Struggling Mills College Looks to a ‘Signature Experience’ to Boost Its Fortunes

John S. Lander, LightRocket, Getty Images

Buried in Mills College’s announcement on Tuesday that it was declaring a financial emergency was news of a key change that the California women’s college hopes will help it return to fiscal health: a “new undergraduate signature experience” similar to those that have allowed some other liberal-arts colleges to distinguish themselves from competitors.

Mills joins Agnes Scott, Emory & Henry, and Simmons Colleges, among others, in turning to a distinctive, campuswide educational experience as a way of meeting demographic and other challenges, says Mary B. Marcy, president of Dominican University of California, who mapped five common college-survival strategies in a recent paper published by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Ms. Marcy said Dominican is itself adopting such a program.

Chinyere Oparah, a professor of ethnic studies at Mills who has been the provost since January, said the new curricular approach would blend two important interests of Mills students, who include many Pell Grant recipients and many women who are the first in their families to attend college. It will both help students transform themselves, she said, by offering a closely guided undergraduate experience, and will also give them skills with which to help transform their communities.

Elizabeth L. Hillman, Mills’s president, said the program would take advantage of a number of existing curricular elements but expand them to apply to all students. The program is to be in place by the fall of 2018, she said, after the faculty have had time to consult about it. Ms. Hillman said she expected that Mills will have “a changed faculty” once the program is in place.

Mills is turning to the signature-experience approach after several years of declining enrollments that have been accompanied by reports of internal turmoil. Ms. Hillman, who described this as “a time of some trepidation,” has been president since July 2016. She was previously provost and a professor of law at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law.

Also announced Tuesday was Mills’s intention to adopt a financial-stabilization plan that will require shrinking the faculty and staff in an effort to balance the college’s annual budgets. Mills is also exploring collaborations with the University of California at Berkeley — where the new chancellor, Carol T. Christ, is the former president of another women’s college, Smith — and with the four-campus Peralta Community College District.

Perhaps the best-known signature-experience program is Agnes Scott’s, which in March received an institutional-transformation award from the American Council for Education. Elizabeth Kiss, Agnes Scott’s president, said that there had been a lot of interest in the program by other institutions, some of which had sent teams to visit the Georgia women’s college.

“In a very competitive landscape,” she said, such a change is “one of the things schools can do, if you’re not already a brand-name institution, to answer the question, in our case, Why Agnes Scott?”

The college’s program, called “Summit,” emphasizes leadership and global awareness, two ideas that market research showed were appealing to the college’s target audience, high-school women who might attend a women’s college.

She noted, though, that Agnes Scott worked for more than two years on its curricular revisions — which seemed to her and her faculty “like lightning speed” — and that the college’s trustees voted to spend some $20 million on them. Mills, by contrast, anticipates a much quicker adoption of its program. Ms. Hillman, asked about its cost, said Mills was not in a position to invest heavily in the changes.

Jake Schrum, president of Emory & Henry, says of small colleges that “if you’re not in the Nifty 50, you’re not on anyone’s radar screen unless you do something special. The straining remaining — the rest of us — I think we do have to distinguish ourselves in our digital materials, our print material, our social media.”

The college’s Ampersand program promises students they can “explore your passions and connect them to the common good.” It is, Mr. Schrum said, “an integrative, experiential learning experience” as well as “a signature way to describe what you do differently than other liberal-arts colleges.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.