Which school, before anything else

Pepperdine does not hold one graduation. It holds several, on separate dates, run by separate schools, and as of this check only half of them have announced 2027.

School	2027 ceremony	Venue
Graziadio Business School	Saturday 17 April 2027	Alumni Park, Malibu campus
Caruso School of Law	Friday 21 May 2027, 10:30 a.m.	Alumni Park, Malibu campus
Seaver College (undergraduate)	not published	n/a
Education and Psychology (GSEP)	not published	n/a

Five weeks separate the two published ceremonies. They are not a graduation weekend; they are different events for different people.

Seaver is the gap, and it is the one most families need

Seaver College is Pepperdine’s undergraduate school. For most families planning a Pepperdine graduation trip, Seaver is the ceremony.

It has published nothing for 2027. The string “2027” does not appear on its graduation pages at all. Its most recent ceremony was Saturday 2 May 2026 at 10:30 a.m. in Alumni Park, and that is where its site still stops.

This page does not carry a projected Seaver date. Malibu is an expensive market where a family may book non-refundable months ahead, and a plausible-looking date invented from last year’s pattern is worse than an honest gap.

The misattribution worth knowing about

If you have searched for this already, you may have seen Saturday 17 April 2027 presented as Pepperdine’s commencement without qualification.

That is the Graziadio Business School date. It is real, it is published, and it is not the undergraduate ceremony. Search summaries attach it to Seaver often enough that it is worth stating plainly: if your graduate is an undergraduate, 17 April 2027 is not their date.

The same caution applies in the other direction. Graziadio’s page covers Fall 2026, Spring 2027 and Summer 2027 graduates in that one April ceremony, so a business-school family whose graduate finishes in summer still travels in April.

Both published ceremonies are in the same place

Graziadio and Caruso Law both graduate at Alumni Park, on the Malibu campus above the Pacific Coast Highway. That is why they share a page here: the dates differ but the lodging problem does not.

Malibu is a narrow coastal market with very little inventory near campus, and prices to match. The practical consequence of Pepperdine’s split calendar is actually favourable: because the schools graduate weeks apart rather than on one weekend, demand is spread rather than stacked, which is the opposite of most clusters on this site.

We have not measured this cluster’s availability. When the availability series for this batch was run, Pepperdine had no published future date to measure a window against, and the two dates above were recovered afterwards. That is a gap in the evidence rather than a finding about the market, and it is stated rather than filled with an estimate.

Where to stay along the coast, and the trade-off between Malibu itself and the towns either side, is on where to stay.