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M. Elizabeth Tidball
Professor Emeritus of Physiology at the George Washington University
Medical Center, Distinguished Research Scholar and Co-Director,
The Tidball Center for the Study of Educational
Environments at Hood College
This paper is about ways to increase our understanding of what constitutes a positive educational environment for women. We do this by determining institutional productivities of colleges and universities with respect to women and men who go on to a post-college accomplishment generally agreed to be indicative of success. The presupposition is that elements of the collegiate environment have made a contribution to the likelihood of such an accomplishment. Unlike basic research in the natural sciences, where there is a standard point of departure, institutional productivity studies have not yet evolved to the extent that results from different researchers can be compared in quantitative terms.
One goal of our research is the ongoing development of a method for assessing institutional productivity that can serve as common currency. Not only is this effort compatible with my intellectual upbringing as a physiologist, but it also has the potential to increase the usage and appreciation of a method that provides a unique and revealing angle of vision with respect to educational environments as they influence women's subsequent accomplishments. By developing a standardized methodology, results from institutional productivity studies can augment results from other forms of research in the effort to discover those elements of educational environments that encourage or submerge the talents of women whose endowments warrant accomplishment.
Because research of this kind is primarily phenomenological, or observational, it is critical that the steps used prior to counting and drawing conclusions from the observations be both as thorough and as accurate as possible. That is to say, the final calculations are not the object of the exercise: anyone can do the arithmetic. The difficult part comes from making the decisions of what to count and how to count, what assumptions are to be made, and how the assumptions made will impact each subsequent step of the process.
Further, this kind of research is extremely time consuming, demands enormous patience, and necessitates eagle eyesight and tireless attention to detail. Because the development of the lists from which the calculations are to be made are, in fact, "the research," what is to be evaluated first is how the numbers were acquired rather than what the numbers are. Finally, the precise communication of the methodological steps is essential, not only to others' understanding of how to design and interpret their own and others' work, but also in order to compare results across studies conducted at different times by different investigators.
What follows is a brief description of the evolution of a protocol for our current methodology for studying institutional productivity. I present this as a means of proposing a standardized point of departure for those who would employ this kind of research as a way of gaining a greater understanding of the influence of educational environments on students' subsequent accomplishment. My hope is that the protocol will also be helpful to those who need to evaluate institutional productivity studies for comparison with results gained by other methodologies.
There are many ways to define success. All come with disadvantages, not least of which, from a research point of view, is their measurability. Who's Who directories provide much useful as well as necessary information. Their principal drawbacks are the length of time it takes for a woman to achieve sufficiently to be included, and the subjectivity of the decision for inclusion on the part of the editors. Research on medical entrants can be built from data gathered by the Association of American Medical Colleges. The information is objective and records a clearcut achievement essentially at the time of earning the baccalaureate, thereby obviating the concern that the success is "too far" removed from baccalaureate influences. As a measure for success, it is very specific and well-defined, but it is also a narrow marker applicable only to a relatively few.
Although I have used listings in a Who's Who directory and entrance into an American medical school as proxies for success of college graduates, I have found the most generally helpful measure to be the earning of a research doctorate. This is not because a research doctorate is the only post-college accomplishment worthy of study or even the "best;" rather, it is because the Doctorate Records File (DRF) of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences is one of very few markers of accomplishment that is reliable and unbiased, that has been accumulated by a not-for-profit non-governmental agency recording national participation, that can be linked with the baccalaureate origins of the doctorates, and that can supply year of baccalaureate, year of doctorate, field of doctorate, and sex of recipients. This is asking much of any data bank, but the DRF does have these data available and they do satisfy all the criteria necessary for undertaking baccalaureate origins and institutional productivity studies. In sum, databases can be appropriately constructed from DRF holdings so that their analysis contributes to an understanding of educational environmental effects on a standardized measure of post-college success.
Before institutional productivity there were baccalaureate origins. In baccalaureate origins work one provides a simple listing of the number of college graduates by institution who subsequently became successful. Most early studies did not separate data by sex so that there was no way to know the situation for women as contrasted to that for men. Further, most studies made no attempt to have the achievement related to its baccalaureate antecedents. In doctoral studies researchers frequently use a "lag time" between the year of baccalaureate and doctorate in order to approximate the relationship. Nor is an adjustment made for the fact that the time between baccalaureate and doctoral degrees is dependent both on sex and according to field by sex. In many studies there has been no attempt to make adjustments for institutional size; results were simply reported as the absolute number of baccalaureate recipients from each institution who subsequently became successful.
