Education

“I lose sleep at night wondering if one of these days they’re going to go back 40 years and see me with a picket in my hand: ‘Keep the Women Out,’” says Volpe. “What goes around comes around.”

Established as the Woman’s College of Frederick in 1893, Hood became fully coeducational in 2003, when its board of trustees voted to allow men to enroll as residential students. This wasn’t a philosophical “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” scenario. This was a matter of survival. Low enrollment and debt had pinned the liberal-arts college against the financial ropes, leaving the school with an uncertain future.

“When your enrollment falls, your revenue falls. And that’s what was happening at Hood for a number of years,” says Volpe, who holds an MBA from Xavier University and who, prior to coming to Hood, had been the interim president and provost at Capital University in Ohio. “The financials,” he says, “could have been the kiss of death for this institution. We were bleeding—more money going out than coming in. And we had to stop that fast.”

Entrusted with the mission of increasing enrollment, strengthening finances, and creating a strategic plan for the college’s future, Volpe arrived at Hood with plenty of data and stats. The school’s predicament, however, was crystallized when he addressed the 2001-2002 freshman class at the President’s House during Father/Daughter Weekend.

“After five minutes,” Volpe recalls, “suddenly I get a cold sweat down my back and it occurred to me that I had the entire freshman class and their fathers in my hallway. That’s when it really struck me that we really have serious problems.”

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Six years into Hood’s “transition,” the college is energized and flourishing with an enrollment of more than 2,500 students, up 49 percent from 1,693 in 2002. Freshman classes are up 65 percent, and this year’s incoming class looks to be the largest in school history. Residence halls, once half-filled, are brimming beyond capacity, and plans are being made for the construction of new residential buildings, as well as an athletic center for Hood’s 19 women and men’s NCAA Division-III teams.

In U.S. News & World Report’s 2008 edition of America’s Best Colleges, Hood ranked second among more the 160 regional schools in the “Great Schools, Great Prices” category. The school was also highlighted as one of 222 outstanding colleges and universities in the Northeast by the Princeton Review.

Key to Hood’s success has been coeducation. But like many single-gender colleges and universities across the country that have gone coed (approximately 60 women’s and five men’s higher-educational institutions remain in the United States), the idea was met with some resistance.

Coeducation at Hood, in fact, was not a radical concept. Since the early 1970s, men have enrolled as commuter and graduate students. But the integration of men into a residential way of life on a campus that had been all-female for more than 100 years—that was a brand-new ballgame. Volpe realized this and knew firsthand the dilemma.

“I think my experience at an all-men’s college and watching my alma mater go coed was very helpful in making the transition. I was able to talk to the women here, and I was able to talk to the Hood alumnae around the country with great sensitivity [and] a kind of empathy,” he recalls.