CORRECTION: This article previously incorrectly stated that Palm Beach County officials donated five acres of land to Vanderbilt. It was updated on Sept. 5, 2024, to correctly state that West Palm Beach city donated two acres of land, and Palm Beach County will vote on an additional gift-of-land agreement in October.
Vanderbilt proposed a $520 million graduate school campus for business and computing in West Palm Beach, Fla., this past spring. This week, Florida officials expressed support for the project and started planning a gift-of-land agreement with the university.
After Chancellor Diermeier and local developer Stephen Ross presented their plans for the campus, West Palm Beach city officials voted to donate two acres of land for the campus on Sept. 3. On Aug. 20, Palm Beach County commissioners expressed vocal support for the project and will vote on donating another five acres of land in October.
The seven-acre plot was initially intended for a University of Florida graduate campus. According to Fortune Magazine, Vanderbilt alumni in the West Palm Beach area started trying to attract the university to West Palm Beach 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 told Fortune Magazine that this 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, fintech and investment banking,” the representative said in a statement to The 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.”
According to the city’s plans, the graduate campus could open as early as Fall 2026 and will focus on business, artificial intelligence and data science programs.
Dean of the Owen School of Business Thomas Steenburgh expressed optimism about Vanderbilt’s early plans for a South Florida campus. He explained that this 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 this past April. “The big picture is that branding-wise, we would be one of the only schools in the South where we have a presence in the two rapidly growing expanding economic markets, and that would be terrific for us.”
Steenburgh emphasized the impact of this campus on the local Florida economy and environment for job opportunities.
“It gives us access to great financial institutions — really important hedge funds, investment banks and venture capitalists,” Steenburgh said. “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.”
Steenburgh added that the South Florida campus will add to the strength of Vanderbilt’s campus in Nashville.
“We’re pretty good in fintech locally, but it’s stronger in SoFlo, so it creates opportunity. Being more closely aligned with more important industries is part of what we’re looking to get out of this,” Steenburgh said. “Anything we do down there is not taking away from what we do up here. This gives us access to new forms of capital, 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 project will be $500 million and require $100 million of annual spending from Vanderbilt.
Senior Jaeden Gough shared concerns about committing Vanderbilt funding towards an out-of-state project.
“I feel like there’s so much work to be done here in Nashville,” Gough said. “Why are you investing in something that’s three states away?”
Rachel Wei (B.S. ‘21) expressed optimism about the new graduate campus while citing concerns about the utility of its location in Florida.
“It seems like Vanderbilt’s proposed West Palm Beach campus will provide valuable educational and growth opportunities for the local community and alumni in the area,” Wei said. “However, from my perspective as an alum who has lived and worked on the East and West coasts, Vanderbilt could be doing more to expand their reach and reputation in major cities like New York, D.C. and Los Angeles.”
Steenburgh shared that the faculty is still in its early phases of thinking about the West Palm Beach campus. The project’s future is dependent on Vanderbilt’s ability to raise funding for it. The next step will be getting a group of faculty together to discuss the specific programs that this school could offer.
“Everything is gonna be governed out of [Nashville], so we’re gonna have academic control over what happens,” Steenburgh said.
Steenburgh said he thinks that Vanderbilt’s embrace of “radical collaboration” is 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,” Steenburgh said. “Making sure that that remains strong here [in Nashville] is really important, so we’ll continue to build that too.”
Alison Winters and Tasfia Alam contributed reporting to this piece.
