A Campus Like No Other

Downtown San Francisco does not have a university. It is the only major city in America like this. A golden opportunity meets a pressing public need.

If you wanted to start a research university in the heart of a world-class city’s Financial District, right next to the technology firms and leading innovators, you would face two problems. First, you would be competing with existing universities for space. Second, it would be financially infeasible, as the real estate costs in deep downtown would be too expensive for a project of that size. Here, San Francisco is unique — a city without a downtown university, that also happens to have vacancy rates approaching 50% and fire-sale, plummeting real estate costs for whole swathes of downtown.

But simply put, San Francisco deserves to have a university like this in the heart of its downtown, making clear to all visitors that education and creativity are the lifeblood of the City, and providing cultural amenities (like public lectures and debates) and academic vibrancy to the City streets.

There is nowhere more perfect for a university than Market Street. There, we can utilize the amenities that already exist, leveraging the public infrastructure around us to provide the amenities of a university (parks, libraries, museums, etc.) without having to pay the cost of constructing them. This both makes the project more feasible, it also allows us to inject life into public spaces.

As such, the entire campus would revolve around Market Street — more specifically, the Powell Street BART/MUNI station. Market Street is the Main Street of San Francisco. It is a car-free road, perfect for a large student body walking from class to class. It is surrounded by every amenity a university could need:

The Financial District and SOMA, with all the major technology firms, are available 5-10 minutes away on foot.
It is the center of SF public transit, with subway access to every single MUNI route.
The Cable Car launch point is right on Powell.
Union Square, a perfect Quad from large student gatherings, outdoor studying, or simply hanging out, is mere feet away.
Market Street is covered in vacant retail fronts which died when the jobs went away, awaiting investment to transform them into bookstores, cafes, restaurants, clubs/bars, clothing stores, and so much more.
An IKEA is mere feet away, where students can get everything they need for their dorms. Similarly, so is a Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, as well as many gyms.
City Hall, and the various government buildings (including the public library), are one subway stop away. Right next to City Hall are the major theaters hosting Broadway in SF, the Opera, the SF Philharmonic Orchestra, and more.
There is easy transit access to the East Bay and the Peninsula.
The whole region is lined with museums — the SF Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and more. These museums have struggled with low foot traffic (the CJM is scheduled to temporarily close to try re-evaluate how to function under new conditions), but students are the perfect target audience.
Chinatown is one subway stop away, and North Beach is not much further. These areas, and Market Street generally, are frequently the location of massive public fairs and festivals. Japantown is a 10 minute bus ride away.
Yerba Buena Gardens, a large grassy area known for live music (perfect for picnics or throwing a frisbee) is immediately next to Market Street.
One stop away (or a short walk) is the Ferry Building, with its iconic food hall and the largest farmer’s market in the City every Saturday.
The Moscone Convention Center is immediately south of Market Street, perfect for hosting large academic conferences. The Convention Center has been struggling in recent years with a declining interest in SF conventions — they would benefit heavily, and are likely to be interested in facilitating this project.
The SF Giant’s stadium is right down the street, bringing a sense of civic pride to students new to the City. The Chase Center, home of the Golden State Warriors, is a few subway stops away.
This place is dying. Food traffic is nothing. The retail is closed. The restaurants are closing. It is a ghost-town. A Main Street with no people. It is exactly where a project like this is needed most.

Filling this place with thousands of students would bring life to the City.

If you wanted to study Computer Science in downtown San Francisco, the technology capital of the world, learning from practitioners from San Francisco’s wealth of technology firms, learning about how to create your own startup while feet away from the highest densities of startups, technology co-working spaces, and funders in the world, where would you go? It is crazy that this does not already exist.

We offer an experience that nowhere else can.

Our vision: a selective, research-focused STEM university.

The STEM focus comports with the gravitational center of the job industry in the City, leverages the assets and resources already present (including potential faculty, the tech-based startup ecosystem, and so much more), provides a useful hook to technology industry funders, and above all, allows us to be distinct from other offerings in the City, such as USF — a school that specializes far more on the traditional liberal arts offerings. This model has been adopted by extremely successful schools, such as CalTech or MIT, as well as a host of technical institutions across the country.

