Hard Choices Loom Alongside Deficit for California College of the Arts

The nonprofitCalifornia College of the Arts(CCA) is mulling cost-cutting measures as a way of reckoning with a $20 million budget shortfall caused by a decline in enrollment, theSan Francisco Chroniclereports. The Bay Area art school estimates that it will kick off the 2024–25 school year with between 1,250 and 1,290 full-time students this fall, about two-thirds the number attending in 2019, when the college enrolled a record 1,800 students, and fewer than the 1,400 who enrolled last fall.

CCA president David Howse informed staff and faculty of the deficit in a meeting earlier this month. In a memo sent to staffers on August 23, he mentioned that CCA might look to layoffs as one way to deal with the gap. The school is additionally planning to revamp its course offerings to draw students in. Howse also posed the idea of a merger with another school, pointing to the 2022 merger of Mills College in Oakland and Northeastern University in Boston, and to the collaboration between the California Institute of the Arts in Southern California and the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier that was announced this past spring.

The deficit arrives as the college gets ready to welcome a donation-funded $123 million expansion consolidating its San Francisco and Oakland campuses and giving it 90,000 square feet of new studio and classroom space. In an immediate effort to save money, the school has revealed that it will scale back a planned two-day celebration of its expansion, which also includes a new home for its well-regarded CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.

CCA is the only accredited nonprofit art college remaining in Northern California, following thedemiseof the San Francisco Art Institute in 2023. Like many colleges, universities, and art schools across the US, it finds itself operating in a landscape that has shifted enormously thanks to the Covid-19 crisis, as attested to, for example, by the recent and suddenclosureof Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, which postdated by just eighteen months theannouncementthat the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also in Philadelphia, would shutter at the end of the 2024–25 school year.

Despite its fiscal woes, one remedy CCA has said it does not plan to implement is a tuition increase.

“While raising tuition would offer some additional revenue, it would not significantly reduce the deficit and could make it more difficult for some of our students to continue their education at CCA,” a spokesperson told theArt Newspaper. “Our priority is to balance financial sustainability with maintaining accessibility for our students.”