Women's College Coalition

Bennett College is the only historically African American college for women in North Carolina and is one of two such HBCUs in the country.  Founded in 1873 as a coed institution and reorganized as a college exclusively for women in 1926, today Bennett is a private, four-year liberal arts college affiliated with the United Methodist Church.

Founded in 1871, Smith College opened in 1875 with 14 students. Today, it is one of the largest women’s liberal arts colleges in the United States, educating women of promise for lives of distinction and purpose. Located in Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith enrolls 2,600 students from nearly every state and more than 50 other countries, providing opportunities for students to develop their passions and talents to effect meaningful change throughout the world.

Smith has changed much since its founding, but throughout its history there have been certain enduring constants: a dedication to providing both the educational offerings and practical experiences that enable students to make a difference in the world, a belief in the ability of education to address the world’s most pressing problems, and a concern for the rights and privileges of women.

Today the college continues to benefit from a dynamic relationship between innovation and tradition. And while Smith’s basic curriculum of the humanities, arts and sciences still flourishes, the college continues to respond to new and evolving disciplines—offering majors or interdepartmental programs in engineering, the study of women and gender, neuroscience, film and media studies, Middle East studies, statistical and data sciences and other emerging fields. Our students leave Smith to work as policy-makers, researchers, artists, engineers, writers, business leaders and scientists who push the world forward.

For more than 125 years Agnes Scott College has educated and empowered intelligent women. Through the new SUMMIT curriculum, Agnes Scott has reinvented the liberal arts and sciences for the 21st century so that ever women graduates ready to become a leader in a global society.

Educator, publisher, and philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps dedicated her dreams as well as her resources to pioneering an innovative setting for women's education as an integral part of The Claremont Colleges. At ninety years of age, she still saw life in terms of possibility and spoke of the women's college that opened its doors in 1926 as her "new adventure."