Adelphi is going back to the city.
The Garden City-based university broke ground earlier this month on a new Fifth Avenue campus in Manhattan, said Carol Ann Boyle, the university’s vice president of facilities management and information technology.
“We’re really, really excited about this space,” said Boyle, who’s helping oversee the build-out for the 51,000 square-foot, three-floor campus. The university, which was originally located in Brooklyn, decided to move back to the city after the 2023 closure of its campus on Varick Street in Manhattan’s Financial District.
“We’ve been successful in Manhattan in the past and we’re really excited about the opportunities and potential that New York City brings for our students,” said Boyl.
She added that the school’s deans were enthusiastic about connecting with industry leaders in the city and hoped the new location would allow them to better prepare and connect students with internships.
She said the new building will primarily host graduate programs and hands-on, specialized classrooms, such as nursing simulation labs, clinical classrooms, and additional space and labs for the school’s education master’s in STEAM teaching program.
Boyle said the university plans to finish construction on the campus in February or March of 2026, then open for a soft launch that summer before running a full fall 2026 semester. She said the campus will likely continue to expand the courses it offers through 2027, eventually offering around 12 programs.
Though not all program offerings on the campus are confirmed, Boyle said there are plans for the university’s nursing, other healthcare programs and education science master’s in STEAM teaching and learning program to use the new campus.
She said the university plans to transfer students who were studying at Adelphi’s Verick Street campus prior to its closure to this new campus. Many of those students are education and social work students, she said, and have been working out of St. Francis College’s Brooklyn campus since 2023.
“This campus is for the preparation of teachers who are more hands-on, the clinical nursing students who need to be hands-on,” Boyle said, adding that it will allow for additional students to be placed in specialized classes. “It provides a lot of modernization in the upcoming teaching period at Adelphi.”
It’s also likely that it will host courses for programs like an MFA in Creative Writing, a hybrid MBA, sports management, healthcare informatics and speech language pathology, as well as the university’s new undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence, Boyle said.
Though she said the university cannot yet predict how many students the campus will hold, she does expect it to increase enrollment, particularly in its graduate programs, as the university will be able to offer more specialized, hands-on courses.
Alongside classrooms, the Manhattan campus will include a career center, student and faculty lounge, event space and student services center, which will offer services like registration, a bursar’s office and academic advising.
Though the city campus won’t include any dormitories, she said students are welcome to find housing on the university’s Garden City campus, which is within walking distance of the village’s LIRR station. Students can take a roughly 45-minute train from that station to Grand Central, which sits a quick walk away from the campus.
“This allows students to take advantage of being close to the city, but not in the city,” Boyle said. “Whether you’re an international student, or you’re from out east and you want to have that experience where you’re on a college campus, but you want to also be in the city, this gives you that experience,” she added, saying that students would be able to take classes on both the Garden City and Manhattan campus.
“They will have every single thing at their fingertips,” Boyle said of Adelphi students who use the new Manhattan campus. “I think that having everything right there is just a really good formula for success.”
Students will receive more information about the campus and its course offerings as its opening date approaches.
