Within the past decade, most women’s colleges in the United States – including Smith College, a liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts – have expanded their admissions policies, allowing transgender students to also attend. Many of these policies allow transgender women to apply, while policies for transgender men and nonbinary students vary more widely.

The Trump administration announced on May 4, 2026, that it is investigating Smith College for violating Title IX, a law that prohibits discrimination based on someone’s sex.

“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement issued by the Education Department.

As a scholar of higher education who studies the experiences of LGBTQ+ students, I think it is important to recognize that women’s colleges offer a unique experience to students, including transgender and queer students. They create environments where students who are marginalized by their genders see themselves as leaders.

Women’s colleges have also long been welcoming places for lesbian and queer relationships, offering community and support as attitudes about gender and sexuality have changed.

A prior focus on trans athletes

Up until now, the Trump administration’s policy agenda on transgender rights and education has primarily focused on whether universities should let transgender students participate in college sports.

The Trump administration froze US$175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania in 2025 because it objected to how the school allowed transgender students to participate on women’s sports teams. One trans woman athlete named Lia Thomas, in particular, gained recognition for her strong performance on the women’s swim team at Penn.

The administration released the frozen funding after Penn agreed in July 2025 to block trans athletes like Thomas from participating in women’s sports.

Some of the sports-related lawsuits the administration filed in 2025 – like those targeting Penn and the University of Maine for allowing trans women to participate in women’s sports – have been settled out of court.

Other Title IX investigations into San José State University and the University of Nevada-Reno, for example, are still ongoing.

Understanding role of women’s colleges

Women’s colleges were created in the mid-to-late 1800s, when women were largely not allowed to enroll in most colleges. Women’s colleges became places where these students would be taken seriously as women and leaders.

As more colleges went coeducational, women’s colleges had to explain their purpose and evolving missions over time.

After World War II, for example, people said that American women who were working jobs outside the home should stop. Women’s colleges again explained their mission to the public, stating they could prepare women for the workforce and home. So, while women’s colleges were created to respond to the gendered exclusion of women, their missions have shifted as societal understandings of gender have evolved, too.

Transgender students didn’t suddenly appear at women’s colleges or other higher education institutions. But in the early 2000s, more students began to openly identify as transgender, and colleges increasingly had to decide how to adjust their policies.

Some older alumni of women’s colleges have expressed concern about admitting trans students, including whether allowing them affects a women’s college’s reputation, traditions or identity. These debates can matter a lot because most women’s colleges in the U.S. are private liberal arts colleges that depend on tuition payments and donations.

But some alumni have supported more expansive admissions policies consistent with the broader mission of women’s education.

While women’s schools have presented their own challenges for some queer and transgender students, they have long remained significant to the LGBTQ+ community.

What should women’s colleges be?

The number of women’s colleges has declined sharply over the past few decades.

In 1960 there were about 230 such colleges. In 2023 there were 30 women’s colleges in the United States. As more colleges became coeducational, women had more options, and many women’s colleges either closed, merged or began admitting men.

This decline in women’s colleges helps explain why debates over admitting trans students to women’s colleges are so charged. Each decision becomes part of a broader question about what women’s colleges are and should be.

The conversation around transgender and nonbinary students attending women’s colleges became more public in the 2010s. In 2013 Smith College denied admission to a trans woman because the student indicated that she was male on her federal financial aid forms.

This resulted in a big debate between Smith alumni and students about what the school’s admission policy should be. Leading up to this point, several women’s colleges – including Barnard, Smith, Mills and Wellesley – treated trans student applicants on a case-by-case basis, or in an informal way.

In 2014, Mount Holyoke, a women’s college in western Massachusetts, created one of the most expansive early policies on this issue. It allowed applications from transgender women and from some applicants who identified as transgender more broadly, while continuing to exclude cisgender men.

Smith also announced a new policy in 2015 that allowed anyone who identified as female to apply and be admitted.

Today, most but not all women’s colleges have their own policies regarding the admission of trans students. These policies vary: Some admit transgender women and some nonbinary applicants, while others are more restrictive. Many do not admit applicants who identify as men, including transgender men.

Mixed experiences for trans students

Some research finds that students overall at women’s colleges report higher levels of support – including from faculty – than students at coeducational colleges. Some transgender students arrive expecting these colleges to offer a safe and accepting atmosphere.

But some transgender students have negative experiences at women’s colleges and can feel like they are being watched too closely, ignored or both. These problems aren’t just because of interactions with other people. They can also occur when trans students encounter student records, bathrooms, housing and campus rules that assume everyone is either a man or a woman, or identifies with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Transgender students often report that college can feel less welcoming to them. Research on trans college students shows that academic, cocurricular, peer and institutional contexts shape how welcoming or alienating campus feels.

My research with other colleagues also examines how trans and queer students thrive in college, whether at co-ed or women’s colleges. Many form close-knit communities and are vital members of their campuses. The difficulties trans students face are not inherent to being trans. I believe they are produced by policies and systems that marginalize them because they are trans.

