One of the University of Cambridge¡¯s three remaining women-only colleges will admit men from October 2021, as part of a drive to widen access to the exclusive institution.

Lucy Cavendish College will also abolish its minimum entry age, which currently stands at 21, said Dame Madeleine Atkins, its president.

¡°We want to make more places available in Cambridge to excellent students from more underrepresented groups,¡± Dame Madeleine told?³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ. ¡°Supporting underrepresented groups has always been in the college¡¯s ethos ¨C previously we were constrained to just one group that are underrepresented. We¡¯re simply adding more groups to what we¡¯ve always done.¡±

Dame Madeleine, who joined Lucy Cavendish in October 2018 after serving as chief executive of the ³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ Funding Council for England, said the move would ¡°substantially¡± increase the number of students at the college. It is primarily a postgraduate institution at the moment, but Dame Madeleine said it would seek to boost both undergraduate and graduate numbers.

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The move may prove controversial with alumnae and proponents of women¡¯s education. The college was founded in 1965 by female Cambridge academics who were frustrated by the limited opportunities for women at the institution, and was named after Lucy Cavendish (1841-1925), a pioneer of women¡¯s education.

Before implementing the changes, which were approved by the college¡¯s governing body on 6 March, the college consulted 2,600 alumnae, students and others on the changes. Dame Madeleine said that overall the response was supportive of the changes ¡°provided we kept our ethos of giving opportunity to underrepresented groups¡±.

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¡°There were, of course, some who felt we should stay women only and we do understand their concerns,¡± she said. However, Dame Madeleine said the college had worked to explain the changing mission of the university as well as the changing make-up of the college, which has a much lower average student age than when it was first set up. ¡°It¡¯s a very different college in some ways from the one they remembered,¡± she said.

The change was about ¡°realising that mature women, while still a much underrepresented group, are by no means the only underrepresented group¡±, Dame Madeleine said.

In December, it was revealed that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge admit more students from just eight elite schools than from three-quarters of all other schools and colleges put together.

Meanwhile, female school-leavers in the UK are now 36.7 per cent more likely to enter higher education than men, a gap that has widened by five percentage points in five years.

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The move will leave two Cambridge colleges ¨C Murray Edwards College and Newnham College ¨C as the UK¡¯s only women-only colleges. Girton College, Cambridge went co-educational in 1976, while all five of Oxford¡¯s formerly women-only colleges now admit men.

¡°There is a certainly an argument we heard that said [that] women graduate and have professional lives in mixed settings and therefore, it¡¯s very important that they are educated here in a co-educational spaces,¡± Dame Madeleine said. ¡°But one needs to remember, of course, that all teaching?at Cambridge is already in mixed groups¡­Our priority is to provide more places for excellent students from underrepresented groups ¨C that¡¯s in our DNA.¡±

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com