After 119 years, California College of the Arts will cease to be an independent institution and will be taken over by Nashville’s Vanderbilt University at the end of the 2026-27 school year.
CCA, which was founded in the East Bay in 1907 and later moved to San Francisco, will not accept new students next year.
Vanderbilt will take ownership of the school’s main Design District campus and establish undergraduate and graduate programming, according to an internal email from David Howse, CCA’s president.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In the email, Howse said falling enrollment has exposed the limits of a tuition-dependent business model. At the same time, demographic changes and a long-standing structural deficit have made it increasingly difficult for the institution to maintain existing programs or invest in new ones, he added.
CCA has been struggling for years. In 2024, it poured $123 million into building a campus in San Francisco and consolidating it with the original Oakland campus. The expansion and dramatic drops in enrollment resulted in a $20 million budget deficit.
Last February, CCA received $45 million in emergency donations, half of which came from Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. The donation, along with a $20 million grant (opens in new tab)from the state, appeared to be a lifeline for the school. In response to the donation from Huang, the school was developing the CCA-Nvidia Incubator for Creative Intelligence. However, Howse said, the donations proved to be only a short-term solution.
“Ultimately, neither of these are enough to ensure CCA can continue to operate independently,” he said in the email.
The announcement was a shock to faculty, who learned about it from Howse on Tuesday morning, according to one department chair.
Notable CCA alumni include Robert Bechtle, Viola Frey, and Woody De Othello.
CCA’s takeover by Vanderbilt is yet another blow to San Francisco’s decaying arts scene, which has seen a cascading closure of schools and galleries.
In October, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco announced that it was leaving its downtown location to pursue a nomadic model. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business took over the lease.
In 2022, the San Francisco Art Institute shuttered in the wake of financial struggles tied to an expensive campus renovation. The 151-year-old institution had birthed countless well-known artists and movements. In 2024, a nonprofit endowed by Laurene Powell Jobs bought the campus for $30 million. Powell Jobs plans to reopen it as the California Academy of Studio Arts, which will offer year-long studio programs to classes of up to 30 emerging artists.
The same year, Mills College, an Oakland-based art school, was set to close due to financial woes and falling enrollment, but Northeastern University purchased and absorbed it.
Mills’ arts programs were subsequently gutted (opens in new tab).
“It seems like a flashback of that,” said Glen Helfand, a 23-year professor of curatorial practices at CCA and Mills alumnus, whose criticism has been a major voice in San Francisco’s art scene.
Helfand said there had been mentions of “potential partnerships with another institution” at CCA staff meetings but characterized the announcement as a “surprise.”
During a press conference Tuesday at City Hall, Mayor Daniel Lurie painted the Vanderbilt deal as a way to re-energize downtown.
The search for a university began about a year ago, with the help of Lurie’s economic policy chief, Ned Segal, and several schools were considered for expansion downtown.
“Vanderbilt quickly stood out,” said Lurie. “We invited their leadership team. We walked them through our city and toward sites to help them think through what was possible. We showed them our downtown and surrounding area, not as it was described in the news, but as it is today and where it’s going next.”
The school will have approximately 1,000 students, with around 750 residing on campus. CCA now has approximately 1,300 students, according to its website.
Vanderbilt said it will “honor CCA’s century-long legacy in the Bay Area in numerous ways,” including operating a California College of the Arts Institute at Vanderbilt and housing the college’s museum, the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts. Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said the school had considered the San Francisco Chronicle’s newsroom at Fifth and Mission Streets as a relocation site, but CCA’s buildings had all of the facilities for an academic institution.
“Vanderbilt’s decision to invest in our city is a powerful testament to the fact that San Francisco is on the rise,” Lurie said. “As Vanderbilt establishes its presence, they will carry forward CCA’s legacy and continue the work of educating the next generation of creative leaders in our city.”
The press conference was briefly interrupted when Marv Tseu, a CCA board member, fell and hit his head.
When it resumed, Lurie announced a fundraising campaign for the school, but no information was disclosed on the goal or potential donors.
However, billionaire Chris Larsen, who has regularly pledged financial support to city initiatives, was seen at Tuesday’s press conference. Others spotted were Brandon Boze of Bridges Capital, a Vanderbilt alumnus, as well as finance executive David Stiepleman, who leads Lurie’s downtown revitalization project.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
