Women-Only Decision Works for Mills College

Nearly five years after reversing a controversial decision to follow many single-sex colleges into coeducation, Oakland’s Mills College finds itself riding a swell of interest in women-only schools that has helped boost its enrollment to a 20-year high.

More than 860 undergraduates are attending the college today, up 12% from 1990--the year trustees voted to admit men in a reluctant attempt to reverse a downward spiral of deficit spending exacerbated by a shrinking student population.

What followed that vote surprised even Mills. Instead of availing themselves of prearranged grief counseling, hundreds of students staged a raucous strike, blockading administrative buildings and shutting down the campus for two weeks.

Under pressure, college trustees changed their minds, and a re-energized faculty, staff, students and alumnae set out to save the now 143-year-old institution.

Although Mills’ president stops far short of bragging about gains since, saying some of the initial enthusiasm has worn off and much work remains to be done, she does promote Mills as a model for other small private colleges--single-sex and co-ed alike--that are jockeying for position in a tough marketplace.

“I think private colleges and universities are still very much engaged in the struggle--dollars are hard to come by and there is still a depressed student pool,” said President Janet Holmgren, who came to Mills from Princeton University in 1991. “Mills is lucky in that we were forced to address many of those issues in the post-strike context.”

The most fundamental change has been focusing on what makes Mills different--its male-free classrooms. And Mills is finding today--as have other women’s colleges across the country--a more receptive audience for that message.

Holmgren is quick to acknowledge that Mills was blessed with good timing. Within a year after its decision to remain co-ed, the specter of sexual harassment went mainstream with the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. Then came the Year of the Woman, several studies of gender inequities in schools and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a graduate of all-female Wellesley College.

“These issues that feminists had been discussing for years suddenly became the topic of general conversation,” said Jadigwa Sebrechts, executive director of the Women’s College Coalition in Washington, D.C. “It made people interested in learning where girls might have an edge.”

Enrollment at the nation’s 84 women’s colleges has increased 24% in the five years since Mills students made national headlines by scrawling “RAPE” on campus buildings--in washable paint--wearing T-shirts that read “Better Dead than Coed,” and, in a few cases, shaving their heads.

Though initially taken aback by the intensity of the student anger, Mills administrators decided to build on its energy with internal steps to strengthen the college: They tightened its fiscal belt by freezing faculty hiring, revved up its fund-raising machine--especially among alumnae--and increased its student applicant pool by recruiting more community college transfers and older women interested in resuming their education. The school also beefed up its financial aid coffers to help more students offset the $14,100 tuition.

The success of that combination of activism, luck and hard work are easily found:

* While enrollment has risen, the enrollees’ qualifications match those of their predecessors, meaning the college has not compromised its standards in the process.

* Mills Hall, the college’s original building that had sat vacant since the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, was reopened last year after extensive repairs and a face-lifting financed in part with $4.5 million in donations from alumnae and others.

* The college’s endowment--considered a key indicator of an institution’s fiscal health--has increased more than 40%, from $70 million to more than $100 million in the past five years, and the college is dipping into it more shallowly for operating expenses.

Yet, the underlying foundation for Mills’ success was far simpler: a decision to focus on the benefits to women of single-sex programs. That decision altered the way the college recruits, houses and instructs its students in ways as varied as offering on-campus apartments for single mothers and expanding the women’s studies program.

“In previous years, probably some women came to Mills despite the fact that it was a women’s college and they remained here because it was,” said Gene Ann Flaherty, dean of admissions and financial aid, and herself a women’s college graduate.

“Now . . . I think that families are cognizant that a woman needs all the support and special advancement that she can receive in a women’s college in order to compete in the workplace.”

That message is particularly appealing to older women returning to college, who seek an education, not a social life, and are more keenly aware of the pitfalls of a male-dominated world. Such students--known at Mills as “resumers”--now make up about a third of the college’s undergraduates, nearly double their presence in 1990.

At 34, senior April Langley is more than a decade older than the average Mills student and has had several careers: U.S. Army cartographer, office manager, administrative assistant, small business owner.

A college degree was always a distant dream, until Langley enrolled at an Oakland community college and decided she wanted to continue her education at a women’s college.

“I wanted a diverse community of people, somewhere where I felt comfortable,” said Langley, who is African American. “The empowerment thing, I said, ‘I don’t really need that, because I already know how to deal with the world of men.’ But once you get here, you just can’t describe what it’s like. You learn in such a strong way. . . . Women are phenomenal together.”

Now Langley is applying to doctoral programs in medieval English literature with the goal of becoming a professor.

“I never thought I’d be thinking about a Ph.D.,” she said. “But at a women’s college, you feel you can do anything, it gives you that extra strength. I guess you see other women are doing it and you know you can too.”

Talk to anyone at Mills, from new students to top administrators, and she is likely to recite the mantra of women’s colleges--a conglomeration of facts, figures and examples extracted from numerous studies focusing on gender inequity in the classroom and on the successes of women’s college graduates.

Hillary Clinton has spoken frequently of the value of a women’s college education to her. And women’s college graduates make up a quarter of U.S. congresswomen and a third of the 50 women dubbed rising stars in corporate America by Business Week magazine.

Ask its students what makes Mills better for them and they point to female role models at the school, where all the student political officers, the entire campus newspaper staff, more than half of the faculty and all but one of the top administrators are women.

In high school, they say, many were afraid to speak out in class because of dominant boys, an experience validated by a 1992 study by the American Assn. of University Women that showed that girls often are overlooked by teachers and have less access to leadership roles than boys.

