Columbia College Chicago was founded in 1890 as the Columbia School of Oratory by Mary A. Blood and Ida Morey Riley, both graduates of the Monroe Conservatory of Oratory (now Emerson College), in Boston, Massachusetts. Mary Blood became the College’s first president, serving in this capacity until her death in 1927. The women established a co-educational school that “should stand for high ideals, for the teaching of expression by methods truly educational, for the gospel of good cheer, and for the building of sterling Christian good character” in the Stevens’ Art Gallery Building, 24 E. Adams Street.

After the death of Ida Riley in 1901, the school changed its name to the Columbia College of Expression in 1905 and its location, Steinway Hall, 17 Van Buren Street, as the institution added coursework in teaching to the curriculum. In 1917, the institution moved to 3358 S. Michigan Avenue. In 1928, the college was incorporated into the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, a family-run school centered on training its students for teaching kindergarten and moved to 120 E. Pearson Street. In 1936, a renewed version of Columbia emerged, focusing on the growing field of radio broadcasting, at 410 S. Michigan Avenue.

In 1944, the College left its partnership with the Pestalozzi-Froebel school and changed its name to Columbia College with Norman Alexandroff as its president. During the 1950s, the College broadened its educational base to include television and other mass communication areas and moved to 207 S. Wabash. Prosperity was short lived, however, and by 1961, Columbia was a dying institution with fewer than 200 students, a part-time faculty of 25, and no endowments, subsidies or visibility.

In 1961, Mirron (Mike) Alexandroff, son of Norman Alexandroff, who worked at the school since 1947, became president, and created a liberal arts college with a “hands-on minds-on” approach to arts and media education with a progressive social agenda. He established an open-admissions policy so that any qualified high school graduate could attend college and be taught by some of the most influential and creative professionals in Chicago. For the next thirty years, Alexandroff worked to build Columbia College into an urban institution that has helped change the face of higher education. In 1964, the college moved into rented warehouse space at 540 N. Lake Shore Drive and by 1969, the college's enrollment had reached 700.