Vanderbilt University plans to open a new campus near downtown San Francisco, an expansion for the prestigious research school and a boost to the city’s turnaround efforts.
Vanderbilt is acquiring the facilities and other assets of the California College of the Arts, which has been having financial problems, with plans to create a campus focused on innovation, arts and design by the 2027 school year. The deal, being announced Tuesday by San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, marks the latest development for the Nashville, Tenn., institution, sometimes called the Harvard of the South, after forays into New York and Florida.
The new San Francisco location will host 1,000 full-time students and 100 faculty. The move is a boon to the mayor’s efforts to revitalize a city that had been struggling with homelessness, drug use and crime following the pandemic.
Since taking office a year ago, the Democrat and Levi Strauss heir has overseen a rebound focused on public safety and bringing back businesses that has won praise from tech leaders driving an artificial-intelligence boom—and a reprieve by President Trump from a planned surge of federal immigration agents.
“A year ago, people questioned whether San Francisco would ever recover, and today major institutions like Vanderbilt see our city as the place to be,” Lurie said in an interview. “This is a huge vote of confidence.”
The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Vanderbilt, a 153-year-old school with about 7,300 undergraduates, has been expanding into places it considers centers of innovation, said Chancellor Daniel Diermeier. Last year, Vanderbilt established a new campus in New York City—its first outside Nashville—and recently got the green light from its board to proceed with another one in West Palm Beach, Fla. The school is also building an institute focused on quantum innovation closer to home in Chattanooga, Tenn.
“We love that San Francisco is the innovation capital of the world and all the AI,” Diermeier said in an interview.
For any school, expansion carries risks, such as not hitting enrollment targets, said Scott Andes, senior adviser for economic development at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are a lot of things that can go awry, and the landscape for higher education is uncertain now,” he said.
Shortly after taking office, Lurie and his team began reaching out to colleges, including Vanderbilt, about the possibility of moving into the city as part of an effort to help fill buildings. Despite its rebound, San Francisco still has one of the largest office vacancy rates in the country.
Diermeier recalls meeting with Lurie’s head of economic development, former Twitter finance chief Ned Segal, over dinner almost a year ago, and talking to Lurie afterward. “It was very clear we were both very excited about this,” the chancellor said. “They did everything they could to make this work.”
That included taking the Vanderbilt team on a tour of a number of potential campus sites around downtown, Lurie said. “It was hundreds and hundreds of hours of work,” he added.