Women's Colleges and Women's Career Attainments Revisited

Abstract

Postsecondary education is a well-recognized avenue to occupational and economic status in American society [9, 23]. Yet, students must select a college within a higher education system that presents an array of institutional characteristics. The extent to which those characteristics may influence the student's eventual postcollege achievements has been debated over several decades. Early research revealed a surprising lack of influence for institutional characteristics on cognitive outcome [3, 12], but accumulating evidence suggests that the characteristics of the institution one attends can have a small but significant net influence on a student's career attainments [1, 20, 23, 24, 25, 35]. Although most research on the impact of institutional characteristics on student career attainment has focused on such factors as student body selectivity, wealth of educational resources, size, complexity, and control [21], a small body of work has attempted to assess the impact of predominant institutional gender. Within this later body of research is clear evidence that men's colleges have independently enhanced male career choice and attainments in areas such as business, law, and the professions [5, 8]. However, most of the recent inquiry has focused on the extent to which institutional gender has influenced women's career aspirations and attainments in ways that ultimately affect gender equity in the workplace. It has been argued that the large numbers of successful female faculty role models and mentors in women's institutions have a