Ann Frances Arbour was born on January 6, 1952 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She graduated from Saint Joseph’s Academy high school in Baton Rouge in 1970. That year, she began her college studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Arbour transferred to Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana for the Spring 1972 semester.

Beginning in the early 1970s, there were proposals to merge the all-female Saint Mary’s College with the nearby all-male University of Notre Dame. An agreement was never reached, but nonetheless, the University of Notre Dame opened its enrollment to female undergraduate students for the Fall 1972 semester. Although women had quietly been studying at Notre Dame since 1917, when two Holy Cross sisters became the first women to graduate with master’s degrees, this 1972 decision was widely understood to be the first time that Notre Dame formally opened its doors to female undergraduate students.

Ann Arbour transferred from Saint Mary’s College to the University of Notre Dame starting in the Fall 1972 semester, becoming a part of this cohort of female undergraduate students to begin their studies at the university that year. Arbour graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies. After graduating from Notre Dame, she married Peter Michael Olyniec. She went on to pursue a master’s degree in library science at Louisiana State University.