Mills College history

Cyrus Mills’s ill health forced them to leave Hawaii in 1864 and settle in California.

In 1865, missionaries Susan and Cyrus Mills (champions for equal education for women) bought the seminary and renamed it Mills College.

In 1871, the school was moved to its current location in Oakland, California.

The school was incorporated in 1877.

Susan Mills served as principal of the seminary until her husband’s death in April 1884, when she acquired the additional duties of board member and acting president.

In 1885 the school became a college, claiming to be the first women’s college west of the Rocky Mountains.

In 1890 she was elected president of Mills College, and during her 19 years in that post she worked constantly to raise standards and secure recognition for the school.

Beginning in 1906 the seminary classes were progressively eliminated.

12, 1912, Oakland, Calif.), American missionary and educator who, with her husband, established what would become the first United States women’s college on the west coast.

In 1920, Mills added graduate programs for women and men, granting its first master's degrees the following year.

On May 3, 1990, Mills Trustees announced that they had voted to admit male undergraduate students to Mills.

By 2014, we’d blazed a trail that others soon followed by introducing the first transgender admission policy in the country at a women’s college.

In 2017, Mills declared a financial emergency because of declining enrollment and revenues, and laid off some tenured faculty.

That September, it became the first private college in California to implement a tuition reset, announcing a 36% reduction in its undergraduate tuition beginning in fall 2018, with a goal of making a Mills education more affordable.