Maryland women’s college to go fully coed starting in fall 2023

The college is Maryland’s sole women-only undergraduate establishment and was the nation’s first Catholic school to award a four-year diploma to girls, in accordance with the Related Press. The establishment established a weekend school for grownup undergraduates open to males in 1975 and coed graduate applications have been provided since 1984.

On Monday, the college’s board of trustees voted unanimously on the coeducational shift after reviewing enrollment traits at girls’s schools and knowledge on highschool commencement charges. “We all know that there shall be some decline there, so we have to proceed to innovate, and Notre Dame has had a historical past of innovation since its founding,” college President Marylou Yam mentioned.

The varsity mentioned knowledge present that fewer than two p.c of feminine college students enroll in personal, nonprofit girls’s schools.

The college had about 2,200 college students in fall 2021, together with about 800 undergraduates, in accordance with federal knowledge.

The shift to coed had been beforehand mentioned by way of public boards in 2004 and 2007, however the choice was not made till this yr.

In keeping with the college, solely voting members of the board participated in Monday’s assembly and the work of an enrollment process power learning the difficulty was confidential.

The board’s school consultant, Mark Fenster, and pupil consultant, Alycia Hancock — who’re nonvoting members — mentioned they weren’t conscious the vote was going down and realized of the information alongside fellow campus members on Tuesday afternoon.

Fenster mentioned school are upset with the decision-making course of. “There was no consulting and no transparency,” he mentioned.

Fenster identified that ladies’s school enrollment has been plummeting for some time. The establishment has seen progress in coed graduate applications, together with pharmacy, nursing and training, however noticed room for growth on the undergraduate degree.

“I don’t assume they’re going to get a variety of males on campus, however I don’t assume that was the rationale,” Fenster mentioned. “The rationale was to make this system extra interesting to females by admitting males. That’s the place I feel the rise goes to be.”

The college plans to incentivize bringing males to the present women-only campus by selling its small class sizes, NCAA Division III athletics, and proximity to downtown Baltimore.

Many professors canceled courses on the Baltimore-based school campus after the choice, in accordance with pupil organizers, Hancock and Alexandria Malinowski.

Aniyah Plumer, a sophomore, particularly sought a girls’s school. After attending Little Flower Catholic Excessive Faculty for Women in Philadelphia, Plumer valued an training in an all-women atmosphere.

“The shift to a coed atmosphere is saddening,” Plumer mentioned. “To search out out that after reaching 125 years as an institution that educated girls, we had been ‘celebrating’ by permitting males to enroll within the college felt like a betrayal.”

Kamiya Britton, a 2022 graduate, believes the choice to go coed will alter the conversations that happen on campus and trigger girls to be much less comfy.

“Ladies come to Notre Dame to be part of a girls’s group that embraces girls and their distinctive qualities,” Britton mentioned.

To deal with pupil considerations and questions on the board’s choice, Yam held two pupil listening classes on Thursday and Friday. At Thursday’s session, just a few college students wore blue tape on their mouths and masks to represent how they felt their voices weren’t heard when the choice was made.

Hancock and Malinowski hosted a silent sit-in outdoors of Yam’s workplace on Friday to protest the choice.

“It was type of disgusting, to be fairly sincere,” Hancock mentioned. “Our voices weren’t thought of.”

Graduates of the college had been additionally given alternatives to talk with Yam after the announcement. However some say they’re nonetheless outraged that they weren’t given any perception earlier than the choice was finalized.

“President Yam and the Board of Trustees are lengthy identified amongst members of our group for his or her lack of transparency, however this week’s cloak-and-dagger choice is a brand new low,” 2019 graduate Caroline Máire O’Donnell mentioned.

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington College in Washington, mentioned the varsity and different girls’s schools purpose to serve traditionally underserved populations of girls and a few males who need to take part totally different applications with out dropping the mission of empowering girls.

“It’s about reorienting and reworking to serve new and totally different populations in new and other ways,” McGuire mentioned.