Mills College announces plan to close, triggering debate about the future of other schools

The announcement Wednesday that Mills College in Oakland, an historic institution for the education of undergraduate women, will close by 2023 sent shock waves through California’s private college network and raised worries that other campuses might next succumb to financial problems worsened by the pandemic.

Mills is the second small private nonprofit college in California to announce drastic steps in recent months. Notre Dame de Namur University, a Catholic institution in Belmont, said it would end its undergraduate programs this spring although it plans to continue some graduate classes. That campus in the San Francisco Bay Area had enrolled about 800 undergraduates and 570 graduate students.