The fact that four-year-old Alice Freeman taught herself to read augured well for her career as an advocate for college education for women. Her family's financial problems necessitated her taking a job teaching Greek and Latin in addition to her studies, yet she earned a B.A. with honours from the University of Michigan, graduating first in her class. After teaching at a boarding school, she received a position as a high-school principal in Saginaw, Michigan, which enabled her to assume her father's debts and move her family to Saginaw to live with her. An offer of a teaching job lured her to Wellesley College where she had a meteoric rise at the age of 26 to become president, a position she held till 1887 when she left to marry Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer.
She returned to academia in 1892 as Dean of Women at the newly founded University of Chicago, where feminine enrolment doubled during her three years there. She continued to lecture and write articles for major magazines on the importance of higher education for women. She co-founded the Association of Collegiate Alumnae which later became the American Association of University Women.
She garnered many awards for her efforts, including honorary doctorates from the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as Union College and Columbia. She became a sort of model "new woman": financially independent, academically respected and successful.