We would offer undergraduate and graduate degree programs in all the major STEM fields, from chemistry, to physics, to engineering. Further, we would complement the program with a limited selection of non-STEM degrees, in fields like Science and Technology Studies, Economics, and Public Policy, where these topics would be explored from a quantitative and empirical perspective. We want to inculcate a culture that approaches emerging issues in science and technology from all perspectives, and produce graduates that are deeply familiar with the science and the humanity of pressing public problems — just as a San Francisco University should. We are the City of the technology titans, but also City Lights and the Summer of Love.

Our Draw — What Other Universities Cannot Offer

Faculty

San Francisco is already home to the best and brightest in every field, working day and night to forge the future. If you start a university anywhere else in America that lacks a flagship university, you will struggle to draw talented faculty. Not here. They already live here.

If you are working in tech and want to share your knowledge as an adjunct lecturer, where do you go? Berkeley and Stanford are quite a commute. Imagine if you could walk across the street, teach an hour seminar, and be back in the office shortly after.

If you have worked in the industry and want to make that shift to academia, where can you teach that does not disrupt your life, especially if Berkeley, Stanford, or SFSU are filled? San Francisco has an un-tapped pool of experienced talent that may want to try teaching or research, but are not interested in moving across the country to make that happen. No other city can claim such a vast reservoir of potential.

If you want a career as a researcher, where better than the City where all of that research is being put to use? Proximity to the major technology firms, often just across the street, make us the prime location for state-of-the-art educational research labs — a draw few places in the world can match. We anticipate a constant moving back-and-forth between the university and private industry, giving students an unparalleled amount of exposure to working professionals and professors with experience in the very fields the students hope to enter.

These factors should allow us to punch way above our weight in retaining faculty.

Further, far more graduates are produced each year that wish to be professors than there are slots in professorship positions. As such, the typical route for most is to start at a smaller, less highly-ranked school and work their way up. For the average aspiring academic, we have a draw that almost no smaller school can provide.

You get to work in the greatest City in the world.

Students

We will not launch as a top university. We will have to build our reputation. But there are advantages that we have that will make us competitive for students. In particular, we are targeting students that would otherwise go to middle-range schools in smaller markets, but would appreciate direct access to the Bay Area job market.

First, it’s San Francisco. The beach. The Golden Gate. The rolling hills. There is a draw to San Francisco that will always bring people, especially innovators and creators.

Second, the San Francisco job market. Smaller universities often feed into their local economy. Here, we are feeding into the largest technology market in the world, and giving them years to network and work within that industry. Our target is students that want access to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, but would otherwise go to solid schools well outside their chosen market.

Third, access to faculty with working experience in the technology industry, leveraging the unique amount of talent in the region.

Fourth, our industry-leading co-op and startup accelerator programs, explored below.

Additionally, we would also focus on international students, especially from Asia. San Francisco is a city built by diaspora communities, with historic and culture ties to major Asian markets, and being an open place for international students would also be financially useful — as international students typically do not receive university-funded financial aid.

Perhaps one of the most important intangible draws is the culture of the technology industry itself.

If this becomes a passion project of the technology industry, if the curriculum is shaped by thought leaders from across tech, and if the important speakers in the industry talk about it as the future — we will attract the next generation of that field who want access to those ideas and that momentum.

We want this project to be a home-grown university, by tech, for tech. The ideas that tech wants to explore, taught the way tech wants to teach it.

Taught the way you want it taught.

Co-ops and Industry Placement

For many years, Northwestern University in Boston and the University of Waterloo operated as standard, mid-tier universities. Then, they introduced a change to their structure that has led them to have job placement rates rivaling the top schools: integrated co-ops.

We plan to arrange co-op / internship programs with existing companies in downtown, requiring students to alternate between semesters of employment and semesters of class. We would even arrange many internships to be part-time during the school year. Students could walk out of class, then directly down the street five minutes to their positions. This would be worked directly into the curriculum and expected of most students.

Ideally, these programs would feed directly into permanent positions, allowing companies to shape their ideal talent pipeline. Given our access to world-class companies in downtown, something almost no other city has, this would provide our students a competitive advantage with which established universities in smaller markets cannot compete. This value-add, a direct pipeline into the Bay Area market, could be enough to get many students to choose us over established names.

This co-op model exists and is thriving in schools like Northeastern and Waterloo. And both of those have nowhere near the kind of job market we have access to, or the firms at our disposal.

In a partnership with the City, we could arrange tax breaks or benefits for companies that choose to participate, or hire a certain percentage of students in their workforce.

THIS IS OUR COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE.

