Dive Brief:
- Mills College President Elizabeth Hillman recently lamented that higher ed as an industry has done a poor job of communicating the costs of higher education and making it accessible to everyone.
- This realization has been the impetus for a 36% tuition reset the university recently underwent, she said during a recent visit to Education Dive's office, noting that discounting the ticket price of tuition by more than one-third didn't actually impact the institution's bottom line much, since they were already heavily discounting.
- Mills also said the institution is seeking to "transform the way we communicate our value to our students," by working with partners, including other neighboring institutions, and identifying individuals in the Oakland area who needed an education but weren't receiving one.
Dive Insight:
Higher education is traditionally set up to be competitive, but more and more institutions are finding the pathway to survivability is actually through heavier collaboration with other institutions to leverage their collective strengths and provide greater value across the board. This is the case across sectors, like in collaborations between for-profits and nonprofits, and community colleges and four-year institutions, but it's equally true between institutions that would consider themselves competing for the same students.
One of Mills' biggest institutional partners is the University of California at Berkeley, which sends students to Mills to relieve enrollment pressures in "bottleneck programs" like business. If Berkeley has 500-600 students who want business degrees but can't get into the program at their home institution because the programs are crowded — or if there are simply students who want to get some core requirement classes out of the way at an institution which can offer significantly smaller section sizes — it makes sense for those students to take the courses at Mills instead.
There are also diversity benefits to such arrangements, which allow students from different personal and institutional backgrounds to mingle with each other and learn from each other's different life experiences. At Berkeley, for example, only 21% of students are from underrepresented minorities and 30% are low-income (as indicated by Pell status). At Mills, nearly one-half of students are from low-income backgrounds and over 40% are underrepresented minorities. To Hillman, "one of the greatest assets of higher education is diversity," and she is proud that the Mills population looks like the state of California. Not only is the student body diverse, she said, but 70% of the faculty is comprised of women, and 40% are people of color.
But despite the benefits of opening doors to students at other institutions and even going out to find students who aren't being served by any institution, there's still one group Hillman can't see Mills bringing in: men. Citing statistics that show there is not a tremendous amount of enrollment gain for women's colleges that open their doors to men, she said Mills is dedicated to serving women for a long time. That includes self-identified women and those whose gender is more fluid and who don't fit into the traditional binary language, but those who self-identify as men aren't the audience Mills is going for. In fact, she said, "getting a chance to talk to generations of women [at reunions and other big gatherings which bring alumnae back] is one of the best parts of the job."