In the past, before 1970, I think it is safe to say that the primary reason women went to college was to find a husband.
At a college, you would find a lot of young men likely destined for upper-middle class professions. They were single, horny, and free of parental supervision. Also, men often outnumbered women 2:1. The result was that a lot of women who went to college ended up marrying one of these men, either while she was a student or soon afterwards. It was common for women to quit school once they got married. This makes more sense if we consider that it was common for a woman to get married to a man a year or two older; and those men, after graduating, soon moved to a new city. These young wives had to leave school.
Even in 1880, women received about 20% of all university degrees. This did not even count the women who got married and dropped out. Women who went to college enjoyed a 4:1 sex ratio advantage. I bet a lot of them got married.
From the perspective of the man, a woman at college was likely from a well-to-do family. She had the discipline to finish all the prerequisites for college, namely high school, which was rare in those days, and also, compared to today, quite difficult. Some knowledge of Latin and Greek was considered a prerequisite of college. She was also learning something at the college itself. The cost of college wasn’t so high in those days, and women didn’t have debt. They did not have to get a career to justify the huge cost of college to their families. This sort of woman could be expected to be the kind of wife that would insist on great things for her children, and work to achieve them. It would be hard for a man to find this kind of woman outside of a college, especially since most of them were soon married.
Already by 1965, the percentage of degrees given to women was 40% — this again omitting those women who dropped out after getting married. These women were not planning of having careers. They wanted to find a top-quality husband. It was common for men to seek the kind of woman who had a college degree. This still probably meant that she was from a better sort of family, and was both educated — really educated, in those days, not just credentialed — and had good self-discipline. She would make a good wife for the kind of man that has high aspirations for his own children.
Today, women are told that their college boyfriends are transient and replaceable. They can be tossed aside after graduation, as a woman moves to a new city for a new career. Getting married to your college sweetheart is now actively avoided and condemned. Men are avoiding women altogether lest they be accused of “sexual assault.” College-educated women tend to be careerist sluts — “sluts” being the natural result of eight years of high school and college where it is assumed from the start that all relationships are transient and disposable — who are also full of feminist brainwashing horseshit, make bad wives, and have too much debt. They are already Married to the Corporation. A man starts to think that he might prefer a simpler, younger sort of girl, not so full of feminist crap, without such a sordid history, who might be a more agreeable and less contentious and problematic sort of wife, and who might be more willing to stay and home and raise his children properly.
I still think that the kind of woman who went to college in 1958 would be desirable today — probably from a better sort of family, having a real education, having high standards and aspirations for her own children and family, with good self-discipline, no debt (or tattoos), and often virgins. (Even today, about 40% of all women at colleges are virgins.) It would be good if these kinds of women could find a way to meet up with like-minded men.
Cornerstone 