As Adelphi University prepares to welcome its first students to its midtown Manhattan location in Summer 2026, the executive director of the new Manhattan Center, Jennifer Lancaster, PhD, talks about the benefits it will provide career-oriented adults and Adelphi.
Adelphi is making its mark in midtown with the new Manhattan Center, opening this summer at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. Located just steps from Grand Central Station, this three-floor, 51,000-square-foot facility is a conveniently located, state-of-the-art learning space for busy adults looking to advance their career with an advanced degree or certification.
As a modern academic hub, the Manhattan Center will open with two programs addressing workforce shortages in New York City and the surrounding region—an accelerated bachelor of science in nursing for career-changers and a master’s degree in STEAM education for science, math and computer science teachers. Eight additional programs will start being offered at the center in Fall 2026, including master’s degree programs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, business administration, business analytics, creative writing, psychology and social work, and doctoral programs in learning sciences and global higher education leadership.
All courses are designed to fit the schedules of working adults, and Adelphi is providing generous scholarships to help students get the degrees they need to advance in their career.
The custom-designed center will be equipped with cutting-edge resources like smart classrooms and a nursing simulation lab, as well as an onsite library and student services office.
We spoke with Jennifer Lancaster, PhD, who joined Adelphi in August 2025 as executive director of the new Manhattan Center, to learn more about how this major milestone will expand Adelphi’s footprint in New York and deepen the University’s historic commitment to driving student success.
How did Adelphi choose the programs that will be opening the center?
The Manhattan Center is dedicated to providing students with personal, powerful and professional education. To open the center, Adelphi focused on sectors of the economy that are important to New York City and that can draw students from all five boroughs and beyond.
Except for accelerated nursing, which is the only undergraduate program in what will hopefully be a suite of healthcare programs, the Manhattan Center is largely designed for certificate programs, graduate education and professional studies for careers in healthcare, education, business and finance, technology, and community transformation. So almost all of the programs will be hybrid or low residency—online with on-ground components.
How important is the center’s location in midtown Manhattan?
Adelphi is taking its place among New York’s premier private institutions, occupying three floors of a building in a most convenient location. It’s an eight-minute walk to Times Square, a five-minute walk from Grand Central Station, and close to everything that New York City has to offer, like the New York Public Library and Bryant Park. It’s also accessible by almost every subway, train and bus line in and out of the city. So, we’re in a really great location for commerce, and this provides a good opportunity for graduate students and professionals working in the city to use the campus as their home for advanced study.
I think of it as Adelphi crossing the Throgs Neck Bridge and George Washington Bridge. There’s no reason why Adelphi shouldn’t be as well known in midtown Manhattan as it is on Long Island. And it should be as familiar to students in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Upstate New York as it is here in Garden City. We’re trying to broaden our reach.
What kind of environment and resources will the center offer students?
There is a large library space, which will have a collection of books and a lot of space for study and collaboration, including private rooms that students can use for group study. There’s a student lounge and conference space, similar to our flexible-use rooms in the Ruth S. Harley University Center on campus, which hold 70 to 75 people. If you want to have a networking event, we can arrange high-top tables. If you want to host a lecture, we can set up rows of chairs.
There’s also a full-scale nursing simulation lab and a maker space and innovation lab for STEAM students that will have 3D printers and state-of-the-art technology. There are clinical spaces for our communication science disorders and audiology program, as well as our counseling program. And then there is office space for anyone who works at the center.
How will the center impact student experiences in New York?
It’s really important to me that the Garden City campus is connected to the Manhattan Center. I call it “GC squared”: Garden City to Grand Central. Part of that work is connecting the center to our online programming. I’d like to think about using Manhattan as that launching point to say, “Even if you’re an online student, you can go to Manhattan to meet faculty members and classmates, to study, to work on a project, or to network with future colleagues and alumni.” Some of our online students live in or very close to New York City, so we want to provide these opportunities in Manhattan.
How will programming evolve as the center grows?
I think the center gives the University and all of its constituents an opportunity to build something new—to think about academic programming in a way that invites creativity and innovation. Are there programs that no one’s ever thought of before that will be very useful to the job market going forward? Are there certificate programs that provide credentials that will really help add skilled professionals to the workforce? And could Adelphi be a leader in doing that? I think that would be very exciting for the University.
How often do you get a chance to build something from scratch? You could take Garden City and duplicate it in Manhattan, but I think we have the opportunity to do something really different.
What are your hopes for the future of the Manhattan Center?
I received a report from a research company called Emerge that said: “Adelphi is not simply entering Manhattan. It is stepping into its role as a premier private university for New Yorkers who never stop moving forward.” If we could achieve that, where we take our place alongside the big names, I think that that would be very exciting.