Mills College — The Women’s College That Saved Itself in 1990 and Was Absorbed in 2022

Summary

Mills College, a historic women's college in Oakland, California, traced its founding to 1852 and ceased to exist as an independent, degree-granting institution in 2022, when it was folded into Northeastern University and renamed Mills College at Northeastern University. It was, by its own reckoning, the oldest women's college west of the Rockies — a small, fiercely identified liberal-arts college that had spent 170 years educating women, and that had, in 1990, become legendary for refusing to stop. After the merger, the campus remained open and the Mills name survived as a college-within-a-university, but the independent institution, and its single-sex mission, did not: the new entity admits men.

For most of its life Mills was the kind of college that depended on tuition and devotion in roughly equal measure, and it never built the endowment to outlast a long enrollment slide. Applications fell sharply in the 2010s; in May 2017 the board declared a "financial emergency," with an operating deficit of more than $9 million and an enrollment that had dropped below 1,000. Years of cuts, layoffs of tenured faculty, and curricular reform narrowed the gap but never closed it, and the pandemic finished what demographics had started. In March 2021, the president, Elizabeth Hillman, announced that Mills would stop admitting new degree-seeking undergraduates and grant its last degrees in 2023, reconstituting itself as the non-degree "Mills Institute."

That announcement read as a death notice, and it galvanized the alumnae who had once saved the college. Six months later, in September 2021, the board chose a different ending: a merger with Northeastern, the Boston-based global university, which would keep the Oakland campus open and operating. The deal was fought in court — the Alumnae Association of Mills College sued for the financial records behind the decision and to pause the vote — but the injunctions were lifted, the trustees approved the merger, and on July 1, 2022 it became official.

What Mills represents in the closure era is the gentler verdict, and the more ambiguous grief. It was not abandoned mid-semester; its campus was not auctioned for parts; its name was not erased. It was absorbed — preserved in form and dissolved in substance — and its alumnae have been split ever since between relief that the place survives and sorrow that the institution they fought for is gone. The college that once reversed its own board now lives on as a name inside someone else's university.

Timeline

The College That Would Not Close

Mills entered the closure era with an asset most doomed colleges lacked: a documented capacity to refuse its own death. In May 1990, the board of trustees, reading the same demographic warnings that would later prove fatal, voted to admit men beginning in 1991 — the standard survival move for a women's college short on applicants. The response was immediate and total. Students occupied the campus, blockaded buildings, shaved their heads, and shut the college down; the now-famous photographs of weeping, defiant undergraduates ran nationally. Sixteen days later, on May 18, 1990, the trustees met and rescinded the vote. No other American women's college has ever reversed a board's decision to go coeducational. Mills remained single-sex, and the strike became its founding myth — proof that the place was worth fighting for, and that fighting worked.

That identity was not nostalgic but evolving. In 2014, Mills became the first women's college in the country to adopt a formal written policy admitting transgender and gender-fluid students, defining its mission around who lived and identified as a woman rather than who was assigned female at birth. It was a deliberate, forward-leaning statement of what a women's college was for in the twenty-first century, and other institutions followed. For a college that small and that old, the through-line was unusually clear: Mills knew exactly what it was, said so out loud, and had once shut itself down to remain it. The tragedy of what came next is that conviction, however fierce, does not pay a deficit.

The Slow Arithmetic of a Small Endowment

Beneath the identity ran a structural fragility that the strike could not touch. Mills lived on tuition and on the loyalty of a relatively small alumnae base; it never accumulated the kind of endowment that lets a college ride out years of thin enrollment. So long as students kept coming, the model held. In the 2010s they stopped. Applications fell from 1,827 in 2013–14 to 839 two years later — a collapse, not a dip — and a tuition-dependent college cannot survive that arithmetic for long. The demographic forces squeezing every small private college in America were squeezing Mills harder, because it was selling a single-sex education to a shrinking pool of applicants who increasingly did not want one, from a campus with almost no reserve to wait them out.

In May 2017 the board did the thing that, in retrospect, marked the beginning of the end: it declared a "financial emergency." The deficit topped $9 million against a roughly $57 million budget; enrollment had fallen below a thousand against a target of 1,100. What followed was the grim machinery of a college trying to save itself — layoffs that reached tenured professors, a wholesale curricular overhaul, new partnerships and revenue experiments. It worked, partially and painfully: the deficit narrowed. But narrowing a structural gap is not closing it, and the college spent the next several years running uphill, balancing cuts against a mission that depended on the very thing it could no longer afford — a full, residential, single-sex college. The pandemic arrived as the final shock to a system with no slack left in it.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

No class was stranded. Continuing students could finish, and the campus stayed open under Northeastern, which has used the Oakland site to extend its West Coast presence; the Mills Institute carries the college's stated commitments — gender equity, social justice, the advancement of underrepresented students — into the merged university as a research and advocacy arm. By the brutal standards of the closure wave, this is a soft landing: the buildings are in use, the name endures, the mission has an heir, and the people who depended on the place were not left holding a worthless transcript on a padlocked quad.

The harder accounting is institutional and emotional. Mills as an independent women's college — the entity that incorporated in the nineteenth century, that reversed its own board in 1990, that led the nation on transgender admissions in 2014 — no longer exists, and its governance, its independence, and its single-sex identity ended with the merger. The alumnae who fought the deal in court did not stop a closure so much as document, for the record, that the decision was contested and the books were demanded. They remain divided in a way that maps the whole story: some are grateful the campus and name survived at all, and some grieve that a 170-year-old institution they once saved with their bodies was, in the end, absorbed by a board they could not stop. Both are right. That is what "absorbed, not erased" means — and why, for Mills, the loss is real even though the lights are still on.

Lessons

References

• "Financial Emergency" at Mills Inside Higher Ed
• Mills College to Stop Offering Degrees, Citing Low Enrollment, Financial Woes KQED
• Mills College to Merge With Northeastern University, After Months-Long Court Battle KQED
• Northeastern University Spared Mills College. But the Merger May Be Erasing Its Identity. The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Mills-Northeastern merger a sign of challenges facing women's colleges CalMatters