Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticCat
I'd say that's one reason that there are so few all male colleges, but I don't think its the main reason.
25 years ago, there were fewer than 10 all male schools in the country, and at least two of them were state military academies (VMA and The Citadel). Most all male schools, public and private, went co-ed in the 60s and 70s, and they did so not because it was that hard to persuade smart young men to go to an all male school but because society as a whole was demanding that the advantages of these schools be available to women as well as men. I'm not saying that going co-ed was a bad thing altogether, although I can wish that more of the all-male private schools had stayed that way. But the reality is that there was never the societal pressure on all-female schools to go co-ed that there was on all-male schools.
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I agree with you about the societal pressure of the 1960s and 1970s. But I'm suggesting that evidence from the mid-1970s on, men's schools have trouble attracting the same caliber students they once did. That is quite explicitly the reason W&L went co-ed and even some of the most vehement oppoents of the switch now admit that it saved the school academically, because the number of applications and the level of SAT and academic achievement in the incoming classes were dropping.
There are a few insitutions that escaped this problem: Morehouse, because of its location in Atlanta and the proximity of Spelman, and the military institutions, some (all?) of which are still predominantly male, because of their special missions.
It's VMI, not VMA.