Towers’s “complicated and ambitious” goals involve establishing Parsons hubs all over the world. Right now, in addition to Paris, the school is zeroing in on Mumbai, Shanghai, and Latin America (probably Brazil, if we had to guess). “The key is identifying global cities where we feel it’s the right place for us to build that hub and then establishing both a regional network and connecting that to a global network.”

He’s pretty sure that “Mumbai is likely next” and that the plan “may move very quickly.” In China, Parsons will likely begin by offering post-graduate and pre-college programs before offering graduate and undergraduate programs “because that’s the way the landscape [in China] works.”

Therein lies what I suspect will be the biggest challenge in Towers’s international plan–different environments require different approaches to education. “[Each hub will] function differently based on local regulation, and, more importantly, on local tradition. We’re just not interested in franchising Parsons as if it was a McDonald’s, which some other universities do. We are very interested in working in-country and building this thread of globalization and localization into an educational environment.”

It’s not world domination, he says, but, rather, “world collaboration.”

Photos: Courtesy of Parsons