SOUTH HADLEY — Growing up in Nigeria, Nathania Amadi dreamed of going to Howard University in Washington. She’d never heard of Mount Holyoke until a college consultant told her about it.
“I was a little terrified of PWIs,” she said, shorthand for “predominantly white institutions.” She wasn’t particularly drawn to the idea of a women’s college, either, but then she saw the financial aid package, “and I was like, ‘whoa.’”
Amadi is now a senior at Mount Holyoke, where nearly a quarter of the student body is international. She’s studying neuroscience when she isn’t campaigning for more bus routes as president of the Student Government Association, or volunteering with the campus chapter of Planned Parenthood.
Amadi’s journey from Lagos to the leafy small town of South Hadley is a testament to the school’s reputation for attracting the best and brightest from around the world — but, even more so, to the power of resources and self-determination.
It’s a tough market for women’s colleges. In the 1960s, there were about 230 across the United States, a number that’s dwindled to 30 or so.
Massachusetts is home to some of the most successful survivors, which have managed to change with the times while preserving their founding ideals of equity and inclusion. The challenge — amid a Trump presidency that’s taking aim at DEI and transgender-inclusive policies — is to stand strong without standing out in a way that draws the glare of the federal government.
It helps that these same schools have always been known for academic excellence, thanks in part to having the economic means to recruit top students who become successful — and generous — alumni.
“At some point, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Phillip Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College who studies the financing and costs of higher education. “Success begets success.”
Founded in 1837, Mount Holyoke is the eldest of the elite colleges that became known as the Seven Sisters. These schools aimed to provide an Ivy League-caliber education to women at a time when such programs were reserved for men.
Today, five of the original Seven Sisters remain women’s colleges: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley. Vassar went coed in 1969, while Radcliffe and Harvard later merged.
Three of those sisters are in Massachusetts, which boasts the most women’s colleges of any state. In all, there are five, including undergraduate programs at Simmons University and Bay Path University.
Wellesley and Smith are both this year celebrating 150th anniversaries. Mount Holyoke is the most gender inclusive, inviting applications from anyone who’s not a cisgender man, while Smith and Wellesley consider anyone who self-identifies as female but do not admit transgender men.
These schools are thriving due to large endowments, aggressive financial aid, active alumni networks, robust international student populations (which bring significant revenue), and evolving admissions policies.
Their continued relevance is good and bad news.
Even though women now outpace men in college enrollment and graduation, what happens inside the classroom tells a different story. One study found that men spoke three times as frequently as women in coed classes when students didn’t have to raise their hands.
In 2025, women are still far from achieving equality in many fields, and are underrepresented as CEOs and in political office.
“There is a strain, not only in US politics, but in world politics, that questions the presence of women in leadership,” said Smith College president Sarah Willie-LeBreton in Northampton. “It makes complete sense to me that more girls and young women would consider education that is serious and unequivocal about their ability to learn, and to lead.”
The sister schools have long touted their liberal arts offerings along with a legacy of leadership among alumnae from Gloria Steinem (Smith) to Hillary Clinton (Wellesley) to Elaine L. Chao (Mount Holyoke), the first Asian American woman to serve in a president’s Cabinet, as labor secretary under George W. Bush.
Wellesley president Paula A. Johnson said her school saw a spike in applications after Clinton ran for president in 2016 but noted there’s work to be done around raising the next generation of civic leaders.
Last spring, Wellesley launched the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Citizenship, Leadership, and Democracy, which strives to broaden ideas about what leadership looks like.
It doesn’t have to be someone running for president, said Tracy Gleason, a psychology professor who co-directs the center, but instead could be “the person who creates a food bank in a town where one doesn’t exist.”
Gleason knows what it’s like to see leadership through a new lens: When she interviewed at Wellesley in 1998, she toured a large reading room filled with portraits of the college’s presidents over the past century.
“It was stunning — because they were all women,” she said. “I didn’t realize just how trained I was to expect all these portraits to be white men.”
In Massachusetts, all three sister colleges are now run by Black women modeling leadership in different ways as they navigate turbulent waters under a Trump administration that’s hostile to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“There definitely is a sense of camaraderie” among the leadership of the Seven Sisters colleges, said Mount Holyoke president Danielle Holley, an expert in civil rights law and the most politically outspoken of the group.
“There should be no doubt that what the federal government is doing right now is a full-on assault on women in the United States,” she said, pointing to federal cuts in funding to study women and gender, rolled-back abortion rights, and threats to birth control access.
Last spring, Holley taught a seminar on the Supreme Court that covered Roe v. Wade. “If you want to return to a place where you have reproductive rights in every state,” she asked students, “what do you plan to do about it?”
Johnson, a physician-scientist by training, underscored the importance of working with peers in higher education “at a time when not only is there great threat, but there’s a real need for us to come together and regain the public’s trust.”
She did not mention President Trump but suggested colleges need to search inward.
“I do think it’s a moment of very significant introspection about where we are outstanding, but where we need to change,” she said. “The complaint about the lack of viewpoint diversity is accurate, and we need to work on that.”
Willie-LeBreton is a sociologist and scholar who studies social inequality and race and ethnicity. She initiated a research project looking at how college presidents have communicated during moments of crisis through history.
Meanwhile, Smith is focused on its future with its “Next 150 Pledge” to waive tuition for undergraduate students with family incomes up to $150,000. The school also unveiled a $30 million new home for two preexisting student centers focused on career development and leadership that now share the same roof.
The message, said Willie-LeBreton: “We understand leadership in a capacious way.”
A senior math major at Smith, Kerry Seekamp is often outnumbered by men in her field whenever she ventures beyond campus.
Earlier this year in Seattle, she participated in the Joint Mathematics Meetings. Seekamp and her collaborator, a fellow Smith student, were scheduled to present a talk and walked into a room of around 50 men with PhDs “wearing shorts and flip-flops in January,” she recalled, adding she was “a little bit confused about why my collaborator and I were the only women in this room of what should be the largest meeting of mathematicians in the world.”
There are two ways to look at it, she added: “One, I can walk into that space and I can think, ‘Wow, I don’t belong ... What am I doing here?’
“Or,” she said, “I can walk into that room and I can say, ‘Wow, 50 people with PhDs just showed up to listen to me talk.’”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.