We would also establish a startup accelerator like no other, utilizing the glut of available office space in downtown to provide student startups with office space (helping revitalize the area further), and allowing such student startups to form in the middle of the best market for startups in the world.

To talk to the best VC firms in the world? To attend the top conferences in their field, to network with other innovators at events? Walk down the street.

No one else can provide an opportunity like that.

Mid-Career Training and Certificates

Imagine a STEM worker that has worked in a particular field or subfield for years, and wants to change their area of focus without moving cities and upending their life? They can come get a masters or certificate in the City they already live — they may even be able to keep the same job, if they take a part-time program.

Imagine an employee at a tech company received their Computer Science degree ten years ago, before modern advancements in artificial intelligence. Instead of hiring and training new talent from scratch, the company sends the employee to get a mid-career certificate in AI. The employee leaves their office once a week, walks five minutes to the university, takes an hour long course from people at the forefront of the field, and returns to work five minutes after.

We can arrange such trainings for a company’s entire workforce, with the curriculum designed by the companies, for the companies, to be precisely what they need.

In this way, firms across San Francisco can offload their training requirements onto us, building our university into the fabric of San Francisco.

Proposed Campus Map

Proposed Real Estate for the Campus

All properties explored below are currently for sale.

We are targeting buildings like former malls and shopping spaces that 1.) are structurally similar to what a university needs (such as containing large open spaces and walkways for high levels of internal foot-traffic, or discrete rooms with large floor-plans like retail shops which would serve well as high-density classrooms), 2.) unlikely, due to the realities of the market, to return to their former economic use, and 3.) impractical for any other use or conversion into residential/office spaces (increasing our competitiveness).

For most of these buildings, the alternative is either a continued half-life of a failing mall in an era where malls are dying, or demolishment. A university is one of the only purposes that can use these buildings as they are, allowing us to save important parts of San Francisco history — and reduce our own start-up and operation costs.

The San Francisco Centre

The San Francisco Centre

Nine stories; 1,814,533 square feet.

One of the most beautiful pieces of architecture on the West Coast. BUILT-IN access to the subway (both BART and MUNI) — the only private building in the City with this arrangement. Underground food court perfect for a student cafeteria. Designed to accommodate thousands of people at once across 9 stories with wide avenues and crowd control pathways.

San Francisco Centre

The building is nearly fully vacant.

Its valuation fell 75% from approximately $1.5 billion to $290 million (as of early 2024), and the free-fall shows no sign of stopping. Currently valued at $221.7 million (SF Examiner). It is encumbered with $558 million in debt, and the owners need a way out to begin chipping that number down.

It was scheduled for auction in November. That auction was delayed until December.

All the big stores have left. No large retailer exists that can take up the abandoned spaces.

As a result, the Centre is filling the slots with lower-tier retail shops, to no avail.

If you go today, you wander through a nearly empty wasteland of boarded-up shops and basically no foot traffic. The mall is not coming back. That model is dead, and without residential development (years down the line), nothing can bring it back.

It does not have to be this way.

This property can be saved.

It can be bought for a price never again obtainable.

The Macy’s

The Macy’s

Located immediately on Union Square — a massive urban park ideal as a place for student gatherings as a de facto Quad (compare this to Washington Square Park near NYU).

The Macy’s building has six stories of floor-to-ceiling glass: perfect for lecture halls overlooking the city.

It is flanked by massive amounts of office space for classrooms or faculty offices.

The Macy’s is leaving. Nothing else can possibly fill that space — and the City has no ideas other than begging Macy’s not to leave.

The loss of foot traffic has caused this area, once among the most vibrant parts of the City, to become desolate. The Macy’s loss will accelerate that.

It is a 5 minute walk from the SF Centre (through Powell street, lined by trees and traveled by cable cars). The combination creates a true urban campus.

The Metreon

The Metreon

The Metreon went on the market in October 2024.

Four stories, 312,592 square feet.

Directly behind the San Francisco Centre, creating a unified campus.

Directly connected to Yerba Buena Gardens, and across from the Moscone Convention center.

The two largest leaseholders currently are AMC and Target — ideally, these are retained, both for the funding purposes as well as civic vitality. Students are the perfect demographic for this kind of retail (movies and household shopping).

Perfect for a mix of integrated student housing and classroom / organization space. Properties on site include large event spaces designed to accommodate crowds (with city views!)