China’s Ministry of Education has approved New York University’s proposal to build a new degree-granting campus in Shanghai, reports Washington Square News, the institution’s student newspaper. While the approval is an important step, President John Sexton and Provost David McLaughlin of NYU cautioned in a campuswide e-mail that several issues still need to be resolved, including the new campus’s budget. The plan is for Chinese authorities to pay for the construction of the new facility, and for operating costs to be covered by tuition. NYU wants to start an executive-education program, which will not grant degrees, in the 2011-12 academic year. The following year it will start a degree-granting, professional master’s program, and in the fall of 2013 it will bring in the first undergraduates. The university expects to have about 1,600 undergraduates, mostly students from China, but it hopes to recruit from the rest of Asia and the United States.