Built on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea off Incheon, about 35 miles from South Korea's capital, New Songdo City is billed as the largest private real-estate development in history. It is Korea's answer to Shanghai and Dubai. Estimates put the cost of the Songdo project, which is barely five years old, at up to $60-billion. The city's centerpiece is Songdo Global University Campus, a collaborative attempt to blend Korean, American, and European academic strengths. The founders broke ground in May and at least two American partners, North Carolina State University and the State University New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook have each received $1-million in planning money to help develop undergraduate programs. Both colleges view Songdo as a local recruitment hub. SUNY at Stony Brook currently attracts 2,000 students from Asia. The model for the Global University Campus is similar to Qatar's Education City, in which American universities will offer undergraduate programs inside a single campus, while administering them separately. Campus developers predict it will enroll 12,000 students by 2012. SUNY at Stony Brook will initially offer four undergraduate engineering programs, along with a business and a technology-management program. Students will be given an opportunity to study at the U.S. campus as well. Several more partners, including the University of Delaware, the University of Southern California, and George Mason University have signed agreements to start faculty and student exchanges, and, eventually, collaborative research projects. Moscow State University, Glion Institute of Higher Education, in Switzerland; the University of Surrey, in England; and Monash University, in Australia, have also been linked by the Korean media to the project. Songdo's American partners say that despite the potential difficulties, they are in for the long haul.