Barring transgender people from attending women’s colleges would block a higher education pathway for transgender and queer students.

Women’s colleges were created in response to gender inequality. I believe this history should push them to keep making college more open and supportive for students excluded because of gender.

Alex C. Lange receives funding from the Spencer Foundation.

For five years, many Australian university students have been watching the amount they have to pay for their studies with alarm and despair.

In response, the Senate is considering a Greens bill to slash high university student contributions for arts, law and business students.

The bill proposes to reverse student contribution increases imposed in 2021 by the “Job-ready Graduates” policy. This includes doubling the cost of arts degrees – which now cost more than A$50,000 as a result.

Despite the unpopularity of the Job-ready Graduates scheme in the community, the bill is unlikely to pass the Senate.

Only the federal government can fix the problems created by Job-ready Graduates. And in the lead up to the next federal budget on May 12, it shows no interest in doing that.

Job-ready Graduates

The Job-ready Graduates policy cut student contributions in teaching, nursing, engineering and IT courses. It did so to encourage students to enrol in these degrees, which were deemed “job-ready” by the Morrison government.

At the same time, Job-ready Graduates increased student contributions in arts courses, where many graduates take time to find suitable work.

Student contributions also went up for business and law courses, despite their above-average graduate employment rates. Three year bachelor degrees in all these fields now cost more than $50,000.

Under the new Senate bill, proposed by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, the annual student contribution for arts courses would reduce from $17,399 to $8,164. For business and law, the price would drop from $17,399 to $13,624. These are the pre-Job-ready Graduate scheme rates adjusted for inflation.

The flaw in the legislation

At a Senate inquiry into the bill this week, most witnesses – which included university leaders, union representatives and researchers such as myself – favoured student contribution reform.

But they were less supportive of the Greens bill as the way to improve matters.

The reason is the bill would cut student contributions without offsetting increases in public subsidies.

The total annual funding rate received by universities per full-time arts student – the student contribution plus the public subsidy via the government – would drop from $18,715 to $9,480. This would effectively halve universities’ revenue from arts students. Law and business funding would drop by 20%.

So, many courses currently on offer would not be viable on these reduced funding rates.

This policy flaw reflects the Australian Constitution’s constraints rather than the Greens policy. Under the constitution, the Senate cannot “appropriate” money, such as authorising the use of public funds for higher subsidies to universities.

The government’s resistance to change

Labor opposed Job-ready Graduates when it was in opposition, but in government it has delayed taking concrete action to reverse it.

In February 2024, the Universities Accord recommended “urgent” change to student contributions.

In November 2024, Education Minister Jason Clare said the new Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) would examine student contributions. But legislation passed in March 2026 to formally establish ATEC, did not mention student contributions.

Clare has implied cost is the main reason for avoiding student contribution reforms so far.

As he told the ABC’s Four Corners program in March:

I’ve said [the Job-ready Graduates scheme has] failed. I’ve also said it’s expensive to fix and not easy to fix.

The Innovative Research Universities group (which includes Flinders, Griffith and James Cook universities among others) estimates a full reversal of Job-ready Graduates would cost the government $1.9 billion a year.

A possible workaround

While the new Australian Tertiary Education Commission cannot directly advise on student contributions (what students pay to go to uni) it can examine the total funding per individual university student.

ATEC can also advise on the Commonwealth’s contribution to student funding. The total funding rate minus the Commonwealth contribution equals the student contribution. ATEC can therefore indirectly suggest student contributions.

Omitting student contributions from ATEC’s legislation may be a government own goal. It could end up with implied new student contributions that can be calculated with simple maths, but without the political protection of justifications provided by expert ATEC advice.

‘One bite at a time’

In explaining his approach to higher education reform, Clare sometimes uses the proverb of “eating an elephant” – something that is only possible one bite a time.

The imagery is off-putting, but the government has implemented other higher education priorities, including a 20% cut in student debt last year.

Perhaps there will be a first move on student contributions in next months’s budget, but no hints have been dropped so far. Having already suffered the political cost for resisting reform on student fees, the government may want to keep the budget benefits.

What could work instead?

My own submission to the current Senate inquiry proposed an incremental approach to reform. Urgent action should be taken on student contributions for arts degrees, as current levels condemn many arts graduates to decades of repayments which may never clear all their debt. Other student contribution decreases, for degrees with better repayment prospects, can be postponed.

To limit cost to government, I suggest increased student contributions for engineering and IT courses, which received discounts under Job-ready Graduates. Graduates from these fields have relatively high incomes.

The Universities Accord recommended student contributions based on expected lifetime incomes. If this principle is eventually adopted, these interim changes would move in this direction.

There is no perfect student contribution system. But we can do much better than now in balancing fairness to students, university funding, and constraints on Commonwealth funding.

Andrew Norton works in Monash University's Faculty of Business and Economics, which would lose money if the discussed legislation passed in its current form. He put in a submission to the Senate inquiry discussed in the article and appeared as a witness.