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Edgerton proved to be an exceptional student, and when she finished her Doctoral work in 1886, Dix himself moved that the young woman be awarded her Ph.D. cum laude. “She fully deserves it,” he concluded. Upon graduation, Smith College offered Edgerton a professorship, but she turned it down to marry Frederick James Hamilton Merrill, PhB 1885, PhD 1890. So ended Edgerton’s promising academic career. [2]

But other women followed the path that Edgerton had blazed, defying Dix’s claim that the female astronomer had “established no precedent” for other women. Though it remained quite difficult for women to gain admission to Columbia’s graduate and professional schools, women did gain admission and attend Columbia at a steadily increasing rate.

In 1895, the Faculty of Philosophy voted to admit female graduate students and qualified Barnard undergraduates to their courses, with the permission of the instructor. In 1897, the Faculty of Pure Sciences followed suit. John Burgess’s Faculty of Political Sciences agreed to admit women in 1898, but only because then-President of the University Seth Low convinced Burgess that a wealthy benefactor would fund a new Political Science professorship if women were allowed to attend the School’s courses. (Later, Burgess discovered that that “benefactor” was President Low himself). In 1900, Teachers College affiliated with Columbia, thus adding a significant number of women to its matriculation list.

As the University expanded, so too did the opportunities for women seeking professional training. Columbia’s School of Journalism, established in 1912, began admitting women at the outset. When the Columbia Business School opened its doors a few years later in 1916, eight out of a class of sixty-one students were women. [3]

By 1927, then, almost every professional school, save the Engineering School, admitted women. In August of that year, the New York World reported that more women than men attended Columbia University and its affiliate schools during the 1926-1927 school year. [5]

The School of Engineering finally began admitting women in 1942; again, it went coed based on need rather than principle. World War II had depleted factories of many of its engineers. In response, Columbia began training women in advanced chemistry and metallurgy courses. The program remained a permanent one because administrators predicted that demands for women engineers would continue to rise after the war. [6]

By the postwar era, Columbia’s campus looked very different from the one over which Reverend Dix and his Board presided in the late nineteenth century. Women made up a significant number of students in the graduate and professional schools, and attended many of the classes offered on campus. Only Columbia College remained all male. As with the University’s graduate schools, the financial and academic needs of the College, rather than the demands of activists, would fuel the push for coeducation at the undergraduate level.