Hillsdale College hopes to develop an educational center and a K-12 school in Placer County, California, over the course of several years, according to Hillsdale General Counsel Robert Norton.
A now-corrected CBS article from March 5 erroneously reported that Hillsdale is planning an undergraduate satellite campus for the site.
“If completed, the campus could eventually serve about 6,000 students and include more than 1,100 student housing units,” the CBS article stated.
The figures included in the CBS article are not from Hillsdale but from a project the University of Warwick proposed for the site in 2017, according to Vice President of Media Outreach and Public Relations Emily Davis. That project fell through before Hillsdale acquired the property in 2021.
There are no current plans to build a satellite undergraduate campus at the location, though the Board of Trustees may still consider the possibility in the future, according to Norton.
“I have not heard excitement on the board level or anywhere else that we’re going to have another undergraduate campus there at this moment,” Norton said. “It’s been talked about as maybe a notion, but it’s sort of ‘who knows.’”
Angelo K. Tsakopoulos originally donated the 1,100-acre property to the University Development Foundation in 2012 for the purpose of expanding higher education in the Greater Sacramento Region. The UDF transferred the land to Hillsdale College after arrangements with other colleges including Drexel University and Warrick fell through.
The Tsakopoulos family subsequently donated the Tower Theater in downtown Roseville to the college, and Hillsdale has been hosting events in the space since 2025. The college recently purchased a neighboring half-acre lot and plans to use it for drop-off, parking, and outdoor events at the theater.
The property, just outside of Roseville, California, is divided into roughly three sections, according to Norton. About 500 acres of the property will be sold for residential housing. On an adjacent 13.5-acre parcel, the college hopes to build the educational center and school. Plans for the remainder of the property have yet to be determined.
Hillsdale has begun to develop the 500-acre parcel of residential property in preparation to sell that portion of the land. The rising cost of construction in California has previously prevented the sale of the property, but those costs have now stabilized, Norton said.
“What moving forward looks like, in all likelihood, is selling off the residential property in the front of the parcel along the main road so they can start putting houses in there,” Norton said. “That brings your utilities to the site. And then after you’ve got that started, you’ve got the utilities there and you just keep going deeper into the property.”
Once the college sells the residential property, it plans to develop an educational center similar to the Blake Center in Connecticut, on the adjacent 13.5-acre property in California.
“It’ll probably be where we hold events, much like CCAs,” Norton said. “There will probably be some offices there. We will probably hold teacher training there for the K-12 teachers.”
Other possibilities include a K-12 school, possibly on the same site as the education center.
“We like what we have here with the academy being near the location of the higher ed,” Norton said. “Dr. Arnn really likes the idea of having schools near where these outposts might be.”
Norton said the board currently favors building a graduate school on the remainder of the property. As far as an undergraduate campus, CBS’s original reporting was wrong.
“Is it impossible? No. Could it happen? Yes. Is it going to happen in the next five years? I would not bet any of my retirement money on that,” Norton said. “Right now, in the foreseeable future, smart money is on that 13.5-acre parcel and maybe getting a K-12 school.”
