KAIST to establish New York campus by 2025

Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), a prestigious national research university in South Korea, is slated to establish a US campus in New York. It will be the first Korean university to establish an official campus abroad. The new campus is scheduled to open in 2024 or 2025, offering majors related to artificial intelligence, financial engineering and cultural technology.

Some candidates for the campus include Long Island and Staten Island of New York. The university will determine the site after discussions with the Korean government and drawing agreements from the institute's board of directors, faculty and students.

"To develop KAIST as a world-class university such as Harvard University or Massachusetts Institute of Technology, our professors and students must conduct research and create entrepreneurial activities with global perspectives. Therefore, the New York campus will be an enterprise-oriented university,“ said Lee Kwang-hyung, the president of KAIST. 

The university will jointly found the new campus with New York-based real estate investment firm Big Continent Inc. Bae Hee-nam, a Korean businessperson and chief executive of Big Continent, will donate a 33,000-square-meter site for the new campus. He will be in charge of the site purchase and building remodeling. 

KAIST was founded in 1971 by a $6 million-aid loan from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a US federal government agency for civilian foreign aid. The establishment of the new campus is meaningful as it will be in the US, the country that assisted the Korean university foundation 50 years ago, KAIST said.

Previously, the university applied to set up a New York campus in 2011, along with a number of other institutions seeking to establish an additional campus in the city. Cornell University, one of the other 18 shortlisted global universities at the time, was finally selected and attracted $350 million from external donors for the construction project. Cornell Tech, the new campus, opened in 2017 on Roosevelt Island of Manhattan.

The university helped establish Kenya KAIST, a project that The Export-Import Bank of Korea (Korea Eximbank) enabled through a $95 million loan to the Kenyan government. The Kenya campus has been founded as an official development assistance (ODA) project, but it is not an official KAIST academic campus overseas, the university said.

Write to Hae-Sung Lee and Namyoung Kim at ihs@hankyung.com
Jihyun Kim edited this article.