Studies have found that, by attending women's colleges, women :

• Participate more fully in and out of class.
• Have more opportunities to hold leadership positions and are able to observe women functioning in top jobs (80 percent of the presidents and 55 percent of the faculty are women).
• Report greater satisfaction than their coed counterparts with their college experience in almost all measures - academically, developmentally, and personally.
• Develop measurably higher levels of self-esteem than other achieving women in coeducational institutions. After two years in coeducational institutions, women have been shown to have lower levels of self-esteem than when they entered college.
• Score higher on standardized achievement tests.
• Tend to choose traditionally male disciplines, like the sciences, as their academic major, in greater numbers.
• Are more likely to graduate
• Are more successful in careers; that is, they tend to hold higher positions, are happier and earn more money.
• Tend to be more involved in philanthropic activities after college.

Only two percent of women college students choose to attend a single-gender college. However, those who make that choice have a remarkably high level of achievement. Consider the following statistics for the Women's College Coalition :

• Of Business Week's list of the 50 women who are rising stars in Corporate America, 30 percent received their baccalaureate degrees from women's colleges.
• 33 percent of the women board members of Fortune 1000 companies are women's college graduates.
• Of all the women members of Congress, nearly one-fourth attended women's colleges.
• One of every seven women cabinet members in state government attended a women's college.
• 20 percent of women identified by Black Enterprise Magazine as the 20 most powerful African-American women in corporate America graduated from women's colleges.
• Nearly half of the graduates have earned advanced degrees, and 81 percent have continued their education beyond college.

Recent studies have found that small, private colleges offer their students more. With smaller classes and better graduation rates, private institutions spent nearly twice as much on teaching and learning then their public counterparts by controlling administration costs and enhancing services.

• At private colleges, students often learn in small classes where they have more interaction with full-time professors.
• Private, nonprofit colleges do as well or better then public ones in providing access and success for low income students.
• Contrary to common perceptions, the family income of students at smaller private colleges and universities is on average lower than the family income of students at larger public research universities.
• Smaller private colleges enroll a higher proportion of Pell Grant recipients than do larger public research universities - 31 percent versus 24 percent.
• Students at private colleges are more likely to graduate and more likely to graduate on time.
• Of Hispanic students who graduate from college, 76 percent of private-college graduates earn their degrees in four years or less, while only 39 percent of public-college graduates do.

Read more in "Many Small Private Colleges Thrive with Modest Endowments" by Richard Ekman, President, Council of Independent Colleges, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 1-2, 2006