NYU Shanghai is a go, the university reported in a campus-wide email from president John Sexton and provost David McLaughlin last night.
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The school, which is NYU's second degree-granting campus outside New York, received the final green light from China's Ministry of Education, according to the email. This agreement follows NYU's January announcement that the university received funding from the city of Shanghai and the district of Pudong to construct the campus.
"NYU's evolution from being 'in and of the city' to being 'in and of the world' is proceeding with enormous success, and the creation of NYU Shanghai is another major step in shaping NYU as a global network university that permits students and faculty to circulate smoothly in pursuit of their scholarship," the email said.
NYU Shanghai is scheduled to open in the fall of 2013 to as many as 3,000 students. 2,000 to 2,400 of these will be undergraduates, up from the 1,600 the university approximated in January. Approximately half of the student body will be made up of Chinese nationals, and the remainder will be international students, primarily from Asia.
Sexton spoke with WSN from a bus in Shanghai early this morning, on his way to the groundbreaking ceremony for the new campus.
NYU Shanghai will operate as a Tier 1 university, recruiting from China's top 60,000 high school graduates — or the top 0.5 percent of college-aged students, Sexton said.
The school will have a liberal arts curriculum; courses are taught in English, and students are expected to be fluent in Mandarin by graduation.
The institution's costs are covered by government subsidies, tuition and philanthropy. As is the case with NYU Abu Dhabi, the local government will provide funds for the operation and construction of the campus. Students are also expected to receive generous financial aid packages, "although probably not at the same level as NYU Abu Dhabi," Sexton said.
The university would not specify, however, the exact percentage of campus funds that comes from government subsidies.
As is the case with NYU's campus in Abu Dhabi, the university's partners in Shanghai have requested that the budget be kept confidential, "so we're keeping it confidential," Sexton said.
Some Shanghai professors are expected to be taken from NYU in New York, and will be placed on rotating schedules, teaching for one to several semesters in Shanghai before returning to the Washington Square campus. Though Sexton said they will not be precluded from doing so, professors from NYU New York would not likely teach in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi for consecutive cycles.
"The blend will be similar to that in NYU Abu Dhabi," Sexton said. "What will happen is that as departments can forecast faculty that go to Abu Dhabi, they're authorized to hire additional faculty in New York. It's a way for us to stay in the game of bringing in new talent [and] it allows us to stay in the talent market for New York."
The approval comes months after NYU Abu Dhabi, the university's first international degree-granting school, welcomed its inaugural freshman class in September 2010.
Sexton said a fourth portal in Europe is a possibility for NYU within the next ten years, but he stressed that "we don't see there being more than four portals," during this decade.
Though the next site has not yet been selected, Sexton said a portal campus in Spain "has a logic to it." He said that the university has been in talks with the Spanish government about possibly building a site in Spain for quite some time.
"First of all, there's a lot of connection to Latin America that comes from Spain, then … we would have Spanish, Arabic and Chinese as the major languages in the world right now all covered," Sexton said.
NYU has had roots in Spain for 50 years; the university's site in Madrid is the school's oldest study abroad site.
"The Spanish would like us to do it, but whether the Spanish can come up with the proper arrangement is the question," he said.
