Founded by Ezra Cornell as a school that would provide the same opportunity to both men and women, Cornell attracted students from the lower and upper classes. While in her second year at Cornell, Kelley helped found a social-science club, but by her third year, she had become too ill after contracting diphtheria to stay in school. She returned to school three years later and received her bachelor's degree in 1882, with a thesis titled "On Some Changes in the Legal Status of the Child since Blackstone."
Historian Kathryn Kish Sklar notes that after 1880, the concern for social change among members of middle-class society required them to educate themselves, to develop an ability to influence public policy, and to create new avenues for communication. After graduation, Kelley published two of her undergraduate papers, including her thesis, in the International Review, a New York-based periodical that also had published some of her father's work. Immediately after graduating from Cornell, she toured Europe with her brother and enrolled at the University of Zurich, the first European university open to women. In Zurich she met M. Carey Thomas, who later became president of Bryn Mawr College.
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