Published: February 1, 1992

It Pays To Advertise

Readers of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal recently were confronted with prominently placed advertisements bearing a cryptic headline: "Why the St. Grottlesex education you enjoyed might not be the best idea for your daughter.''

Placed by the Emma Willard School, a 177-year-old boarding and day school for girls in Troy, N.Y., the ads were promoting research indicating that young women perform better and express greater confidence in a single-sex setting.

"St. Grottlesex,'' of course, is imaginary, an amalgam of top, formerly all-boys preparatory schools in New England that became coeducational in the 1960s and 70s. Such schools presumably were the alma maters of the affluent business executives who were the targets of the ads, which appeared on the arts page of the Journal and the opinion...