Already with 14 campuses across Florida, including one in Daytona Beach, Keiser University is expanding beyond the state's borders -- into China.

The regionally accredited, private, for-profit university, which serves about 18,000 students, has opened a campus in Shanghai. Keiser is offering an American-style bachelor's program in business administration taught in Mandarin Chinese.

"We believe our curriculum, our student services and academic quality -- there is a need and demand for it in China," said Zhanjun Yang, vice chancellor of international studies at Keiser.

Of 10.8 million Chinese high school graduates who took the national college entrance exam this year, the nation's public universities and colleges will only be able to accept the top 25 percent to 30 percent, Yang said. That leaves 7 million students this year looking for opportunities to attend college.

Philip Altbach, director for the Center for International Higher Education and a Boston College professor of higher education, noted China requires foreign institutions to work with a Chinese partner, so there are no free-standing foreign branch campuses.

Keiser-Shanghai -- which is on the campus of Jiaotong University, a larger Chinese campus -- started with 102 students and is up to 107, five of whom are from countries outside of China. Keiser plans to grow the campus steadily and hopes it leads to increased international study opportunities for students in China and Florida.

"Our Chinese students tend to be more traditional than at Keiser University in Daytona Beach or Fort Lauderdale," which attracts many more working adults, university president Arthur Keiser said.

The China campus has been a long time coming for Keiser, who said he has been going there looking for the right partnership opportunities since 1996. He said Keiser had started an exchange program there in 2000, but the al-Qaida attacks of 9/11 led to a shutdown of student visas.

Altbach said American for-profit universities are increasingly turning to foreign markets for new students.

"It's not a big trend in China, which, unlike a lot of other developing countries is tightly controlled in terms of who gets in," Altbach said. "But, globally, there is a huge market for the Apollo Group which owns (the University of) Phoenix, and Laureate (Inc.). They are buying and starting universities all over the place."

For-profits enroll about 10 percent of the United States' college students.