Vanderbilt University plans to build a $520M graduate school campus in West Palm Beach, FL. The campus, focusing on business and computing, aims to enhance local economy and provide job opportunities. The project is in early planning stages, with funding and program offerings still being determined.
This past spring, officials with Vanderbilt University, located in Nashville, Tenn., proposed a $520 million graduate school campus for business and computing in West Palm Beach, Fla.
That was followed in August by Florida officials giving a major boost to the effort by donating a 7-acre plot of land to the university.
After Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and local South Florida developer Stephen Ross presented their plans for the campus, West Palm Beach city officials voted to donate 2 acres of land for the project on Aug. 20. The very next day, Palm Beach County contributed an adjacent 5-acre parcel, according to the Vanderbilt Hustler, the university's official student newspaper, in a Sept. 3 report.
The entire 7 acres were initially intended for a University of Florida (UF) graduate campus. Fortune Magazine reported, however, that Vanderbilt alumni in the West Palm Beach area began trying to attract the university to the South Florida city in 2023 after the UF agreement fell through.
Before construction on the campus can begin, county and city officials must conduct a detailed review of the process and bring it up for a vote. Palm Beach County Mayor Maria Sachs believes that that process will take at least a month.
A university representative said Vanderbilt is working with local leaders in West Palm Beach to determine how it can best contribute to the community.
"We are assessing the potential for expanding our business education and computing programs to West Palm Beach — an area of tremendous growth and investment in private equity, venture capital, [financial technology, or fintech], and investment banking," the representative said in a statement to the Vanderbilt Hustler. "We have begun meeting with West Palm Beach city and Palm Beach County officials about parcels of land we are exploring as the location for this project."
If all goes well with the construction, West Palm Beach officials noted, the Vanderbilt graduate campus could open as early as Fall 2026.
Vanderbilt Looks to Build Campus ‘Of the Future'
Thomas Steenburgh, dean of the Owen School of Business at Vanderbilt, expressed his optimism about the university's early plans for a South Florida campus. In speaking with the college's student newspaper, he explained that the new campus would not only be a site for the business school but for a new Vanderbilt graduate school of "collective computing."
"[At Vanderbilt,] we're interested in being a business school of the future, a university of the future," Steenburgh said in an interview. "The big picture is that branding-wise, we would be one of the only schools in the South where we have a presence in two [of the more] rapidly growing economic markets [in the region], and that would be terrific for us."
He also emphasized the impact of the Vanderbilt graduate school campus on the local Florida economy and environment as far as job opportunities.
"It gives us access to great financial institutions — really important hedge funds, investment banks and venture capitalists," Steenburgh explained. "They don't have the talent to manage the businesses to the level that they'd like. [Building business programs] gives us a way to place our students very quickly in the areas of the economy that we'd like to have a presence in."
Plus, he added that the South Florida campus will enhance the strength of Vanderbilt's main campus in Nashville.
"We're pretty good in fintech locally, but it's stronger in South Florida, so it creates opportunity. Being closely aligned with more important industries is part of what we're looking to get out of this," Steenburgh said from his Nashville office. "Anything we do down there is not taking away from what we do up here. This gives us access to new forms of capital, and people that we don't know now, so it's really extending the importance of what we're doing."
On Aug. 16, Dennis Grady, interim CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of the Palm Beaches, announced on LinkedIn that the local economic impact of the graduate school campus project will be $500 million and require $100 million of annual spending from the university.
Funding, Program Offerings to Be Determined
Steenburgh told the Vanderbilt student newspaper that the faculty is still in its early phases of thinking about the West Palm Beach campus, while adding that the project's future is dependent on the university's ability to raise funding for it. The next step will be getting a group of faculty together to discuss the specific programs that the graduate school could offer, he noted.
"Everything is going to be governed out of [Nashville], so we're going to have academic control over what happens."
Steenburgh sees Vanderbilt's embrace of "radical collaboration" as being a large part of what makes it special as a university.
"That's the genesis of things — people with new points of view finding a new way of doing things," he said. "Making sure that that remains strong here [in Nashville] is really important, so we'll continue to build that too."
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