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California College of the Arts is closing; Vanderbilt buying campus

KALW | By Sunni Khalid
Published January 13, 2026 at 2:49 PM PST
The San Francisco campus of the California College of the Arts
HaeB
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Wikimedia Commons
The San Francisco campus of the California College of the Arts

After 120 years, the struggling California College of the Arts, or CCA, announced that it will be closing its doors for good next year.

The announcement of CCA’s closure was made today.

CCA’s president David Howse said that falling enrollment and a long-standing structural deficit made it difficult to maintain existing programs, or to fund new ones.

In recent years, the CCA had invested more than 100 million dollars into its San Francisco campus, with the help of emergency donations from private donors and the state in a bid to remain afloat.

Vanderbilt University – which annually ranks as one of the nation’s top universities — is buying the CCA’s Design Campus in the Showplace Square neighborhood. It’s also planning to open satellite campuses next year in New York City and West Palm Beach, Florida.

The Nashville-headquartered university plans to establish its campus in San Francisco next year. It plans to serve about a thousand undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty and staff.

The new campus will include a California College of the Arts at Vanderbilt, including the existing Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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Sunni Khalid
Sunni M. Khalid is a veteran of more than 40 years in journalism, having worked in print, radio, television, and web journalism.
See stories by Sunni Khalid