A WINNING GAMBLE
10 YEARS AGO, A STRUGGLING WHEATON COLLEGE BET ITS LIFE ON GOING COED; IT'S PAID OFF.

Author: By David Abel, Globe Staff Date: 04/08/2001 Page: L1 Section: Learning

All the prime indicators of a college's health were growing more and more gloomy. The number of applications dwindled so low only two students were applying for every spot in the freshman class. Enrollment numbers plummeted. And the quality of the student body was suffering, with SAT scores and students' grade point averages sinking below peer institutions.

The dire situation for the small college in Norton required a radical remedy. Like other women's colleges, Wheaton decided to do what many of its alumnae had long considered unthinkable: The college's trustees voted to go coed.

Now, with a decade of hindsight, and despite protests from those angry that the college was selling out its traditions or succumbing to a false elixir for the

school's myriad problems, Wheaton officials believe they made the right decision.

Since 1990, the number of applications has nearly doubled, making the college about 20 percent more selective. SAT scores for incoming freshmen have jumped from an average of 1040 to 1200 and their grades have similarly improved from an average 3.0 to a 3.35. The boost in students, among other tangible benefits for the college, has also enabled the school to significantly increase faculty salaries.

"After the past decade, there really is no longer any question whether we made the right decisions," said Dale Rogers Marshall, who has managed Wheaton's transition since taking over as the college's president in 1992. "It is clear as can be. The change from single sex to coed made all the difference."

Wheaton, of course, is not the first women's college to successfully make the transition to a coed institution. Other schools, including Vassar, Skidmore, Sarah Lawrence, Goucher, and Connecticut College, had blazed the trail years before.

And the strategy is already apparent at the Fenway's Emmanuel College, which announced just last year that it would convert to a coed environment. Applications to Emmanuel this year have jumped by more than 100 percent over the number who applied last fall.

The reason for the change in fortune at the now coed colleges, Rogers and other college presidents contend, is twofold. Women have become less interested in single-gender schools - fewer than 2 percent of female high school seniors say in surveys that they are willing to attend all-women colleges - and more male students are willing to attend schools where they may be a minority.

In a report last fall on the progress of women's colleges that are now coed, Rogers and the presidents of six other schools concluded that their successful transition also reflects the effectiveness of marketing campaigns that bridged the gender gap.

"Why would men choose colleges with these values?" the report said. "For the same reasons women do. . . . They want a campus where they can have leadership opportunities. They like a campus that values equal opportunity for women and for men. And they know that the world has changed and that they will undoubtedly be working in organizations with high-achieving women as well as men."

The report also highlights the distinctive culture of coed schools that were previously women's colleges. At each of the six schools, there is no Greek system, no football team, there are more women on the faculty and the boards of trustees than the vast majority of the nation's colleges, and each has a long roster of successful alumnae. That, the presidents said, has created a culture that tends to put the sexes on more equal ground than at most institutions.

The value of such a setting was evident, they said, in a story one male student at Wheaton relayed from a job interview after graduation. The interviewer asked the student: "How will it be for you to have a woman supervisor?" When the student explained where he had gone to school, the report said, the potential conflict quickly disappeared.

At Wheaton, which is still more than 60 percent women, the good news has translated into a recent spate of academic coups. Within the past few months, one student was named a Rhodes Scholar and a recent graduate was named a British Marshall Scholar - the first time students won such prestigious awards in the college's history. And, last week a Wheaton student won a Fulbright scholarship, the second at the college to do so.

The improved outlook at Wheaton also has enabled the college recently to raise $90 million, add faculty, and launch a project to build a new arts center.

"If Wheaton had not gone coed, would we have been able to make such a dramatic reversal?" Rogers said. "The simple answer: No way."