Parent Education

The parents of Mount Holyoke students in 1955 were very highly educated and were much more likely than the population at large to have attended premier, elite educational institutions. Together the data recording parents’ higher education provide the clearest evidence of how elite the social backgrounds of Mount Holyoke students were in the 1950s.

Student yellow cards document that 85 percent of the fathers of the class of 1955 possessed a college education. This is a very high proportion compared to men in the population at large. For 1955 the Census Bureau reports that 6.2 percent of all men 25 years or older had a 4 year college education.

Mother’s rates of college education were also extremely high. Seventy-two percent of student mothers attended college compared to 5.2 percent of women 25 years or older in the population at large.

Along with very high college attendance rates, we also see extremely high rates of attendance at the Ivy League for fathers and at the Seven Sisters for mothers. Among Mount Holyoke students’ fathers with a college education, nearly one-third attended an Ivy League school ((91/296)*100=30.7 percent). Among students' mothers reporting college education, almost one fifth attended one of the Seven Sisters ((48/250)*100=19.2 percent).

The Ivy League is the name generally applied to eight elite universities: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. As Alexander Leitch writes in A Princeton Companion (Princeton University Press 1978), over the years these institutions have had a common interest in scholarship as well as athletics.

Similarly, the “Seven Sisters,” the elite private Northeastern Women’s colleges are recognized for their academic excellence and distinguished alumnae. They were widely understood in the 1950s to be a women’s equivalent to the Ivy League. The schools were founded in the nineteenth century in response to the leading private, elite male institutions' refusal to admit women and offered curricula of equal quality to these male institutions.

The original sisters were Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesely.