California College of the Arts Will Close in 2027

California College of the Arts, the last nonprofit art and design school in Northern California, announced today that it will “wind down its current operations” and close by the end of the 2026–2027 academic year.

Vanderbilt University, based in Nashville, will purchase the 120-year-old school’s recently expanded San Francisco campus as a West Coast outpost for 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

“With declining enrollment, CCA’s tuition-driven business model is not sustainable,” CCA President David Howse wrote in an email to alumni. “Demographic shifts and a persistent structural deficit remain significant burdens on our ability to sustain current programs or grow new ones.”

The art school has been open in recent years about the financial difficulties it faces. CCA laid off staff and eliminated open positions in the fall of 2024 in an attempt to mitigate a $20 million deficit. But in February 2025, the school announced it had received nearly $45 million in donations, much of it from the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation. Over the summer, the school also received news of a one-time $20 million allocation from the California state budget. And as recently as September, CCA announced a “partnership” with the technology company Nvidia.

Howse added that all this fundraising, coupled with budget cuts, “provided some relief,” allowing the school to pursue conversations with potential partners.

Financial details of Vanderbilt’s purchase were not disclosed. The university has also recently expanded its campus footprint in New York City and West Palm Beach, Florida.

‘A phenomenal save,’ says Dorsey

During a press conference at City Hall Tuesday morning, leaders from San Francisco and Vanderbilt announced the news with enthusiasm.

Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said the university had considered several different locations around San Francisco for its new campus, including the largely vacant Westfield mall on Market Street, but chose CCA’s Design District campus for its existing student housing and proximity to the city’s bioscience facilities in Mission Bay.

“San Francisco offers an extraordinary environment for learning at the intersection of innovation, creativity and technology, and it provides an unparalleled setting for Vanderbilt to shape the future of higher education,” Diermeier said, adding that Vanderbilt expects to operate around 750 units for the campus’ roughly 1,000 undergraduates.

The university still has state regulatory hurdles to clear before classes can begin. Diermeier said he expects the university will officially launch in San Francisco in the 2027-28 academic year, but “no sooner than 2027.”

Sounding a familiar refrain, Mayor Daniel Lurie on Tuesday said Vanderbilt’s interest in taking over the CCA campus shows promise for the city’s economic rebound. The city has struggled to revitalize its downtown core in the midst of widespread vacancies sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Vanderbilt’s decision says that San Francisco remains one of the world’s great places to live, to learn, and to innovate. It says this city is still a place where new ideas are born, tested, and created,” Lurie said.

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, whose district includes CCA, celebrated the news, adding that he recently purchased a Vanderbilt hat. Although the city is losing one university, Dorsey said the deal helps prevent a “gut punch” to the neighborhood by continuing to keep classes and student dormitories full.

“My one reaction when I got the news was ‘What a phenomenal save.’ Because I think this could have been different had Vanderbilt not been in the picture,” Dorsey said. “This is really something that’s going to be a good fit with technology, design, and entrepreneurship.”

For nonprofit art schools, a complete collapse

The announcement of CCA’s closure follows a now-familiar trend for Bay Area art schools and small liberal arts colleges. After more than 150 years, the San Francisco Art Institute closed its doors in 2022, following a failed merger attempt with the University of San Francisco. Mills College was subsumed into a merger with Northeastern University that same year.

Like Mills, CCA’s campus will become a satellite campus of a larger, more solvent school. Vanderbilt will also open a New York City campus in the fall of 2026, and plans to create a graduate campus in West Palm Beach, Florida. While plans for the CCA campus will be directed by an advisory committee chaired by a member of Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science, no mention was made today of what’s to become of CCA’s brand-new studio facilities and classrooms.

After closing down its historic Oakland campus, CCA completed a $97.5-million campus expansion in 2024, adding 90,000 square feet of studio and classroom space.

Vanderbilt has promised to safeguard CCA’s legacy via a “CCA Institute,” which will include continuing programming at the art school’s gallery, the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts. Vanderbilt will also manage CCA’s archives and “serve as a vehicle for alumni engagement,” per today’s announcement.

Less is known about the fate of CCA’s 311 faculty members, many of whom have worked at the art school for decades. An email sent to current faculty stated that any potential hiring decisions will be made by Vandebilt, “likely at a later date.”

The 484 students who are on track to graduate by 2027 will be able to finish out their degrees at CCA. The school says it will work with others to “establish transfer and completion pathways.” 207 undergraduates and 117 graduate students started at CCA in the fall of 2025.

This is a developing story.