“Coming from coeducational institutions my whole life, always having to deal with feeling like I was not being taken seriously, I just felt this was a place that would not be like that,” said Kanwarpal Dhaliwal, 20, a junior from Los Banos and the student body president.

Nationally, admissions directors at women’s colleges have noted that written applications have increasingly reflected “great awareness on the part of women about what they were applying for . . . increasingly more references to the benefits of the women’s college,” said Sebrechts, with the Women’s College Coalition.

Marketing the advantages of a women’s college is a touchy task for admissions officers, however, because it forces them to straddle the narrow fissure between saying women may learn better without men around and saying they need to be taught separately and differently from men.

Ursuline College in Ohio is among the women’s colleges that has taken the more extreme tack, designing a curriculum that caters to women’s supposed differences--including fostering a supportive instead of competitive atmosphere and requiring enrollment in assertiveness-training seminars. Such a philosophy was popularized by a 1986 book called “Women’s Ways of Knowing.”

Historical documents indicate that may have been Mills’ charter in 1852, when it was founded as a seminary to prepare the daughters of the Gold Rush for the few careers then open to women, including teaching and volunteer work of all kinds.

But these days the college’s president shies away from any suggestion that women have special needs. Instead she emphasizes enrichment measures, such as encouraging faculty to include more discussion of women’s accomplishments in their fields than might be contained in standard textbooks.

“I don’t think women learn in an entirely different way and I don’t think our instructors teach that way,” Holmgren said. “What we have been able to say is there is a strengthened environment for women in women’s colleges, that co-ed settings are many years behind women’s colleges in tending to the environment for women.”

Following the board’s coeducation vote reversal, that environment was supercharged politically for several years, creating liaisons that had previously existed largely in publicity brochures: students and administrators, faculty and staff, old and young alumnae.

“Not only was it a wake-up call, it was a time to recommit,” said Christine Daniel, a 1986 graduate who led the most radical alumnae faction during the strike and later became vice president of the alumnae association. “Younger alums . . . kind of take things for granted and, boy, we learned not to, in a big way.”

Over time, the intensity of the fight waned, especially among students, who watched the last wave of undergraduate protesters get their diplomas in May. Efforts to keep students involved in improving the college’s prospects for long-term survival have not all been successful. A student-planned fund-raising Oktoberfest the fall after the strike, for instance, was so poorly attended that it ended up costing the college money.

But among the ongoing legacies of the strike is an increased student empowerment, which has manifested itself in a general concern about ethnic diversity--both of the student body, which is less than a third minority, and the faculty. The issue was raised by students in the heady post-strike period and later touched a chord with the college president, who now counts hiring of minority faculty among her top goals.

During her tenure at the college, the percentage of the full-time faculty that is minority has grown from 5% to 15%, according to the college’s planning director. Holmgren vows to increase that percentage in the coming years.

She knows she faces other challenges too.

Although Mills’ treasurer considers the college financially stable, Holmgren would like to double its endowment in the next seven years, which would require a major fund-raising campaign. Corporate donors, some of whom backed away from the college after the strike, are returning but--perhaps because of the lingering recession--have not brought their contributions back to pre-strike levels.

Holmgren has vowed to increase enrollment to 1,000 undergraduates by 2002, the college’s sesquicentennial, which she believes will mean stepping up recruitment of transfers and resumers.

As more of Mills is populated by older students, the campus becomes less residential, a financial blow that administrators have partially addressed by turning some dorms over to a conference center and by offering a wider variety of on-campus living options: a co-op, a quiet wing, a freshwoman dorm, a resumer wing.

Despite the work ahead, hints that the threat of coeducation is over for now can be witnessed in the campus dining halls and lounges, around the swimming pool and in the Tea Shop, where discussion rarely turns to whether the college should admit men. Students bring it up “in joking only,” said senior Dhaliwal.

Mills’ president is equally confident about the co-ed issue, particularly now that the college faces a growing pool of prospective students as the children of the post-war baby boom generation--known as the baby boom echo--begin to reach college age.

“The college has an important mission and an important niche in higher education at a time when we really need to think about institutions being focused and individual,” Holmgren said. “The board has made a very clear and outspoken commitment not to reopen (the co-ed) issue. . . . I think we’ve really put it behind us.”

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Scoring a Comeback

Enrollment at women’s colleges rose dramatically nationwide during the past few years after gradually declining for nearly a decade. Factors cited include increased focus on the success of women’s college graduates. The number of women’s college’s has been decreasing since 1960, with the most noticeable drop in the ‘70s after Princeton, Yale, Harvard and other prestigious all-male schools went co-ed.

Enrollment increases at selected women’s colleges, 1992-93 Barnard College, New York, N.Y.: 14% Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pa.: 8% Chatham College, Pittsburgh, Pa.: 9% Hollins College, Hollins, Va.: 7% Hood College, Frederick, Md.: 24% Marymount College, Tarrytown, N.Y.: 10% Mills College, Oakland, Calif.: 5% Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass.: 4% Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Lynchburg, Va.: 13% Salem College, Winston-Salem, N.C.: 16% Scripps College, Claremont, Calif.: 9% Simmons College, Boston, Mass.: 3% Smith College, Northhampton, Mass.: 10% Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.: 11% *

Number of women’s colleges 1960: 298 1971: 163 (Men’s colleges go co-ed) 1980: 112 1994: 84 *

Approximate enrollments at women’s colleges nationwide 1981: 86,000 1991: 85,000 1995: 105,000 Source: Women’s College Coalition