Addendum: Editorial from the Randolph-Macon Woman’s College
I posted a quick thought about the decision of the Randolph-Macon Woman’s College to go coed last week. I catching up with the news I missed over the weekend, I found that the President of the Board and the interim President of the school itself wrote a collaborated letter to the editor in the Washington Post that was worth reading, if this topic interests you at all.
The reasoning behind their decision is clear cut and completely operational as opposed to political:
The fact of the marketplace is that only 3 percent of college-age women say they will consider a women’s college. The majority of our own students say they weren’t looking for a single-sex college specifically. Most come despite the fact that we are a single-sex college.
Our enrollment problems are not going away, and we compete with both coed and single-sex schools. Of the top 10 colleges to which our applicants also apply, seven are coed. Virtually all who transfer from R-MWC do so to a coed school.
These market factors affect our financial realities. We must offer more aid to attract students, and we are using a large portion of our endowment each year to balance our budget.
As I mentioned in my previous post, you’ve got a choice in circumstances like these: increase your enrollment pool or raise the rates to cover the losses. Raising the tuition would only decrease the enrollment by pricing some students out of the school. From an operational point of view, the Board made the right choice and every argument I’ve heard so far in opposition simply ignores this in favor of an emotional response. That doesn’t cut it when it’s time to write the checks for the goods and services the school needs to do its thing.
