Mills College in talks to merge with notable East Coast university

Faced with financial troubles, Mills College in Oakland, California is reinventing itself and looking for a way to become gender equitable.

The 169-year-old university, one of the few women’s colleges in California, said Thursday it was in talks to merge with Northeastern University, the Boston research institution with a global presence.

If the two schools were merged, Mills would become Mills College of Northeastern University and would no longer be an independent, separate institution. Undergraduate and graduate degrees would be offered through Mills College at Northeastern University, and the school would be gender inclusive in undergraduate studies. Current Mills undergraduates can graduate from Mills or Northeastern University’s Mills College, depending on the course history and when the alliance was held, according to a statement from Mills

“Our goal is to unite our two institutions so that together we can build Mills’ core strengths, including promoting student access, women leadership, equality and social justice,” Mills said in a statement. “This new alliance would allow for the continued award of degrees on the Mills campus named Mills as part of those degrees, enhanced support for Mills’ current students, faculty and staff, and the future development of new educational programs.

Mills announced in March that it would stop enrolling new freshmen students after the fall of 2021 and is expected to award their degrees in 2023.

“Our goal is to provide our students with an exceptional academic and curriculum experience for at least the next two academic years, with the Mills faculty and staff at the heart of that experience,” said Elizabeth Hillman, president of the school, in one Letter put online. “Additional information on academic opportunities for students will be made available in the coming weeks. Similar plans are underway to develop transition plans and opportunities for faculty and staff.”

Mills opened in 1852, two years after California became a state, and is steeped in history. The college was originally founded in Benicia as the Young Ladies’ Seminary, according to the Mills website. The school was relocated to Oakland in 1872 after it was bought by two missionaries who advocated women’s rights. Mills has been celebrated for many firsts over the years, including the first women’s college to offer a computer science major in 1974, the first and only women’s college to reverse a mixed education choice in 1990, and the first same-sex college , the adoption of an admission policy for transgender students in 2014.

The college survived two world wars, but the pandemic has brought new challenges and the need for a new way forward.

“Declines in enrollments, coupled with years of operational downtime and the unexpected challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, call for this change,” Hillman said in a video posted on Twitter.

Even before the pandemic, the college was facing financial difficulties. “In 2017, Mills College declared a ‘financial emergency’ and laid off several permanent professors for ‘five years of multi-million dollar deficits and declines in enrollment,'” Campanil said, a news site on the school.

source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/mills-college-in-talks-to-merge-with-notable-east-coast-university/