It was one of my first questions when I conceived the idea of writing a women’s history of Bethel, yet I haven’t fully addressed it yet:
How has women’s enrollment at Bethel changed over time?
As long as I’ve been on the faculty, I’ve known that women accounted for the vast majority of Bethel’s traditional undergraduate students. But I wasn’t sure if that was a recent development in Bethel’s history, or reached back deeper into our past. Nor did I know if that was just the case with the College of Arts and Sciences; what about women’s enrollment at the Seminary, or in adult and graduate programs?
So while it’s high time that I dedicated a post to some quantitative history… know that my data are incomplete, and pieced together from a variety of sources. Particularly in the early years of Bethel’s modern history, all I can do is share impressions.
In 1947, the year that Bethel College began its four-year program, there were roughly five men (303) for every three women (181) on the student body. Across the first five senior classes, 28% of the graduates were women, according to dean C.E. Carlson. He added that fourteen of the first 39 women to earn a Bethel bachelor’s degree “had married” by 1954, with the others “quite evenly distributed over the fields of teaching, social work, missions, church secretarial and office positions, and graduate school.
In part, that initial gender gap in favor of men reflected the impact of WWII on higher education in this country. Men accounted for 98% of the sixteen million Americans who enlisted in the wartime military and so could claim generous education benefits under the G.I. Bill. Even at the start of the Fifties, Bethel president Henry Wingblade reported that there were 118 veterans among the 553 students enrolled at the College and Seminary.
As the G.I. Bill effect faded and the U.S. developed what historian and college president Richard Freeland called “the world’s first system of mass higher education” (Academia’s Golden Age, p. 7), the Bethel College student population started to approach gender parity. We don’t have anything like complete data for that era, but according to occasional Clarion articles on fall enrollment in the College (like this p. 2 profile of “The Bethel Man“), the women’s share was consistently around 44% in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fortunately, we have more consistent College statistics for the last sixty years, thanks to Bethel’s Institutional Data office (which keeps the last ten years available online) and its current and former directors, Jeff Olson and Dan Nelson, who sent me summary reports that reach back as far as 1964. Here’s what those data look like as a stacked area chart, with men in red and women in blue:
The mid-Sixties is clearly the hinge moment in this story. In November 1965, the Clarion noted that while the “numerical advantage of men over women in the senior class is obvious,” the entering class that fall consisted of 190 women and 165 men. By the end of the decade, the gender gap — now in favor of women — stood at ten percentage points (55-45). (Nationwide, American women didn’t overtake men for college enrollment until the end of the 1970s.) Bethel’s gender gap largely stayed that size for a generation, with the 1980s advent of the Nursing program nudging the women’s share closer to 60%, a threshold that Bethel finally crossed in 1993. I haven’t yet attempted to tell the story of women’s sports at Bethel, but here it’s worth adding that the Nineties was also the decade when the institution finally closed in on the gender parity mandated by Title IX, with 149 women on eight athletic rosters by 1999-2000.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the recent decline of women students in the College of Arts and Sciences, which runs counter to a national trend. Pending further thinking, I’d just note that the share of women among traditional undergraduates dipped below 60% around the same time that Bethel started accepting far more non-traditional undergraduates to CAS: high school students availing themselves of a variety of “Early College” programs, including Minnesota’s Postsecondary Enrollment Option. I wouldn’t be surprised if the gender demographics of our Early College population mirror that of Minnesota’s K-12 public schools: 51.5% male.
It’s not surprising that women make up an even bigger percentage of students in Bethel’s adult/professional (63.4% in 2024, down from a 2009 peak over 70%) and graduate (73.1%) programs, several of which are in fields (Nursing and Education) that I’ve previously noted as being dominated by women throughout Bethel’s history. Nor was I shocked to see that women accounted for less than 40% of Seminary students as recently as 2017-18. But they became the Seminary majority for the first time in 2022-23, so it’s worth pausing our larger institutional story for a moment to look more closely at the history of women’s enrollment at Bethel Seminary.
Here I can draw on detailed Seminary enrollment reports collected somewhat sporadically in our archives. For our next graph, I’ll start in 1965, the year that the Seminary first held classes on the new campus in Arden Hills, and continue through 1977, the year Bethel Seminary West first met at College Avenue Baptist Church in San Diego, California. (The 1968 report is missing.) I’ll adjust the Y-axis to make it easier to see the (slight) growth in the mid-Seventies, but leave in the undergraduate figures for contrast.
By 1975 the slogan of Bethel Seminary was “The man of God communicating the Word of God,” prompting one of the 31 women enrolled that fall to ask herself, “How was I, a woman, to fit into this whole area of communicating the Word of God?” But when the Seminary submitted its self-study that year to the Association of Theological Schools, the exclusively masculine pronouns in the first draft gave way to gender inclusive choices in the final version — e.g., “Each student must discover himself or herself… While the Seminary provides training in skills, it also places a high premium on preparing the man or woman behind the skills” (italics mine).
The following spring Carol Shimmin became the first woman to earn an M.Div. from Bethel; in the fall of 1976, female seminarians cleared the 10% threshold for the first time. The archive of enrollment reports becomes much patchier at this point, but I’ll pick up the story in 1986 for today’s last graph and carry it into the start of the next century.
The women’s share of Seminary enrollment had stalled by 1994, the year the school’s marketing office commissioned a study in which Communication professors Leta and Phil Frazier found “an acute awareness that it is significantly different to be a female student at Bethel Seminary as opposed to being a male.” As I noted in an earlier post on that report, “the leading source of grievance and concern had to do with the lack of women on the Seminary faculty, a group that was actually shrinking at that point.” So it’s surely no coincidence that the 1995 hiring of Carla Dahl coincided with a significant uptick that led women’s Seminary enrollment to reach the 40% mark by 2012. Dahl led a new Marriage and Family Therapy program that chiefly enrolled women, but female students were becoming more commonplace throughout the Seminary as the Nineties turned to the Aughts — everywhere but the institution’s one doctoral program, no doubt reflecting the continuing scarcity of women in pastoral leadership in conservative evangelical denominations like Bethel’s.
| 1996 | 2001 | |||
| Program | Women | Men | Women | Men |
| M.Div. | 48 | 262 | 91 | 339 |
| Christian Education / Children & Family Ministry | 14 | 12 | 47 | 18 |
| Marriage & Family Therapy | 17 | 2 | 70 | 15 |
| Theological Studies | 31 | 86 | 59 | 68 |
| D.Min. | 2 | 122 | 8 | 101 |
One goal of this blog is to help involve members of the Bethel community in doing the history of Bethel, so comments are always welcome! Just know that if you leave a comment at the project blog, I’ll take that as expressing your permission to quote it in the project.
The Women of Bethel 