4 SCHOOLS THAT WENT COED SAY THEY'RE GLAD THEY DID

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992                   TAG: 9201090491
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Landmark News Service
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short
4 SCHOOLS THAT WENT COED SAY THEY'RE GLAD THEY DID
Since the late 1960s, four state-supported Virginia universities have switched from admitting only women to admitting both sexes, and none has any regrets.
"There is no way our growth would have taken place if we had stayed a single-sex institution," said Fred Hilton, a spokesman for James Madison University in Harrisonburg, which went coed in 1966.
Since then, it has evolved from a teachers' college to a strong liberal-arts school, and enrollment has shot up more than fivefold, from 2,000 to 11,200.
The other schools that switched were Mary Washington in 1970, Radford in 1972 and Longwood in 1976. But with its feminine name, Mary Washington is still battling to erase the all-women image, said A. Ray Merchent, Mary Washington's executive vice president. Women students outnumber men 2-to-1.
The school tried to change its name to Monroe Washington five years ago, but legislators shot that down. Now it helps get the message across by including pictures of men's athletic teams in its recruiting material.
Junior Andrea Hatch is glad the college is coed.
"In an atmosphere with all women, you don't learn how males see things," she said. Plus, "girls' schools depend so much on male colleges for social activities."
Rene Rios, a male senior from Annandale, also sees benefits: "Having more females, it's not hard to find dates."
But there have been disadvantages. Longwood's 150th-anniversary history book noted that after coeducation, "meal prices had to go up because men ate more than women."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB