In 2027, the last non-profit art and design college in San Francisco will be shutting down for good. On Tuesday, January 13th, David Howse, the President of the California College of the Arts, sent out an email to faculty, staff, and students revealing that the 119-year-old college will close after the 2026-2027 school year. The San Francisco campus and the Oakland campus will be acquisitioned by Vanderbilt University, a private college in Nashville, Tennessee.
The declining student enrollment and a tuition based “business-model” made the college unsustainable, according to President Howse. After this, Howse announced the agreement with Vanderbilt University was made to “support opportunities for our students to complete their education and to honor CCA’s significant role in the Bay Area’s creative ecosystem.”
This decision was made between President Howse and the Board of Trustees, a group of private donors, who in 2025 were able to pool together a $22.5 million donation for the college. Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, a technology company, and his wife Lori Huang used their foundation to match the trustees. They also received a $20 million grant from the state of California just prior. This culminated in a total of $65 million raised for CCA in donations during the 2025 year.
According to the email, this funding was able to provide them time to plan for the future and to avoid a financial crisis, as they were already in a $20 million deficit during 2024. During an interview with SFStandard that Wednesday, President Howse said the college wanted to achieve independence and financial sustainability. However, even with the new funding, in the email he called it a “temporary fix” to the underlying, structural deficit of the institution.
The email admitted that CCA could no longer serve the San Francisco arts community effectively and that Vanderbilt would be able to take on that role. In that same message, it was mentioned that Vanderbilt would be implementing art and design programs at this campus. CCA is also adamant in defending Vanderbilt’s ability to protect the arts legacy of the college. According to the SFStandard interview, there will be a “CCA Institute” on the campus where CCA’s Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts program and CCA archives will be kept. CCA alumni will also be able to interact and engage with these files at Vanderbilt.
San Francisco Mayor David Lurie held a city address later that Tuesday. He acknowledged the acquisition and deal briefly during his announcements. Lurie believes that with this new outreach post, Vanderbilt will be able to help the city of San Francisco economically and educationally. He also mentioned that it is both his job and Vanderbilt’s job to honor CCA’s legacy of “creative and cultural life” in the San Francisco community. This new campus will house 1,000 students, according to Lurie. Vanderbilt has also expanded location to New York and Florida, similarly to how it will reach San Francisco.
Students who are graduating by the end of the 2026-2027 academic year will be granted their CCA degrees and are able to finish out as intended. Other students will have to transfer out. In the email, support for these students and pathways to accredited universities were mentioned, but according to a KQED interview, Otis College of Art and Design has been the only school so far to reach out to CCA students looking to move. Transferring to Vanderbilt is not guaranteed and more information will be provided at a later date.
Bay Area artists are shocked by this news. Vanya Calderón, a current CCA transfer student and popular digital artist, went to Instagram to voice her thoughts. “The school did know about this deal long before today, of course they did, but it still surprises me how willing they were to continue being so generous and hopeful with all their incoming students knowing full well what they were proceeding with.”
KQED, a news and media company based in San Francisco, interviewed their own Senior Arts Director and CCA alumni, Sarah Hotchkiss. Hotchkiss expressed discontent with the situation, “It’s really hitting the arts community very hard right now. …If you’re gonna have an arts ecosystem at all, you need to have an art school.”
The fresh graduates that come in every year bring in excitement and energy into the arts community of that region. According to Hotchkiss, this cycle is what keeps the arts community engaged. Art colleges create connections and networks of support for emerging artists. There is less community and less opportunities in the artist space when an arts college is not present.
CCA is not the only art college to close in the San Francisco area within the past few years. In 2022, the San Francisco Art Institute shut down after trying to merge with San Francisco University. Later that year, Mills College in Benicia merged with Northeastern University in Oakland, where promises of maintaining a relevant arts education were not kept. Program cuts and faculty layoffs have also occurred at Sonoma State University and San Francisco State University.
With all of these closures and funding changes, the future of opportunities for artists and art teachers in the Bay Area are unclear.
