UC Berkeley announces freshman program at Mills College

There's a new development at Mills College.

The Oakland-based university that's shifting its focus amid financial struggles will be hosting a UC Berkeley program for first-year students this fall.

UC Berkeley announced Thursday that in addition to its semester-long Fall Program for Freshmen and traditional path on the Berkeley campus, the Changemaker in Oakland program will be held on the Mills campus, with 200 students living and taking classes together. The freshman program will last a year and give students the opportunity to ease into college in a smaller environment.

Ramu Nagappan, assistant dean of UC Berkeley Extension, which runs the Fall Program for Freshmen and will also run the new program, described the experience as "like a small liberal arts college, with the resources and opportunities of a large research university," in a statement.

Nagappan said students in the Fall Program for Freshmen demonstrate "small, but measurable differences in academic outcomes — their GPAs are slightly higher, their time to graduate is a little faster than College of Letters and Science students who start on the main campus. It's more of a nurturing environment."

The 169-year-old Mills College, one of the few women's colleges in California, announced March 17 it's shifting from a degree-giving college to an institute promoting women's leadership.

After fall 2021, Mills will no longer enroll new first-year undergraduate students, and it will likely confer its final degrees in 2023, pending further consideration and action by the board of trustees, Elizabeth Hillman, the school's president, said in a letter posted online.

Opened in 1852, two years after California became a state, Mills is steeped in history. The college was originally founded in Benicia as the Young Ladies' Seminary, according to the Mills website. The school was moved to Oakland in 1872, after being purchased by two missionaries who were champions of women's rights. Mills has been hailed 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 decision to go co-ed in 1990 and the first single-sex college to adopt an admissions policy welcoming transgender students in 2014.

"Declines in enrollment, coupled with years of operating losses and the unexpected challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, require this change," Hillman said in a video posted on Twitter.