Yale
The university had to cheat on its policy of accepting "1000 famous male leaders" to a accomplish it, but Yale admitted its first sex-blind class this year since going co-educational in the fall of 1968.
Yale took a cautious tack in 1968, accepting only one woman for every seven men. "If you walked around the school those days it didn't look like a co-ed school at all," says Rachel Wizner, director of co-education. "It was more like a male school with women hanging around from weekend stays."
Yale went through the gamut of ratios each year while trying to whittle the score down to 2.5 to 1, which was finally reached last year.
However, Yale is not stopping there. Since going sex-blind, Yale has increased the percentage of women to 35 per cent for the class of '78. But Yale will have to boost the percentage of women in the application pool if it wants to meet the corporation's interim goal of 40 per cent, since the percentage of women applying to Yale equals the number accepted.
"There were a lot of problems in the beginning--many of which we take for granted now," Wizner says, citing problems such as where women should live and whether there should be full-length mirrors (none existed at Yale).
But after six years of co-education, many problems are left unsolved. A women's caucus group devoted to discussing many of the women's problems on campus drew over 100 people Tuesday night, and the dominant questions on the docket included women's courses, health service problems, and the univeristy's alleged non-support of women's athletics.
Nevertheless, when the university abandoned its traditional alumni-gavored goal of 100 men in a class by allowing only 900 males in the class of '78, it became apparent that Yale has indeed gone totally sex-blind.
This feature on co-education in Ivy League schools was researched, compiled and written by Crimson staff reporters James J. Cramer, Christopher B. Daly, Robin S. Freedberg, Robert T. Garrett, Nicholas B. Lemann, Jenny Netzer, Walter N. Rothschild III, Natalie L. Wexler and Philip B. Weiss.