The Education and Advancement of Women: The Unfinished Agenda of the 21st Century

“…advancing educational opportunity for women across all ethnic, racial, age, and socio-economic groups both in this country and in the world continues to be the great unfinished agenda of the 21st century. Integrally intertwined with that is an even more pressing issue and a much larger agenda, that of social justice for women - not to mention children and men – worldwide.”

The Women’s College Coalition is an association of colleges and universities whose primary mission is the education and advancement of women – around the world. The Coalition is pleased to announce that Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea, has joined more than 50 women’s colleges in twenty-one states and the District of Columbia in the United States and in Ontario, Canada, in effecting this mission.

Sookmyung Women’s University was founded in 1906, during the reign of Emperor Gojong, Empress Sunhen, as Myungsin Girl’s School, the nation’s first educational institution for women. The school evolved into Myungsin Girl’s High School, then Sookmyung Women’s Junior College, then Sookmyung Women’s College, and then in 1955 Sookmyung Women’s University.

Many women's colleges in the United States were founded during the early 19th century, at a time when women were not admitted to many institutions of higher education, which were exclusively for men. While the landscape of higher education in the United States has changed dramatically since the late 1960s, the education and advancement of women – both in the United States and around the world – is the unfinished agenda of the 21st Century.

Speaking at the Centennial Convocation of The College of New Rochelle in 2003, Patricia McGuire, the president of Trinity Washington University, said:
	"Imagine a world in which women were denied the opportunity to learn broadly, where millions of women were unable even to read or write, a world where women were disenfranchised, treated as property, denied a separate existence apart from men. That was the world our founders knew just a century ago. That is the world that millions of girls and women inhabit today around the world."

A recent UNESCO report indicates that upwards of 65 million girls in our global village are not in school today.” In 2005, according to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, 18.3% of the adult population worldwide is illiterate. Almost two-thirds of them are women.