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Diving certificate:

• Vanderbilt University received approval Tuesday to build a $519.6 million, 300,000-square-foot graduate campus in West Palm Beach, Florida. This could begin with the organization of courses from 2026.
• County commissioners voted unanimously to expand the Tennessee-based private university in the region. Under the plan, the county would donate 5 acres of land worth $46 million.
• The additional campus would expand Vanderbilt’s business school and include programming in artificial intelligence and data science and an innovation center to connect the university with entrepreneurial activities in the region.

Insight into the dive:

Vanderbilt focused its pitch for a campus in West Palm Beach on the economic benefits it would bring to the region.

This includes campus and institutional contributions – including planned operating expenses of $100 million per year – as well as potential commercial spin-offs and intellectual property arising from campus activities.

SThe student-led initiative alone is expected to inject tens of millions of dollars into the local economy each year, according to a presentation in August by Nathan Green, Vanderbilt’s vice chancellor for government and community relations. In total, Vanderbilt expects the campus to include 1,000 students and more than 100 faculty members.

All in all, Vanderbilt said it was The total economic impact on the area would be $7 billion in the first 25 years and reach $24 billion over 75 years.

These are “really big numbers, bigger than any other use we could put this property to,, Harvey Oyer, an attorney for Vanderbilt, said in Tuesday’s presentation to the commission. “There is no other use of these five acres that would have a greater intellectual impact on our community.”

As part of its agreement with the county, Vanderbilt committed to meeting certain spending goals in developing and operating the campus, such as spending $300 million by the time campus construction was completed. Oyer noted that the university plans to spend beyond that amount.

Along with the county’s land contribution to the campus, the city of West Palm Beach granted Vanderbilt the right in September to develop 2.2 acres of city-owned land on the site.

As the company looks to expand in Florida, Vanderbilt has also recently taken steps to increase its presence in New York. The university announced this in September signed a rental agreement in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood for a campus that will “give birth to the world after Vanderbilt and Vanderbilt.”

The university did not share specific plans for programming in this area. It will discuss the question with input from a newly established academic advisory committee that includes professors from the disciplines of humanities, sciences, engineering and business. Vanderbilt’s vice provost for undergraduate education chairs the committee.

Vanderbilt’s flagship campus in Nashville had 13,710 students, including 6,559 graduate students, in fall 2022, according to federal data. Both numbers increased significantly compared to five years earlier, when Vanderbilt had a total of 12,592 undergraduate and 5,707 graduate students.