Most of the Ivies were much more academically rigorous in the past. There were no ideological, unrigorous majors like Sociology or Gender Studies. Graduates were expected to read both Greek and Latin.
I'm sure lots of them were smart and erudite.
The fact that we only hear about "great educated men" in the history books has more to do with a bias in society than with who actually got educated.
What we know is that the very wealthy often had private tutors for their daughters, and that some women also learned a lot from their parents. Records exist that describe the tutelage of aristocratic and royal women, and it's not hard to extrapolate that those professional tutors probably needed other clients (from the less-well-off aristocracy and merchants) to both "climb the ladder" and fill the gaps between aristocrats' daughters.
An interesting tidbit in this regard is that we actually do know that the women in the (middle class) Bach family were as musically-educated as the men, since they ended up as leading sopranos in opera houses. Some people theorize that the Bach women were the ones teaching their sons music, not the men.
Universities definitely aren't the only places to get educated, and they were a men's club for a shockingly long time. Women were getting higher education in more private settings.
There are plenty of female diarists. Court cases often delved into women’s lives. Women belonged to institutions like convents that kept records.
The real gaps in documentation aren’t based on gender but class. Not entirely clear what medieval peasants did with their time.
But even then, inquisitions kept meticulous records and regularly investigated small towns. Women were questioned as often as men.
Modern historians (pre-1970s) may have been less interested in women’s lives, but they weren’t necessarily less documented.
Edit: another big gap in records is from the wars of the 20th century. WWII and the wars of the 1990s destroyed “the record” in large parts of eastern europe.
>they were a men's club for a shockingly long time
But, yeah. A lot of elite universities had a rather small percentage of women well into the latter half of the 20th century. Those that have larger numbers was often because there were sister female schools like Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. Dartmouth College didn't start admitting women until the 1970s.