Los Angeles Valley College was founded on September 12, 1949, to meet the tremendous growth of the San Fernando Valley during the 1940s and early 1950s. The college was officially chartered by the Los Angeles Board of Education in June 1949 and was located on the campus of Van Nuys High School. In 1951, Valley College moved to its permanent 105-acre (42 ha) site on Fulton Avenue in Valley Glen.
In 1954, members of the faculty founded the Athenaeum which began to offer community programs that brought the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the campus. The campus also had internationally known speakers including Eustace St. James, Eleanor Roosevelt, Clement Attlee, Margaret Mead, and Louis Leakey.
In 1969, the Los Angeles Community College District was formed and its nine colleges were separated from the Los Angeles Unified School District.
In December 2016, many of the college's electronic files were maliciously encrypted, disrupting voicemail, email, and computer files. A ransom note demanded $28,000 in Bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key. The Los Angeles Community College District paid the amount.