The first baccalaureate origins research that separated achievers by sex was conducted in the late 1960s and published a few years later (Tidball 1973). This study, based on samples drawn from Who's Who of American Women, also accounted for the different sizes of institutions, and grouped institutions not only as women's and coeducational colleges but also as highly selective and less selective ones. In all categories, women's colleges were most productive of successful women. Subsequently this work became a Citation Classic for the social and behavioral sciences and a model of interdisciplinary research. Oates and Williamson (1978), Rice and Hemmings (1988), and Wolf-Wendel (1998) have all confirmed women's colleges to be most productive of successful women. The first use of the DRF as the originating database for a sample of doctorates earned only by women made adjustments for institutional size and for calculating the distribution of women doctorates by institutional type and by field of doctorate (Tidball 1980). Like the Who's Who study, women's colleges were most productive of doctorates in all fields.
Landmark methodological advances were reported by Tidball and Kistiakowsky(1976). For the first time, baccalaureate and doctoral degrees were separated and analyzed by sex. Further, by ordering data from the DRF to be the doctorates only for baccalaureate recipients of specified years, doctorates earned were thereby attached directly to the baccalaureates from which they had originated, obviating the use of lag times for both sex and field. Correction factors were calculated for the separation of baccalaureate and first professional degrees, necessary until 1961 when the U. S. Government began listing these degrees separately. The total number of doctorates, by field and by sex, for each of six decades for each baccalaureate institution were reported. Also calculated was the percentage of doctorates earned by sex and by field for each baccalaureate institution by dividing the total number of doctorates by the actual number of baccalaureates earned from the matched institution. This allowed for a size correction in the assessment of productivity. Results appeared as rank ordered lists of baccalaureate institutions of origin. Women's colleges were overrepresented both in terms of absolute numbers of successful graduates and in terms of their percentage productivity of achievers. Subsequent similar studies have confirmed many of these findings for women's colleges (Wolf-Wendel 1998).
The most common barriers to comparability among baccalaureate origins studies include the following: failing to disaggregate students by sex; failing to make allowance for institutional size; selecting a time period for earning the baccalaureate degree that is too brief and/or too close to the DRF survey selected as the basis of achievement; using proxies for the number of baccalaureate recipients that do not appropriately reflect the population from which the achievers emerged; disaggregating an already small number of achievers into even smaller subgroups for further analysis and generalized conclusions. In addition, there is no conventional agreement for categories of institutional types, few attempts to design studies from a common base, and generally inadequate descriptions of methodology. These omissions preclude the ability to assess the relative reliability of the reported results, and hence to draw more than tentative conclusions.
Nonetheless, refinements and additions to a basic methodology have continued. Lists of baccalaureate origins according to percentage productivity have been developed and their presentation made alphabetically. Subsequently, publication of absolute numbers of baccalaureates attaining success has been abandoned. Instead, considerable attention began to be given to the determination of the population of institutions that was to constitute the study. Based on studies of baccalaureate origins of medical graduates (Manuel and Altenderfer 1961) and of doctoral natural scientists (Knapp and Goodrich 1951), numerical minima of doctorates were used to determine which baccalaureate institutions were to comprise the study population. All institutions that met these criteria were included and their productivities calculated. Since the study population was the universe of all institutions meeting the criteria, it was therefore not subject to the limitations of statistical theory. For the first time, in addition to listing individual institutions as the baccalaureate origins of doctoral recipients separately for each sex, sex-separated data from groups of like institutions were combined to increase the reliability of conclusions derived from institutional productivity results. Nine institutional groups were identified for both the study of entrants into American medical schools (Tidball 1985) and for natural science doctorates (Tidball 1986). In both studies, women's colleges were by far the most productive of successful women.
Most recently, a further refinement has been made in the development of the study population. Rather than identifying the institutions for inclusion according to an absolute number of research doctorates produced during a specified time period, individual institutional productivities were calculated. These were then used to determine entry into the study population such that the resultant distribution of women and men doctorates/baccalaureates replicated that of the entire nation. Calculations of institutional productivities were made for women and for men according to institutional type and admissions selectivity, and, for the coeducational institutions, according to the ratio of men to women doctoral productivities from the same institution grouped according to several ratio ranges. The ratio studies provided an additional and valuable assessment of institutional climates for women in coeducational settings that is lacking when only data for women are collected.
When results from these studies are presented graphically, patterns of participation by doctoral field are highlighted for women and for men, both nationally and for the study population of the 316 most productive baccalaureate institutions in the country with respect to research doctoral production. The study population closely mirrors the national data and shows that, for men, field participation increases almost as a straight line from a low in education through the humanities, social sciences and life sciences to a high in the physical sciences. By contrast, for women, the pattern looks like an inverted "V" with a low in education rising through the humanities to a high in the social sciences, and then falling through the life sciences to a low in the physical sciences.
