60 Years of Opening Doors: The University of West Los Angeles Celebrates a Landmark Anniversary
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Founded in 1966 with six students and a belief that working adults deserve access to quality higher education, University of West Los Angeles has spent six decades producing attorneys and business leaders who reflect and comprise the community that is Los Angeles
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In the spring of 1966, four educators from Culver City High School did something quietly radical. They opened a school with a handful of students and a simple premise: that working adults in Los Angeles deserved a path to legal and professional education that fit around the demands of their lives. Sixty years later, University of West Los Angeles stands as a testament to that founding conviction – and to the thousands of graduates who took it seriously.
This year, University of West Los Angeles marks its 60th anniversary as one of Southern California’s most distinctive institutions of higher learning – a private university with two campuses, one near LAX in Inglewood and one in Woodland Hills, serving a student body that looks and lives like Los Angeles itself. Its graduates hail from more than 65 countries. More than 2,200 alumni are practicing attorneys in California today.
The School of Law, which received accreditation from the Committee of Bar Examiners of the State Bar of California in 1978 and has maintained it continuously ever since, has long served those who might otherwise have been priced or scheduled out of the legal profession. The law school expanded significantly in 2002 with the acquisition of the San Fernando Valley College of Law, the first law school in the San Fernando Valley, thereby deepening its reach into the communities it was built to serve.
The School of Business, launched in 2012, extended that same mission into the world of commerce, organizational management, technology and leadership. Today, University of West Los Angeles offers a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (degree completion program) and a Master of Science in Leadership, Management, and Technology. These business degrees are designed for the modern working professional, with hybrid and fully online program options that reflect the realities of contemporary adult life. They are taught by faculty with real-world business leadership experience, deepening the practical, real-world value of the programs.
What has made University of West Los Angeles endure is not just its flexibility, but its culture. With intimate class sizes, faculty drawn from the ranks of working practitioners, and a support system oriented toward first-generation and non-traditional students, the university has built a reputation as a place where ambition meets genuine mentorship. Students who work full time and attend school part time are not the exception; they are the rule, and the institution is designed around their success.
The university is accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission and its law school’s state bar accreditation, which covers both on-site and online modalities and reflects a deliberate choice to prioritize access and equity over the more restrictive pathways of ABA accreditation. That choice has drawn criticism in some quarters, but it has also put law degrees within reach for students who might never have seen themselves standing before a California court.
Los Angeles has always been a city of reinvention, of people arriving with big dreams and limited resources and finding ways to build something remarkable. For six decades, University of West Los Angeles has been one of the quiet engines of that story – training lawyers who fight for immigrant families, business leaders who anchor neighborhoods, and professionals who carry the weight of their communities’ hopes. That is a legacy worth celebrating.
University of West Los Angeles is located at 9800 S. La Cienega Blvd., Inglewood, and at 21650 Oxnard St., Woodland Hills.
For more information, visit uwla.edu.
