Vanderbilt University plans new campus in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Vanderbilt University plans new campus in San Francisco

wsj.com

18 pointsnoleary15 comments

They're also opening a graduate school in Chattanooga (The Quantum Center), and working on their recently-acquired NYC campus.

It's weird that there are only ~100,000 living alumni.

What do I do with these billions of dollars in the endowment? Ah yes buy some really expensive real estate, and continue the whole artificial scarcity that is my brand.

At least they are spending it.

The actual announcement by Vandy - https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2026/01/13/vanderbilt-university...

Includes a lot of info that the WSJ article glazed over (eg. "Vanderbilt’s planned San Francisco campus expects to serve about 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students")

Looking at Vandy NYC [0], I'm guessing they're trying to pull a Wharton@SF and expand their BSchool's presence in the Bay (and thus enhancing their alumni pool) along with subsuming CCA which has been under tough financial strain for the past few years.

I'm also guessing the Nashville moniker is negatively impacting undergrad yield (eg. I and my peers didn't even apply to CS@GT for undergrad because of racial, LGBTQ+, and body autonomy worries in Georgia and I know for a fact that Duke has been facing issues with yield protection as well)

Edit: You may not agree with these views, but they are actively considered by students nowadays. Most American undergrads are now nonwhite, women, or LGBTQ+, and overwhelmingly lean liberal to progressive. As such, schools in Republican states are negatively impacted even if they are located in Democrat bubbles like Nashville, Austin, or Atlanta.

[0] - https://www.vanderbilt.edu/nyc/

Vanderbilt has an acceptance rate of 3-4%, which makes it almost as exclusive as Stanford.

They aren’t having trouble getting applicants.

Yield Rate (percentage of admitted students who accept) is what matters, not acceptance rate.

Most people who get into Vandy (such as me and my peers years ago) also got into Columbia [1], UChicago [2], Northwestern [3], and other similar programs.

Yet Vanderbilt's yield rate of 45% [0] compared to 53-63% of its peers highlights this rising discrepancy, with students choosing to attend alternative peer programs.

The only thing that differentiates Vanderbilt from (eg.) Rice was prestige as a supposed T15, yet Vanderbilt's ranking and prestige has been dropping significantly over the past decade [4], and this leaves a university like Vandy in a tough position.

The overwhelming majority of students who get into a Vanderbilt tier university lean liberal to progressive and/or are a racial minority, and for these candidates Vandy is not as attractive as it's peers (the likelihood of being "hate crimed" as an Asian American is much higher in Nashville compared to New Haven). Conversely, Vandy and Nashville is viewed as too "woke" by conservative students so they are less interested in matriculating (and anyhow, the overwhelming majority of bachelor degree holders end up leaning liberal).

As such, if Vanderbilt wishes to retain it's value proposition, it has no choice but to branch out from it's historical geography becuase it otherwise faces the prospect of being relegated into the same bin as Wake Forest or Tulane - a somewhat prestigious but geographically limited university.

For high achieving students (and their parents) and academic faculty, such a prospect is not very attractive.

[0] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1624-Vanderbilt-...

[1] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-319-Columbia-Uni...

[2] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1416-University-...

[3] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-945-Northwestern...

[4] - https://vanderbilthustler.com/2023/09/19/vanderbilt-drops-to...

I graduated the year before they stopped allowing graduates to walk away without student loans. What a journey that's been (as a blue collar electrician) — still not finished repayment!

Exactly the opposite is happening, enrollment-wise: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-southern-college-boom

I went to GT and was just at a football game with my teenage daughter. She had a blast and commented how many “brown girls like her” were there compared to her very WASPy, super-liberal Maryland school. She also commented about there being babies everywhere, which was also a plus for her.

My cousin just bought a house in the Atlanta suburbs and my two other cousins moved to the DFW area. They all love it. The south is the most culturally Bangladeshi/Indian part of the U.S., for better and for worse.

A case can be made for Atlanta and Richardson/DFW because there is a fairly large preeexisting community already, but you can't deny that Vandy's yield protection is an issue.

Additionally, the CHE article is primarily talking about southern public flagships like UT, Georgia, etc which are targeting a different demographic compared to a Vandy - a university that continues to try and market itself as the "Harvard of the South" and tends to benchmark itself against Ivies, UChicago, and other T15 programs.

> The south is the most culturally Bangladeshi/Indian part of the U.S., for better and for worse

Yeah no. I'd say the Bay Area and NYC remains the primary hubs for the Desi community, and that's reflected in demographics as well. I don't have complete visibility into the Bangladeshi community, but based on the handful of Bangladeshis I know (families affiliated to BAL or the Army) they and their family ended up in the NYC or DMV with the tech-minded or Hindu Bangladeshis ending up in the Bay.

Vanderbilt's yield is over 60% in recent classes: https://vanderbilthustler.com/2025/04/11/record-low-4-7-of-a.... That's right around Cornell and Columbia: https://www.ivywise.com/blog/college-yield-rates/. That's entirely consistent with Vanderbilt's ranking and relative lack of international recognition. Nobody in India or China knows what Vanderbilt is, but they know what Cornell and Columbia are. And the "Harvard of the South" framing doesn't mean they think Vanderbilt is comparable to Harvard. It means it's as good as Harvard in the South.

>> The south is the most culturally Bangladeshi/Indian part of the U.S., for better and for worse > Yeah no. I'd say the Bay Area and NYC remains the primary hubs for the Desi community, and that's reflected in demographics as well.

I mean the southern U.S. is more culturally similar to India/Bangladesh than other parts of the country. SF and NYC remain the hubs because the vast majority of the U.S. Desi population is post-H1B migration and chain migration from that, and those places are where the H1B jobs are. NYC also has the ethnic enclaves and support networks. Bangladeshis don't go to Queens because they love freezing their asses off in winter.

Why would the amount of babies at a football game have an influence at your daughter's college preferences? Maybe I'm missing something.

If I had a college age kid, I definitely would encourage them to avoid some of the southern schools caught up in the MAGA cultural revolution. There's been a big movement to crush free speech and academic freedom, especially in the Texas university system.

A big recent example is Texas A&M booting any professor who doesn't fall into the party line - most recently punishing a professor for teaching Plato in an intro philosophy course. [0]

[0] https://lithub.com/texas-am-is-banning-plato-citing-his-gend...

She likes babies. I've raised my kids around WASP liberals because I want to socialize my kids to be orderly, but there's a definite baby shortage in that circle. Also, a lot more guilt and less people having fun than at a southern state school football game. It’s a lot closer to a big Indian wedding (which she also likes for some reason) than anything you find among the Annapolis yacht club circle.

I don’t have a view on where she goes to college—we just had a good season and I wanted to take her to a game. If I had a choice, maybe I’d want her to go to Oxford or Cambridge.

> If I had a college age kid, I definitely would encourage them to avoid some of the southern schools caught up in the MAGA cultural revolution.

Northern schools are not doing much better. Not even the richest schools can do much to fend off a belligerent DOE and the rubber stamp of SCOTUS.

> She had a blast and commented how many “brown girls like her” were there compared to her very WASPy, super-liberal Maryland school.

Does that have anything to do with Georgia or have anything to do with GT being a primarily engineering school with a very large international engineering student population?

To answer that question, try going to a football game in Athens next…

Is your daughter, by chance, attending a private school versus an R1 Public?

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