City College to Close Downtown SF Campus This Summer Amid Low Enrollment

City College of San Francisco will close its 47-year-old Downtown Center at Fourth and Mission this summer, vacating an 84,000-square-foot building and relocating culinary, fashion and language classes to other under-enrolled sites, including the college’s Chinatown campus. The move puts a large, city-owned property back on the market for partners even as downtown San Francisco struggles with high vacancy.

Enrollment has collapsed since a decade ago. State records show City College enrolled the equivalent of 22,541 full-time students across six campuses about ten years ago; records for this fall show 9,172 full-time equivalent students, a 59 percent drop. Trustees were shown an even lower figure in an updated presentation by Yee: 7,355 FTE. That enrollment plunge prompted the state to freeze funding for City College at 2024-25 levels “until more students show up,” while the Downtown campus is not fully protected by that minimal funding guarantee because it “operates at the state's discretion.”

City College owns the Downtown Center and plans to seek tenants or collaborators for the 84,000-square-foot building. “City College will look for ‘potential partnerships with other educational institutions, community-based organizations, the city and other partners’ that might move into the building,” Messina said. Administrators say programs now held at Fourth and Mission will be shifted to other under-used locations across the system, with Chinatown explicitly named as a receiving site.

The closure compounds labor and program uncertainty on campus. Local 2121 and union organizers reported that on March 12 over seven hundred students and faculty rallied on campus and at City Hall to protest the issuance of 163 layoff notices for full-time faculty, notices that the union says could result in layoffs of roughly 60 percent of all faculty, full- and part-time. Local 2121 president Alisa Messer said, “There is no one person or group behind the curtain pulling strings, many interest groups glom onto the attack.”

San Francisco civic leaders and downtown business groups have been watching campus decisions closely because of the city’s persistent vacancy problem. City College’s Downtown Center closure “will be the latest vacancy in the ongoing exodus of businesses and other tenants from the city's once-vibrant core,” and more than 30 percent of office buildings remained empty at the end of 2025, a metric officials cite when weighing reuse options for large spaces like Fourth and Mission.

The decision arrives amid a wider regional shakeup in higher education. California College of the Arts announced it will wind down operations and shutter by the end of the 2026–27 school year, with Vanderbilt slated to operate a West Coast outpost on the campus; CCA faced a $20 million shortfall in 2024 and even a March 2025 matching gift of $22.5 million was not enough to save the school.

City College officials and trustees framed the Downtown Center as a “valued part of City College's presence in the community.” Aliya Chisti, chair of the college’s Board of Trustees, said the campus is a “valued part of City College's presence in the community, and its future will continue to be an important conversation.” With the summer closure set and program moves already planned, the college says it will pursue partnerships and return to the Board of Trustees for further decisions on timing, staffing and reuse.