Learning From Trinity College

Great Kevin Carey piece about how one relatively obscure Catholic college for women produced a disproportionate share of high-achieving alumnae at a certain point in time:

[Cathie] Black wasn't the only one on Sister Claydon's radar. Other Trinity alumnae who have received notes in recent years include Kathleen Sebelius (Class of '70), the two-term governor of Kansas and current secretary of health and human services, and Nancy Pelosi (Class of '62), the first woman to serve as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the most powerful female politician in American history. In fact, when Forbes magazine recently published its list of the 100 most powerful women in the world, only Princeton undergraduate alumnae outnumbered those of tiny, little-known Trinity College.

The Washington, D.C., area is replete with landmarks— Ford's Theater, the Watergate Hotel, the homes of Frederick Douglass and Red Cross founder Clara Barton—where, at a particular moment in time, history was made. There is no official placard marking Trinity College as such a site, but there probably should be. For roughly twenty years in the 1960s and '70s, the small, austere, and relatively obscure women's college graduated prominent female scientists, scholars, doctors, educators, judges, and public servants in numbers far out of proportion to its size. The true import of this achievement is only now being realized, as the school's graduates hit the pinnacle of their careers. The historic advances of last year's health care reform effort, for example, bear the fingerprints of an uncanny number of Trinity alumnae.

Fascinating read.