School is Closed

On January 13, California College of the Arts told its students, staff, and alums that it will wind down at the end of the 2026-27 academic year. The college is 119 years old. It was the last private nonprofit art and design school in Northern California, after the San Francisco Art Institute closed in 2022 and filed for bankruptcy the following year. Vanderbilt University, based in Nashville, is buying the campus.

The arithmetic behind the decision is not mysterious, and that is the unsettling part. Fall headcount fell roughly 30 percent between 2019 and 2024, down to about 1,300 students. Just under 70 percent of the college’s core revenue came from tuition and fees. The college ran a $20 million deficit. In late 2024, the college laid off a tenth of its staff. In early 2025, it received $45 million in emergency donations, half of it from Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, along with a $20 million grant from the State of California. President David Howse’s message said the support bought time, not independence.

Then there's the detail we haven't been able to put down. The anchor institution of Vanderbilt’s new Bay Area campus will be the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design, named in recognition of a seventy-five million dollar gift.

We want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of that observation, and it is not the one we mean. Nobody behaved badly. A family gave a large sum to keep an art school alive; it was not enough, and a larger sum later went to building art and design education inside an institution with an endowment underneath it. That is a rational sequence of decisions. It is also the clearest illustration available of the actual problem.

The money for art and design education still exists. It has stopped flowing to institutions that only do art and design.

Standing alone is the vulnerability. A school teaching one expensive subject, funded almost entirely by fees from students who are openly told the career at the end is uncertain, has no second engine. A university has a dozen.

This is not only an American story, which is why we are writing it for a global list. In England, the Office for Students confirmed in July that creative and performing arts subjects will lose £12.9 million in high-cost teaching support in 2026-27, part of a £50.9 million cut to the Strategic Priorities Grant, itself following a £100 million reduction the year before. Domestic fees are capped, so that gap isn't filled. It gets absorbed by closing courses, or cross-subsidized by departments already under pressure. In Australia, creative arts enrollments have been sliding since the 2021 fee changes made arts degrees dramatically more expensive, and researchers tracking the sector this year describe whole disciplinary pipelines disappearing from entire regions rather than from single campuses.

Now put that beside the other end of the pipe. We have written here about the vanishing junior role, about under-25s falling as a share of UK agency headcount, about a graduating class booing executives who flew in to tell them the future was exciting.

One end of the profession will not hire beginners. The other end is closing the places that make them.

It would be easy, and wrong, to write the sentimental version of this. Art school was not a golden age. It was expensive in ways that frequently had nothing to do with teaching. It produced portfolios that looked like each other, because a tutor with forty students defaults to a house style. It sold a career pathway that had already narrowed. Plenty of the best people we know never went, and some who did are still paying for it.

But it did a handful of things reliably, and they are worth naming, because whatever replaces it has to do them too.

It gave people licensed time. Not free time, but three years in which making things was the job rather than the thing you did after the job finished.

It gave people a crit. Somebody with taste and no financial interest in your feelings telling you what was wrong with the work, in front of other people who were also about to be told. Nothing online does this. Feedback on the internet often arrives as applause or as abuse, and neither one improves a layout. The crit is the hardest thing on this list to reconstruct by yourself, and it's why working in isolation could slowly impact your craft.

It gave people a cohort. The people you started with are the network you will have at forty, and that is not a soft benefit. It's how most work actually gets referred.

Software is the part everyone assumes was the point, and software is the part you can genuinely learn alone in a month.

So what replaces it? Something will, and it will be less institutional and more deliberate. Small studios where senior people still sit close enough to the work to teach it. Apprenticeships that pay actual money. Mentors you seek out rather than ones assigned by an org chart. Local groups meeting often enough to become a real cohort rather than a launch event with a photographer. None of that assembles itself, and it requires people with careers to spend hours they aren't billing.

Which makes this a leadership question rather than a policy one, at least for the people reading this. Governments will do what governments do. In the meantime, a studio can open one junior seat the spreadsheet does not quite justify. It can run an open crit and invite people who do not work there. It can post the pay. It can let a student sit in the room during a client call and hear how the money conversation actually goes. It can pay for the portfolio review instead of charging for it.

We say around here that everything starts small, and we usually mean it as an argument about reduction. Here it is more literal. A profession replaces itself one seat at a time, and at the moment we are not replacing it at all.

CCA graduates its final class in 2027. Somebody in that room is going to make work you admire in 3 to 5 years. The question for the rest of us is who teaches the class after theirs.