Early graduates included two college presidents, Julia Josephine Thomas Irvine (Wellesley) and Martha Carey Thomas (Bryn Mawr); a prominent women's suffragist, Harriet May Mills; a publisher and author, Ruth Putnam; and the noted Cornell professor and scientist, Anna Botsford Comstock.

In 1929, two Black female students, Pauline Davis and Ruth Peyton, were denied residency at Sage by the Dean of Women, R. Louise Fitch.

The building contained features that defined it as a residential college (as opposed to a traditional dormitory) such as a dining hall, classrooms, a library, and professorial offices.

While Sage rooms were spacious compared to other dorms, by the 1990s the facility was significantly run down, as the University, which planned to transform the entire building into classroom space, did little more than basic maintenance.

Between April 1996 and August 1998, the university undertook a renovation, at the cost of $38 million, to convert the building into the new home for the Johnson Graduate School of Management.

[5] A glass ceiling was constructed over the inner courtyard, changing it into an atrium, using a design inspired by the main exhibition hall at the Oxford University Museum.

On February 24, 1832, a disheartened Ezra Cornell wrote the following response to his expulsion from The Society of Friends due to his marriage to Mary Ann Wood: "I have always considered that choosing a companion for life was a very important affair and that my happiness or misery in this life depended on the choice ..."He remarked that the nation was founded on the principle of separation of Church and State.

Coeducation of the sexes and entire freedom from sectarian or political preferences is the only proper and safe way for providing an education that shall meet the wants of the future and carry out the founders [sic] idea of an Institution where "any person can find instruction in any study."