Business / Technology

SAN FRANCISCO — The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, the 131-year-old business school in Philadelphia, is counting on a new West Coast campus to raise its high-tech profile.

For a decade, the school operated a little-known San Francisco outpost in the former headquarters of Folgers Coffee. The new site, a block from the Bay Bridge, is 37,000 square feet and more closely resembles the area's Internet startups, with high ceilings, exposed brick and the latest videoconferencing equipment.

The campus, which opened last month, is part of Wharton's effort to attract aspiring technology entrepreneurs to its master's in business administration program for executives. Most students in the program, ranked first in 2011 by U.S. News & World Report, are in Wharton's hometown of Philadelphia. The new location can accommodate 150 students, a 50 percent increase from the old building.

"This is a much more entrepreneurial and innovation-driven area," said Bernadette Birt, chief operating officer of the program. "They hang out together. They relax here, as well, and get all their work done together."

East Coast business schools are increasingly looking to shore up their West Coast ties, either through satellite campuses or partnerships with other institutions. In addition to letting them draw local students, the programs provide easier access to the world's biggest technology companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle and Intel. New York's Columbia University offers an executive MBA program with the University of California, Berkeley. Northeastern University in Boston said in November that it plans to open a Seattle campus this year with programs in information technology, computer science and other fields.

The new Wharton West is on the sixth floor of the Hills Plaza building on the Embarcadero, the street bordering San Francisco's eastern waterfront. The school signed a 10-year lease in June and spent the next six months on renovations.

The changes included the removal of four columns to create enough classroom space, and the installation of a plumbing and electricity system designed to achieve a gold rating under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.

"The aesthetics of the space is this blend of trying to bring a traditional approach from Wharton at Penn and blending it with a more open-ceiling, entrepreneurial garage space," said Douglas Zucker, principal at Gensler, the architecture firm that designed the campus. People are "coming here because they want to start a company."

Wharton's executive MBA degree takes two years to complete. Students come together every other weekend for classes that typically start on Friday morning and end Saturday evening, allowing them to keep their full-time jobs.

Annual tuition runs $48,550, which is in line with the other top executive MBA programs in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The school has more than a dozen professors who fly in from Philadelphia as part of their total course load. John Percival has been making the cross-country commute since the San Francisco school opened 10 years ago to teach an introductory course in corporate finance.

"The high ceilings, open air and looking out the windows just puts everybody in a better mood, including the faculty," Percival, 65, said.

Part of the San Francisco allure is the proximity to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Since the new campus opened, guest speakers have included Duncan Logan, chief executive officer of technology incubator RocketSpace, and Jay Jamison, a partner at BlueRun Ventures.

Material from Seattle Times archives is included in this report.