 She earned a bachelor's degree in 1892 from Bryn Mawr College, and completed a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1896.She was part of only the third cohort of women doctorates from Yale – the school opened admission to women in 1892 and the first seven graduated in 1894 – and she became the first to receive her degree publicly, at Yale's commencement ceremony.At Bryn Mawr she studied political economy under Franklin Henry Giddings, and at Yale she studied "industrial history, advanced economics, political science, and anthropology" with William Graham Sumner and Arthur Twining Hadley; her dissertation was entitled "Law, Nature, and Convention, a Study in Political Theory".