HE COLLEGE of St. Monica was founded by the Sisters of St. Monica in 1934. Its main campus is located on an attractive T forty-acre tract in an older, middle-class suburb about fortyfive minutes' drive from the center of Los Angeles. The main campus serves about five hundred young women with undergraduate programs in the arts and sciences and in education. Additionally, there is a small day program in nursing serving mostly women and a few men. The nursing program is required by federal regulations to be coeducational to receive federal funding and federal student financial aid. Accordingly, men are welcome to enroll in the program.
The main campus also offers an evening graduate program in education. This program has about two hundred students enrolled. However, as with the nursing program, these students are predominantly women. The most recent estimate is that about 90 percent of the students at the main campus are white women. Most of these students are Roman Catholics. Many of the day undergraduates come to the College of St. Monica from girls' high schools operated in the Los Angeles area by the Sisters of St. Monica.
Annual enrollments at the main campus of the College of St. Monica averaged about 850 female students until the 1960s, when a nearby men's Catholic college went coeducational. Since many female students preferred to attend a coeducational Catholic college once it became available, annual enrollments declined to about 500 students in the day programs at the College of St. Monica in the 1970s and remained at a steady state thereafter, despite the introduction of the nursing program.