Press
Feminine domain
DU's women-only college helps adult students focus on learning
By Jennifer Brown,
Denver Post Staff Writer
DenverPost.com
"I made a promise and a commitment to myself, and my children are watching," said Seymore, 34, who gets tears in her eyes as she describes holding on to her college dream. "My daughters are watching their mother."
The Women's College of the University of Denver is the last women-only college in the Rocky Mountain region, and one of about 60 left in the nation - down from nearly 300 four decades ago.
While a single-sex college experience is a hard sell to many students, advocates say women's colleges still are necessary. And DU's fills a particular niche - it targets working adults.
Seymore, who enrolled at the Women's College in 1998,was a software engineer until starting a motivational speaking business a year ago.
She will study at 2 a.m. because it's the only time she has.
"You've been at work all day, and you come home, and you've taken care of all your responsibilities of being a mother, and then you have to type a paper," Seymore said. "You have to know why you are doing it. You have to dig even deeper."
Seymore helped raise her younger brother and sisters because her mother - who didn't finish high school - worked day and night as a waitress and bartender.
Although promising herself that she would get a college education, after high school Seymore joined the Army reserves instead.
She finally enrolled, Seymore said, as much for her daughters as for herself.
"If they come to me and say they want to be a professor or a dean or a president or an artist, I want to look them in the eye and say, 'Do it. Follow your dreams,"' she said. "I can honestly say, 'Mommy did it."'
Carolyn Nuñez, whose college days were sidetracked by marriage more than a decade ago, hates missing out on T-ball and soccer games involving her 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son, but she believes she's teaching them something bigger.
"I want them to see that college isn't an option - you have to do it," she said.
While Nuñez studies statistics, her kids write their ABCs.
Janet St. John, a 2003 graduate, was an administrative assistant when she started at the Women's College.
Now she is a director at a health-care company.
St. John, 51, credits the turn in her career not only to what she learned in class about business, but to the confidence she discovered in herself.
"Going to school was confirmation that I really had a lot more knowledge than I thought," St. John said.
Dean Michele Bloom said her students "transform," develop stronger aspirations and "find their voice."
"They are so serious about this and the significance of it in their lives," Bloom said. "These women are my heroes."
Edyie Thompson, a 46-year- old mother of two, worked at a grocery store for several years after high school before regretting not going to college.
The Women's College, Thomp son said, gave her a "sense of purpose."
"It's changed my whole outlook, given me more energy," she said.
Grads get DU degree
DU bought the 1909-founded Colorado Women's College, at Quebec Street and Montview Boulevard in Denver, in 1982 and later moved it to a building on campus designed and built by women.
Admission to the Women's College involves an essay, an interview and a reference letter but no standardized test scores. Graduates earn a regular DU degree.
Private women's colleges affiliated with co-ed institutions are allowed to exist under federal law as long as admissions are separate and they offer no graduate programs.
The number of women's colleges in the United States has been dwindling since the late 1960s, when Ivy League and other universities began allowing women to enroll.
Many of the remaining women's colleges are on the East Coast, with some in the Midwest and California. There are four men-only colleges left in the United States.
In the 40 years since mainstream institutions went co-ed, higher education has not evolved enough to build gender equality, said Susan Lennon, director of the Women's College Coalition in Washington, D.C.
"The fact that we have one woman on the Supreme Court is answer enough for me," Lennon said. "Women are still underrepresented in so many areas."
Women's College math professor Ray Boersema, who also has taught in co-ed college classrooms, said women learn better when men aren't in the room.
"There is a comfort in learning here that I have never experienced in a mixed-gender class," he said. "They've gotten rid of the baggage of what they are expected to be."
Men are expected by other math students to catch on quickly and won't admit it when they don't; women are expected not to know math and don't want to prove the stereotype true by asking questions, Boersema said.
Communications professor Carol Zak-Dance said Women's College classmates aren't competitive the same way students are in a co-ed class.
"The women's environment is a little bit more deliberate," she said. "There's a willingness to listen to different points of view and to learn from them."
Boersema and Zak-Dance, who also has taught at co-ed colleges, including DU, said Women's College students are the most motivated they've taught.
Four-hour classes
Students follow an intensive seven-course schedule, meeting every other weekend for four-hour classes between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
"It blew my mind away that they would actually stay there until 10 o'clock and they would learn until 10 o'clock," Boersema said.
At 23, Yesenia Noriega is young among the Women's College students, though her path to college wasn't traditional.
Noriega, who jumped around Denver high schools and was kicked out of one for having a "bad attitude," managed to become the first in her family to get a high school diploma. Her brothers - just like her parents - dropped out.
Noriega calls getting a degree "the one true thing" she believes in, a goal she latched on to when she realized how hard it was for her mother, a hotel worker, to make a living.
She pays tuition through scholarships and grants, and works full time as a clerk at the Department of Justice. Noriega expects to graduate next spring.
Going to class with women as role models, she said, has "given me a better understanding of what I want as a woman."
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or [email protected].