Sarah Mitrani ’25 will never forget March 11, 2020—the day she was supposed to tour the Smith campus.

The San Francisco resident hadn’t initially considered a women’s college. But she decided to see Smith for herself and arrived in Northampton just before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the campus. Her tour canceled, she strolled around Smith on her own.

The sights included an impromptu graduation ceremony with seniors in the quad wearing their regalia, “holding Corona beer bottles and walking across the Wilson steps,” Mitrani recalls. “Even though the most depressing thing ever was happening, all of them still had a smile on their face, and everyone was so kind to each other.”

Later, when considering her college options, she decided Smith had “this spark and this energy that connected all the students to each other that I didn’t feel anywhere else.” She graduated in May with a degree in history, concentrating in U.S. history.

One hundred fifty years after Sophia Smith’s bold vision in her will “to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men,” Mitrani is among those who believe a Smith education remains powerful and relevant.

Judging from admission statistics, thousands of other students agree. For fall 2024, 8,666 students applied, with an admission rate of 21%. The class of 2028 includes more than 34% domestic students of color and 17% first-generation college students. Yet the number of U.S. women’s colleges is dwindling. It sank from about 230 in the 1960s to about 30 today, according to the Women’s College Coalition, an association of women’s colleges and universities. Women’s colleges can face financial and societal pressures to go coed. Friends and family may view them as antiquated and wonder why anyone would opt for a women’s college in 2025.

As Smith celebrates its landmark 150th anniversary, it’s worth asking: Why is Smith still needed? What has the college accomplished in its first 150 years, and what is still left to do to live up to its mission of educating “women of promise for lives of distinction and purpose”?

The Smith experience is unique, according to faculty, staff, and students interviewed for this story. In every classroom, educating women and gender-nonconforming students is the primary goal. Students have opportunities to develop collaborative leadership skills and become the leaders the world needs in many settings, from educating their own children to becoming CEOs. Smithies develop enduring friendships, and many discover at the college their own activist spirit to make a better world.

Add in the power of liberal arts to transform lives, the beauty of the campus, and the lifelong network of Smithies who provide friendship and professional support, and you have an institution that remains as meaningful and important today as it was at its founding in 1875, according to its proponents.

“I think women’s colleges have only become more and more relevant,” says Kelly Anderson, a lecturer in the study of women and gender and in archives. “The students that come into my classes in the fall are not only hungry for their history, but they’re eager to find a place of belonging, to understand systems of power and inequality.” This knowledge, she says, helps them develop “their sense of themselves as leaders in the world.”

In the past, even some faculty and students questioned whether Smith should stay a women’s college. Smith debated going coed in the 1960s. Then-President Thomas Mendenhall acknowledged some form of coeducation “might prove inevitable and necessary at Smith in order to maintain faculty and students of quality,” given how many single-sex colleges were considering going coed. He developed a proposal to acquire 8 acres of land in the Fort Hill area of Northampton that would house a college for men in their junior and senior years.

That proposal didn’t go anywhere, in part because of the cost, but the idea of coeducation lingered. Surveys of Smith students in 1967 and 1969 found a majority favored admitting men. Two-thirds of faculty in a 1969 survey agreed that the college would be better off coed. “It was consistent with the temper of the times,” says Nancy Weiss Malkiel ’65, former dean of Princeton University and author of “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation. “Women and men were participating together in the student movement, in the anti-war movement, in the civil rights movement.” Yale voted to go coed in 1968; Princeton in 1969.

Yet by 1970, the majority of Smith students wanted the college to remain single sex. Malkiel credits two forces for the shift. One was the rise of Gloria Steinem ’56 as a national leader. “Smith was identified with someone who was articulating a case for women essentially to be in charge of their own fates,” she says. The other was the experience of Smithies who transferred to coed colleges or opted for the 12-College Exchange Program. They reported to friends about the challenges they encountered, including difficulties being taken seriously in the classroom. In 1972, trustees voted to keep Smith a women’s college.

The students who choose a women’s college today are what has kept Darcy Buerkle, a professor of history, teaching at Smith for 22 years. Student interests and passions have changed over time, she says. She recalls phases when students were “relatively sanguine” on campus and focused on their studies rather than social issues, to when “feminism” was seen as an outdated word. Through it all, Buerkle says, “it’s fascinating to see how they bring their whole lives and their whole intelligence to the project of their own education.”

That quality attracted Skylar Ball ’26, a dual English and history major from Los Angeles. “I had never been exposed to people who were so interested in the things that they study and so thoughtful,” Ball says of Smith. She calls women’s colleges “a necessary space,” particularly given her experiences in high school, where she felt teachers considered her less intelligent and capable because of her gender. “Gender discrimination was really evident in STEM classes“, she says.

Developing students as leaders is a priority at Smith, as it is at many women’s colleges. The Wurtele Center for Leadership launched in 2019 as the nexus of that work. Among other activities, the center assists students who hold leadership positions in campus organizations and residential life—or what director Erin Park Cohn ’00 dubs “big L leadership.” Women and gender-nonconforming students hold all the student leadership positions at Smith, giving them a chance to practice and hone their skills.

But the center’s mission to cultivate leaders goes far beyond promoting individual achievements during college or later in life. Of equal importance is “small L leadership,” or developing students’ abilities to help move goals forward. “It’s really about gaining the skills to be able to work together with other people,” Cohn says. “That collaborative element is central to the work we do with students on campus.”

Cohn is proud to think about the trailblazing Smithies who have become well-known leaders. She believes there will be more in the coming years. She also hopes Smith will find ways to tell the story of “how the aggregate of Smith graduates has had an impact” in many fields. “It’s easier to tell the story of an individual achievement than it is to speak to that larger impact,” she concedes. But she believes the larger story has yet to be fully told.

No assessment of Smith’s value would be complete without recognizing its welcoming atmosphere, where students can explore their full identities. That culture has evolved over time. Historically, “this is definitely a place that has had pretty strict ideals of femininity and what is expected of a woman,” says Mitrani, the recent Smith graduate. “Looking around today, people challenge that in little and big ways every single second.”

Smith provides a haven for educating groups that have been marginalized in the past, just as historically Black colleges and universities in the United States do. The student populations at HBCUs also trend toward women. At Howard University in Washington, D.C., for example, 70% of students are women. Women’s colleges and HBCUs may both face challenges in upcoming years, depending on how shifts in politics and culture play out.

Cohn, who holds a doctorate in history, cautions against assuming that history is linear and progress is a given. She cites the reemergence in 2025 of blatant misogyny and masculine models of leadership built around dominance, as well as “the call for couching any person who is not a white male as being in their position of leadership because of DEI”—diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Darcy Buerkle concurs, seeing the “ongoing cultural dismissal and denigration of women’s intelligence” as both the main obstacle the college has faced and the main reason it needs to continue as a women’s institution.

We clearly have not yet achieved Sophia Smith’s vision of a world where women are treated equally to men. The fight goes on. Smith College will stay at the forefront of that mission.

Andrea Cooper ’83 is an independent journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NationalGeographic.com, and other national publications.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Smith Quarterly.