Founding Of Third University

We want to be a world-class research university. We want to be distinguished in our education. So those are very broad. But at which level do we want to be benchmarking ourselves was the thing that will determine the kind of financial commitment that you need. So, earlier on, we were aspiring to be the top private US universities, the Harvards and the Whartons or whatever. It requires a different level of financial commitment. And truly when we looked at it and we say, Wow, it's a very expensive proposition, for which, when we turned back to MOE, they say, No, we will not give you that kind of resources to sustain that. So we had to make adjustments to our aspiration. We would still want to be amongst the top, but we want to be amongst the top public US universities who are no less eminent. We have a lot of help from our own management, the president I mean in terms of Janice, Ron Frank [Ronald Frank] they are very experienced academics. They have seen different models of university in the US. They come from well-known research universities. They know what kind of resources are needed, so they played a big part in helping to shape that. 

We also brought in a couple of consultants who are very experienced university planners from the US to help us look at all these as well. And one particular one actually helped us build this model, this financial model. Professor Bill Massy [William F Massy] who was formerly a chief financial officer of Stanford University. He came and helped me build that model and together with the president. And we also engaged the board in that whole planning, because in the board we also had academics, who gave their insights and all that. And that's how we shaped the whole thing and say, yes, this is a reasonable model for us to adopt and these are the projected financial commitments. So that's how we did it.