The University of Florida’s $345 million plan for a Jacksonville campus has been touted as a downtown revitalization engine, a way to attract new UF students, and a worthy investment for taxpayers, who are paying most of the cost.

But at a time when families are increasingly rethinking the cost of college, what if students don’t actually show up? 

Email records, obtained by The Florida Trib, show that some of the language in the deal to build the campus – on land donated by the city, largely with taxpayer money – raised the eyebrows of the city council’s auditors. 

At issue: a single sentence in the 86-page redevelopment agreement with UF, approved by city leaders in June. 

The all-important sentence states: UF must start this fall with “at least two degree programs with at least fifty students in total.”

There are no requirements that the 50-student minimum, or the number of degree programs, increase over time.  

“It sounds small,” said John Boyd, Jr., a real estate expert who shared his opinion with The Florida Trib. 

Boyd, a principal at The Boyd Company, which advises corporate clients on downtown redevelopment and other site selection, said affordability concerns surrounding a college degree are a key reason why student-recruitment efforts have become “challenging.” 

“There’s so much unpredictability today with colleges and universities,” he said.

Nevertheless, Boyd predicted Jacksonville – which has spent tens of millions of dollars to revitalize downtown, often with mixed results – will benefit from its partnership with UF.  

“Having a UF presence enhances Jacksonville, it’s a global brand,” Boyd said. “It remains an anchor that is less vulnerable to swings in the economy versus most types of tenants, most types of businesses, in the downtown urban core.” 

At the same time, email records show that Jacksonville’s auditors viewed the 50-student minimum with skepticism, and questioned the city’s Downtown Investment Authority about it.  

“How was the 50-student requirement determined?” wrote Phillip Peterson, the assistant council auditor, to the downtown agency last year, shortly before a unanimous city council vote to approve UF’s campus. “Don’t they currently have 40 students enrolled, and would this just require an additional 10 students?”

Even without a campus, UF had already been serving a limited number of students in Jacksonville by using rented space — such as its JaxLab architecture program, which opened in 2023.

The city agency responded to the auditor: “The current enrollment is below 20 students, so the increase to 50 represents more than doubling of the enrollment in less than two years.”

The redevelopment agency added that if UF Jacksonville fell below 50 students, it would trigger a process for the city to reclaim its donated land, so “this number was by design conservative.”

“The performance schedule also requires UF to use commercially reasonable efforts to grow enrollment,” the agency wrote. 

Publicly, both the city and UF leaders say they are optimistic about the future of the new campus. The university projects it will officially launch with 316 students this fall, and expand to 677 students by 2030. A Jacksonville city council member raised the possibility of enrollment eventually approaching 1,000 students.

For UF, even if it struggles to woo its target demographic of older graduate students, there will likely be zero consequences. Simply meeting the 50-student minimum, while continuing to gradually build out the campus, will allow UF to keep the hundreds of millions of dollars in public money it is set to receive, along with 20-plus acres of prime downtown land, donated by the city.

While UF has proclaimed that its new campus – to be located in the historic LaVilla neighborhood, next to the Jacksonville Terminal Station – will train the city’s workforce “for generations to come,” the university’s enrollment projections are aspirational goals, with no enforcement mechanism.

“That’s the goal, to have a lot of students,” said Kim Taylor, the council auditor for Jacksonville’s city council, in an interview with The Florida Trib. “The requirements are far less.”

City leaders, in addition to donating 20-plus acres of downtown land, have committed $100 million to the project.

Another $150 million in funding is expected to come from the Legislature, with private UF donors contributing $50 million as well.

The Downtown Investment Authority’s CEO, Colin Tarbert, did not respond to requests for comment from The Florida Trib.  

Jacksonville city council member Jimmy Peluso, whose district includes much of downtown, said there is little reason for concern. The UF project, he said, is steadily moving forward, and the university has been a collaborative development partner thus far. 

“I just don’t see this as a problem,” Peluso said. “Not yet.”

Peluso said the 50-student number was designed to represent the “bare minimum” for enrollment at the Jacksonville campus, in part because the pace of UF’s campus construction might depend on what is included in the Florida Legislature’s annual budgets in future years.

“The UF campus is going to be a slow roll,” Peluso said. “It’s not going to be an immediate, ‘tomorrow’ thing.” 

He added: “There’s a lot of moving parts with this.” 

The vision for Jacksonville’s new UF campus is focused on graduate-level academic programs in fields such as business, health science, law, and engineering. Also planned for the campus: an applied research enterprise built around the Florida Semiconductor Institute.

Last month, UF’s Board of Trustees voted to relocate the Warrington College of Business’s one- and two-year MBA programs to the new campus in Jacksonville. The programs together enrolled roughly 40 students during the 2024-2025 academic year, according to the Gainesville Sun. 

Kurt Dudas, a UF vice president for strategic initiatives, said in a statement to The Florida Trib that initial enrollment thresholds “were intended to be conservative, and our expectation is that we will surpass those minimum thresholds.” 

“The redevelopment agreement also includes language requiring UF to make substantial monetary investment and infrastructure for the campus beyond those initial thresholds,” wrote Dudas, who is spearheading the creation of the Jacksonville campus. “We are thrilled to be recruiting students for multiple programs that we expect will open this fall, well ahead of those performance requirements.”

Dudas did not respond to follow-up questions from The Trib. 

An artist’s rendering of the planned campus, featured on UF’s website, shows about a dozen students studying, walking, and chatting together in an outdoor plaza, with the University of Florida logo featured prominently in the background. 

But under a worst-case scenario, if UF has trouble attracting students, it has other options for its Jacksonville location. 

During UF’s negotiations with the city, the term “campus use” was expanded to include healthcare facilities — such as a primary care center, or cancer center. 

The expanded definition caught the eye of Jacksonville’s auditors, who asked the downtown agency: “Is it anticipated that this development could mainly be a cancer center?”

Jacksonville’s downtown agency responded that “UF does not intend to develop large portions of the campus for these uses but wishes to retain flexibility to develop clinical and research facilities that are ancillary to the educational programs being offered.”

Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said the flexibility of UF’s development agreement and the minimum requirement of 50 students, together signal that Jacksonville officials are eager to see UF simply build “something” downtown.

“The city of Jacksonville does not want to lose UF,” Kelchen said. “They don’t have a lot of leverage in this situation, so basically they’re just asking UF to make a good-faith effort to try to have programs and students.” 

Michael Vasquez is an investigative reporter at The Florida Trib. He can be reached at michael.vasquez@floridatrib.org.