Northwestern will close its San Francisco campus based on the 18th floor in the Financial District at 44 Montgomery Street, the former headquarters of Wells Fargo bank. Alice Yin photo

After nearly a decade of trying to plant a purple flag in the heart of Silicon Valley, Northwestern University is pulling out of San Francisco — shuttering its downtown campus by spring 2026 and dismantling a cornerstone of the Kellogg School of Management’s West Coast ambitions.

As The Daily Northwestern first reported on Thursday (May 1), the university’s decision to close the 18th-floor campus at 44 Montgomery Street was driven by deepening financial uncertainty. In early April, WBEZ Chicago revealed that nearly $790 million in federal research dollars had been frozen amid a Department of Education civil rights investigation.

The result has been a cascade of canceled grants, stop-work orders, and suspended payments — wiping out major revenue streams and forcing leaders in Evanston to make hard decisions.

One of the first casualties? Kellogg’s presence in San Francisco.

A BOLD BET, NOW UNWINDING

Launched in 2016, Northwestern’s San Francisco campus was meant to be more than just a satellite. A cross-disciplinary outpost hosting programs from Kellogg, the Medill School of Journalism, the Pritzker School of Law, the Segal Design Institute, and the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, it was a beachhead in tech’s backyard. For Kellogg, the Bay Area campus offered proximity to innovation, alumni, venture capital — and prestige. Executive education modules and networking events were designed to deepen ties to a region that has reshaped global business.

That strategy now looks fragile. “The demand for academic program activity in that location no longer supports the need for a dedicated space,” a Northwestern spokesperson tells The Daily Northwestern. “Moving forward, Northwestern will continue to thoughtfully consider strategic educational opportunities that serve the institution’s mission and priorities.”

JP Salvador, the San Francisco site manager, says he found out about the closure just three weeks before it was announced. “When there’s uncertainty in the economy, people don’t donate as much,” he says. “And a lot of the programs are donor-funded.”

Poets&Quants reached out to Kellogg’s leadership late Thursday (May 1) and will update this story with any response. A web page dedicated to the school’s Bay Area Winter Quarter was inoperative as of Thursday evening.

‘NOT A CORE PART OF NORTHWESTERN’

Kellogg’s departure leaves Wharton, which established a San Francisco campus in 2001, as the only elite U.S. B-school with a satellite in the tech capital. (INSEAD is the top European B-school with a presence in the city; in February it announced an expansion of its presence there.) Kellogg still has campuses in Miami, Florida, and Chicago, Illinois, where it has annual cohorts of learners in its top-ranked Executive MBA program and part-time MBA program.

The financial free fall for Northwestern didn’t start in San Francisco. It started in Washington.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on elite universities, ostensibly about civil rights and stamping out anti-semitism, has taken direct aim at Northwestern’s research engine. As WBEZ reported, nearly all of the school’s federal funding is in jeopardy, including Department of Defense contracts and National Science Foundation grants. The implications go far beyond research labs — they ripple across the university’s budget, threatening everything from faculty recruitment to student financial aid.

Caught in the crossfire: programs like Kellogg’s West Coast initiatives, which come with a high price tag. Among the biggest expense: Undergraduate programs, like the Bay Area Immersion Experience jointly run by Medill and Segal, offered students $1,750 stipends to offset San Francisco’s high cost of living.

Salvador says the federal funding freeze was a key cause of the West Coast closure.

“It all comes down to money,” he tells The Daily Northwestern. “If you don’t have it or you’re running out of it, then you have to make some cuts here and there. And San Francisco is not a core part of Northwestern.”

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