Two Bay Area colleges to close, lay off hundreds of staff

The Art Institute of California, San Francisco, is closing. The Art Institute of California, San Francisco, is closing. Photo: Rebecca Aydin Photo: Rebecca Aydin Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Two Bay Area colleges to close, lay off hundreds of staff 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Hundreds of faculty and staff are out of jobs with the closures of the Art Institute of California, San Francisco, and the Alameda campus of Argosy University, a general education school.

Dream Center Education Holdings, a Pittsburgh organization that acquired schools affiliated with the Art Institute of California and Argosy University last year, will be closing these campuses, as well as some others in California, in December. (The Art Institute of California, San Francisco, is a subsidiary of Argosy; it is not related to the similarly named San Francisco Art Institute.)

“Local demand at the physical locations where we decided to discontinue campus-based programs has been far surpassed by the demand for online programs in these markets, as evidenced by declining enrollments which have made these campuses unsustainable,” Anne Dean, the Dream Center’s senior director of communications, said in an email. “We came to realize we would need to discontinue campus programs on a larger scale if we were to truly focus on investing toward a more flexible curriculum to meet student demand.”

Some 138 employees of the Art Institute of California, San Francisco, are getting laid off, plus 78 more at Argosy’s Alameda campus, according to letters that the Dream Center sent to the state.

Students unable to finish their degrees before the closures will be eligible for tuition reductions or grants, according to Dean. Transferring to another Dream Center campus will make students eligible for a 50 percent tuition reduction, while those transferring to a partner institution will be eligible for a $5,000 grant.

Rebecca Aydin is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rebecca.aydin@sfchronicle.com