A bachelor's degree used to be crucial for young jobseekers, but it's losing relevance amid AI fears and a slack labor market.

As higher education institutions try to keep their place as an essential step toward building a career, their leaders are looking to New York City real estate to bridge that gap. NYC locations give them two fundamental ways to stay relevant: proximity to one of the country’s liveliest job markets and experiential learning opportunities.

“Partnering, being embedded with industry, and building that relationship is super important,” James Kellerhouse, a vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at Vanderbilt University's upcoming Manhattan campus, said Thursday at Bisnow’s New York Higher Education Summit.

The recent government shutdown delayed the most recent jobs reports, but in September, Gen Z’s 10.4% unemployment rate was more than double the 4.4% national average.

Rising unemployment among tech workers is coinciding with the lack of opportunities for young graduates and discussions about artificial intelligence’s potential to create widespread labor disruption.

The 150-year-old university in Tennessee signed a 99-year lease for over $100M in September 2024 for a former seminary campus in Chelsea that includes 13 buildings. The university plans to spend at least $50M on top of that to rehabilitate the 200-year-old properties, Kellerhouse said.

“We had to find a location in New York that felt like Vanderbilt University, that had the same sense of place that our students are coming from in Nashville,” he said on stage at 185 W. Broadway. “It's almost eerily similar.”

Vanderbilt isn’t the first such institution looking to NYC. Last May, Northeastern University executed a merger with Marymount Manhattan University, establishing NYC as the former’s 14th campus — for reasons that are more than just aesthetic.

Vanderbilt's students will benefit from being closer to industries that frequently hire recent graduates but would never move their headquarters to Nashville, Kellerhouse said. Additionally, the school is hopeful it can build partnerships with civic organizations, nonprofits and for-profit companies to create employment opportunities down the road, starting with efforts to get 100 internships for incoming fall 2026 students.

“The culmination of so much of that is what we're doing in New York. It's really getting students in partnered with industry,” he said. “Ultimately, we see a place where Vanderbilt contributes, and higher ed should be contributing to the workforce, the talent pipeline.”

Finding ways to boost the pipeline from higher education to employment is on other universities’ radars, including those that already have an NYC presence.

New York Law School Chief of Economic Development Christopher Bruno is leaning into his past experience as director of economic development for the city of Fairfax, Virginia, as well as NYLS Dean Anthony Crowell’s experience as counselor to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to shore up partnerships with local government for job creation.

While working for Fairfax, Bruno collaborated with George Mason University’s business school to open a small-business incubator in a commercial office building in the city.

“It allowed the city to realize several new businesses, and by extension, jobs that were created in the city,” he said. “It also created this attractive program for George Mason University that it used to both attract students but also investment in their enterprise programs.”

University executives are also thinking laterally about how they can create more exciting learning opportunities for students in an era where technology, while making teaching more dynamic and accessible, is also flattening parts of the learning experience.

So, even if NYC’s lack of available space means universities will have to spread out their classrooms and dorms rather than having self-contained campuses, executives still believe the city’s capacity to translate lectures into real-life experiences will give their institutions a leading edge.

“The classroom isn't just sitting in the classroom. You're in New York City,” Kellerhouse said. “If you're going to take an architecture class, it's not to sit in the classroom to take it. It's actually to experience it, breathe it, live it and understand it fully.”

For New York Institute of Technology students, that idea has held true even if it means placing students’ living spaces on the other side of Manhattan to its classrooms.

“They're on the east side. Our campus is over on Broadway, so it's a bit of a commute for them,” said NYIT Chief Financial Officer Barbara Holahan about the college’s 525 Lexington Ave. dormitory and its five-building campus just below Lincoln Center. “But the students who are there are right near Grand Central. They're really in the heart of the city.”