There is always great interest in the relationship between institutional selectivity and productivity. For men, and to a lesser extent for women, the most selective institutions are clearly associated with greater productivity. Beyond these most selective categories, however, the degree of selectivity makes little difference in productivity. Of considerable interest to women's colleges is the finding that this group of institutions, although ranking fourth in terms of mean selectivity, is a clear first in mean productivity. That is, for women's colleges, productivity is disproportionately greater than selectivity. This is consistent with previous findings for women listed in Who's Who registries. Ratios of productivity for men to productivity for women from the same institutions were calculated and plotted by doctoral field against productivity. Ratios were grouped into several ranges from those less than one (female productivity greater than male productivity) to ratios greater than three. As the ratios increased from less than one to as great as eight, institutional productivities for men were barely altered. However, under the same circumstances, increasing ratios were associated with markedly declining productivities for women. We interpret these findings to signify that gender equity has not yet arrived at the large majority of the most productive coeducational institutions in the country. We also note that for institutions in which the ratio is less than one, productivities for women are comparable to those of women's colleges (Tidball and et al. 1999).
A person might well wonder what is the relevance of studying baccalaureate origins and institutional productivity. One response relates to the fact that these methodologies provide for the only outcomes research that is both objective and quantitative. Such characteristics are especially useful because they contribute uniquely determined information to a large and overarching area of research that seeks to define what aspects of institutional environments are especially beneficial for women. As is patently obvious, there is no single way to determine these qualities. Rather it is important that there be a number of approaches, from quantitative interrogation of self-reports to qualitative social science studies, to case studies and to anecdotal evidence, in addition to the research presented here. Each provides its own kind of information about positive outcomes for collegiate women that points to attributes regularly found in women's colleges. Another response relates to a constellation of consistent findings from such studies that contributes to our larger knowledge base. Here there are at least four recurring themes: 1) simply being a college for women is of prime importance to women's subsequent success; 2) the productivity of women's colleges is disproportionately greater than their selectivity might suggest; 3) the negative effect of men students on women's accomplishments is absent from women's colleges, thereby not diminishing their productivity; and 4) women's colleges provide an abundance of adult women role models who are closely related to these colleges' productivity of successful women. As is the case in any field of endeavor, the recurrence of themes — regardless of the setting, or the type of investigation, or the individuals doing the research, or the institution in which the work was accomplished — provide the kind of evidential material that bespeaks truth.
Baccalaureate origins and institutional productivity research present a creative approach in which rigorous development of study populations along with insightful and critical analyses are applied to longstanding and continuing questions of what constitutes optimal environments for the education of women. They do not and cannot stand alone, any more than can other methodologies. Rather they become partners in the search for what works for women. Further, they represent a very real interdisciplinary effort by bringing methodologies associated with the natural sciences to contribute new dimensions and directions to ongoing questions in the social psychology of higher education for women.
Knapp, R. H., and H. B. Goodrich. 1951. "The Origins of American Scientists." Science 113: 543-45.
Manuel, W. A., and M. E. Altenderfer. 1961. PHS Publication 845. Baccalaureate Origins of 1950-59 Medical Graduates. Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office.
Oates, M. J., and S. Williamson. 1978. "Women's Colleges and Women Achievers." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3: 795-806.
Rice, J. K., and A. Hemmings. 1988. "Women's Colleges and Women Achievers: An Update." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13: 546-59.
Tidball, M. E. 1973. "Perspective on Academic Women and Affirmative Action." Educational Record 54: 130-35.
Tidball, M. E. 1980. "Women's Colleges and Women Achievers Revisited." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5: 504-17.
Tidball, M. E. 1985. "Baccalaureate Origins of Entrants into American Medical Schools." Journal of Higher Education 56: 385-402.
Tidball, M. E. 1986. "Baccalaureate Origins of Recent Natural Science Doctorates." Journal of Higher Education 57: 606-20.
Tidball, M. E., and V. Kistiakowsky. 1976. "Baccalaureate Origins of American Scientists and Scholars." Science 193: 646-52.
Tidball, M. E., D. G. Smith, C.S. Tidball, and L. E. Wolf-Wendel. 1999. Taking Women Seriously: Lessons and Legacies for Educating the Majority. Phoenix: Onyx Press.
Wolf-Wendel, L. E. 1998. "Models of Excellence: The Baccalaureate Origins of Successful European American Women, African American Women, and Latinas."Journal of Higher Education 69:141-86.
[Chapter 2 - Who Attends a Women's College Today and Why She Should]