The flood of easy student loans and the pool of middle-class parents willing to give their children an arts education have both dried up in the wake of the Great Recession. Operating costs remain high, and competition from other arts schools is stiff. It now stands at slightly more than 8,000, having dropped by a staggering 2,000 in the past three years alone. After peaking at 12,500 students in 2008, enrollment has been crashing. Now Columbia has hit another, much sharper turning point-one that’s viewed by trustees as a long-overdue moment of reinvention and by some teachers and students as an existential threat. By 1992, when Alexandroff retired, Columbia had 7,000 students and was one of the great success stories in American higher education-a school that had evolved in tandem with the city as it shed its provincial industrial past and grew into a global hub for the service and creative industries. Columbia College Chicago is the South Loop’s biggest property owner.Īll this represents a remarkable state of affairs for a place that started out as an oratory institute in 1890, turned itself into a small trade school for radio broadcasters, and then, in the 1960s, under the stewardship of pioneering president Mike Alexandroff, morphed into an idiosyncratic arts college with a reputation for welcoming low-income students, counterculture provocateurs, and all manner of self-styled misfits who had rejected, or been rejected by, mainstream schools. Now, thanks in no small part to the school’s outsize presence, the neighborhood bustles with students and young professionals and is pushing skyward with new condo towers. Many of these properties were bought when the South Loop was shabby. Today the college owns 17 buildings in the South Loop: turn-of-the-century office towers, industrial lofts, former theaters, and more. Then, too, there is Columbia’s physical footprint. When you count the more than 1,000 teachers who currently make up the part-time faculty, to say nothing of the paying audiences who have patronized the Chicago arts institutions that alumni have founded or energized, Columbia’s imprint on the city’s creative and economic life grows geometrically.
The current president of HBO Films went to Columbia, as did SNL cast member Aidy Bryant and rapper Common, to name just a few. Many more have found rewarding careers in art, film, music, theater, television, radio, photojournalism, and, more recently, digital gaming and design. Former Columbia students have garnered, by the school’s own count, six Oscars, two Grammys, 20 Emmys, two Tonys, and two Pulitzers. Over the course of its nearly 130-year history, this open-door school for the creative arts in the South Loop has turned out more than 100,000 alumni, many of whom have gone on to great things. Above: Columbia College’s Media Production Center, on South State StreetĬolumbia College may be Chicago’s most overlooked big deal.
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