Two colleges in Bay Area plan closures

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 and Argosy University last year, will be closing these campuses, as well as some others in California, in December. (The Art Institute, San Francisco, is a subsidiary of Argosy.)

“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, 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.