To begin with, Coleman College is now Coleman University and they left La Mesa in 2005. You can find them in San Diego.
The site is two buildings; the building closest to the road used to be the La Mesa Bowl, a bowling alley built in 1962 and purchased by the college in 1980; they added the two-story medical training building at rear and increased the available parking.
So who owns the place now? The Church of Scientology of San Diego. They bought it in 2008 for little over 9 million dollars, and planned to demolish everything for a new structure or structures the size and shape of which they have never revealed.
However that never got off the ground (thank you economic collapse!) so the place just sits a magnet for graffiti, skater kids, homeless people, and photographers looking for modern ruins.
I give it four stars because as a ruin it is situated in the perfect place; on a frontage road next to a freeway, so people driving into La Mesa from San Diego can see it and shudder a little.
more