Note 20 — Front matter

The women’s colleges, so called, included in division B of these reports, are in reality church and private enterprise schools, as a rule of the most superficial character, without endowment, or fixed curriculum, or any standard whatsoever of scholarship in teachers or pupils. What money there is to spend is for the most part used to provide teachers of music, drawing and other accomplishments, and the school instruction proper is shamefully inadequate. Few if any of these schools are able to teach the subjects required for entrance to a college properly so called; the really good girls’ schools are, as a rule, excluded from this list by their honesty in not assuming the name of college. The U. S. education report for 1886–87 gives 152 of these colleges in division B, the report for 1897–98, 135. When it is said that separate colleges for women are decreasing, the statement is based on this list of colleges in division B, which are not really colleges at all; and when it is said that women students are not increasing so rapidly in separate colleges for women as in coeducational colleges, it is the students in these miscalled colleges who are referred to; for precisely the reverse is true of students in genuine colleges for women. It is happily true that since better college education has been obtainable, women have been refusing to attend the institutions included in class B. Between 1890 and 1898 women have increased only 4.9 per cent in the college departments of such institutions, whereas, in these same eight years, they have increased 138.4 per cent in women’s colleges in division A. The value of statistics of women college students is often vitiated by the fact that women studying in institutions included in division B are counted among college students. Many of the colleges for men only and of the coeducational colleges included in the lists of the commissioner of education are very low in grade, but few of them are so scandalously inefficient as the majority of the girls’ schools included in division B. I have, therefore, in my statistics taken no account whatever of women studying in institutions classified in division B.