and seminaries, with a large concentration of Rabbinical colleges being located in the New York City metropolitan area.

According to the College Board's statistics, at least 15,183 men are attending the following institutions that are not open to female enrollment, with 13 schools not reporting their enrollment figures:

The largest of these schools include Morehouse (3,029 undergraduates), Beth Medrash Govoha (2,034), Saint John's University (1,842), Hampden-Sydney (1,060), and United Talmudical Seminary and Wabash College (869 each).

The smallest include the Yeshiva and Kolel Bais Medrash Elyon (17 undergraduates), the Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary (20), the Talmudical Institute of Upstate New York (21), Rabbinical College Beth Shraga (36), and Wickliffe College of Telshe (36).

The Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades is notable on this list because it is a secular college that is not commonly included on lists of men's colleges, even though it is officially classified as one and enrolls no females.

See also

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: