"Newfound Enthusiasm for Women's Colleges"

October 17, 2018: Trinity is featured in an article focusing on the increasing enrollments at women’s colleges, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The story opens with the photo of two Trinity STEM scholars, Kimberly Cruz ’18 and Raissa Audrey Tseumie ’18. The article notes that there’s a “wave of enthusiasm for women’s colleges” and many young women are “excited by the promise of an all-women’s education … More students say they want an environment where they can be supported by other women’s voices. …. and “There’s a heightened sense of purpose for today’s women’s colleges.”

Trinity and President Patricia McGuire are featured in the article:

‘They Have No Time for Donald Trump’

Students are also seeking out communities of care, said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. And young women are rejecting the outdated superwoman role in favor of support systems….

Trinity Washington is another women’s college that was willing to make big changes to survive — before it was common to do so. Sitting at a table in the new Payden Academic Center, with views of students in plush sneakers walking along the manicured lawns outside the floor-to-ceiling arched windows, Patricia McGuire, the institution’s president, described its history of reinvention.

The very decision to create the university, in Washington, D.C., was met with controversy, a theme that would follow it as it continues to reinvent itself over a century later. Trinity was founded by nuns in 1897 because the nearby Catholic University of America refused to accept women, McGuire said. The right wing of the church was furious.

The university became an elite institution for well-to-do young women. Notable alumnae include Nancy Pelosi and Kellyanne Conway. But by the time McGuire became president, in 1989, Trinity was no longer the go-to institution for wealthy young women, and it was losing students to coed institutions like Georgetown and Penn, she said.

“The past was gone,” McGuire said. To ensure Trinity’s future, she began by confronting the university’s diversity problem. When she took office, there were no local students and just a few black women enrolled full time.
“This was the latent institutional racism that nobody talked about,” she said.

McGuire decided to focus on enrolling local women of color. “Trinity was founded to make education accessible for those who otherwise might not go to college,” she said. “And there were just thousands at our doorstep.”

By the late 1990s, Trinity’s student demographic changed from being about 95 percent white and Catholic to a predominantly black institution, she said.

Trinity’s most notable enrollment spike was not a result of the #MeToo movement or the 2016 presidential election, but of the decision, in 2007, to create a nursing program.

Many Trinity women are low-income students living on the margins, McGuire said. They are galvanized by the promise of economic empowerment and the desire not to be another statistic.

“They have no time for Donald Trump,” she said.

Persuading young women to choose a women-only institution beyond recent enrollment bumps won’t always be easy, McGuire said. Now college leaders are challenged with turning this new momentum into a permanent enthusiasm.

Follow Cailin Crowe on Twitter at @cailincrowe

For a copy of the full article, contact Ann Pauley, Trinity media relations, pauleya@trinitydc.edu