For more than a century, Sweet Briar College has offered women a liberal arts education in a pastoral setting near Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Equestrian programs, a tight-knit residential community and, lately, an engineering science degree, have been its hallmarks.

Breaking news! The sweet peaches of Sweet Briar College have to find somewhere else to ride firm, docile mounts:

Its hallmark for many years was...a horseback riding program? The primary reason to go to this girls-only college is...to ride horses? And what is a "tight-knit" residential community? Are loose-knit ones not as good? I need subtitles to go with these articles!

On Tuesday, the college’s leadership abruptly announced its closure to stunned and tearful audiences of faculty and students. Officials cited “insurmountable financial challenges,” saying the 700-student college, founded in 1901, would shut down permanently in August. An $84 million endowment, officials said, was not enough to offset ebbing demand for their school in a tumultuous market. All around campus students were wandering, in shock, on the phone with their parents and friends, she said, wondering if all the things they worked so hard to achieve were for nothing.

It's sad. A Sweet Briar diploma can open doors at IBM, Bank of America, and Microsoft. Sweet Briar is the Harvard of Smurf colleges.

“That was, as one would expect, very emotional,” Jones said. Many of the students were in tears, he said.

Can you imagine all these same-sex people crying? If you went there and didn't know what was going on, you might have thought you were at a funeral for an extremely prolific polygamist man!

There was an immediate outpouring on social media, of shock and dismay . “There are few things in my life that have caught me more off-guard or been more devastating,” one alumna, Angelica Shea, tweeted. “I can’t stop crying.”

Didn't she have to stop crying to tweet?

Fifty years ago, there were 230 women’s colleges in the United States, according to the Women’s College Coalition. Now, after decades of shutdowns, mergers and coed conversions, there are little more than 40.

Why would any woman go to a women-only college in the first place? The article didn't address that, so I did some research. Here's what I got from a lefty website:

- Students participate more fully in and out of class.

So women are afraid to participate in classes with men?

- Students report greater satisfaction that their coed counterparts with their college experience in most all measures – academically, developmentally and personally.

Women are happier not being around men? What about when they go into the real world?

- Students tend to choose traditionally male disciplines like the sciences.

And they are afraid to choose sciences if there are men also taking those majors?

- Students develop higher levels of self-esteem than other achieving women in coed institutions.

So women are ashamed of their bodies if they go to a co-educational college?

These reasons are all ridiculous. So I am going to list reasons why I think women are abandoning these single-sex schools:

1) Horses don't compare to men. There is a certain pleasure in riding a horse, but it still doesn't compare to the more direct pleasure of having a boyfriend.

2) Lesbians realize they have opportunities at regular colleges, too. If you're a lesbian, it's understandable why you'd want to go to a girls-only school; it would be like someone with a chocolate infatuation working at a candy store, or a vampire working at a blood bank. But regular colleges nowadays have lesbian kissing clubs. Even back in my college days I remember seeing signs – "LESBIANS ARE LUSCIOUS!!!!" – everywhere, with numerous invitations to events involving hugging and mutual comforting. I remember one particular girl who would pick up other girls by jumping into the shower with them! (Not making this up.)

3) Women realize they need to be socialized around men. If women don't have contact with men during their formative years, they will run into unexpected surprises later.

4) Women realize they can compete equally with men and don't have to cringe at the mere sight of men in the classroom.

Have you ever seen Abbott and Costello go to Mars? In this classic, Abbott and Costello go not to Mars, but to Venus, where the only people on the planet are women, and women react with shock and surprise at seeing their first men. (Unlike HuffPo feminists, these ladies didn't clean toilets or talk incessantly about birth control.)

But in the real world, there is no women's paradise like Venus; you cannot go through life without encountering and dealing with men. Women have to get used to a planet with both men and women on it. Considering the declining appeal of single-sex schools, I don't think all the bareback equestrian riding in the world is going to persuade women to enroll in larger numbers.

Pedro Gonzales is the editor of Newsmachete.com, the conservative news site.