Mills College will house 200 UC Berkeley students in new program

UC Berkeley and Mills College are teaming up to provide a new opportunity for 200 Cal freshmen.

Oakland's Mills College announced earlier this month that it will no longer grant degrees and won’t enroll new undergraduate students after this fall’s class.

On Thursday, officials announced that Mills will host the UC Berkeley Changemaker in Oakland program. The program allows 200 freshmen students to live and take classes together on the Mills campus.

Officials said the program will help students transition to Berkeley’s main campus by first allowing them to spend time in a smaller cohort environment.

The Changemaker program is being offered as an expansion of the longstanding Fall Program for Freshmen, which allows incoming students to take core classes together.

The Mills campus will be home to 150 incoming students from Cal’s College of Letters and Science and 50 from its Rausser College of Natural Resources.

Berkeley’s new program has an ideal location at Mills College, said Chinyere Oparah, provost and dean of faculty at Mills.

Berkeley students will experience the “constant flow onto the Mills campus of local organizers, activists and policymakers” from Oakland, Oparah said.