From left, KU students Shiran Zhang, Kejing Wang and Boling Huang, all from China, participate in their Kansas Environment and Culture class, Friday, Nov. 21, 2014. All are enrolled in KU's new International Academic Accelerator program.

Kansas University has a lot riding on the success of its new International Academic Accelerator Program. The program, launched in fall 2014, aims to exponentially increase the number of international students enrolled at the university — and, along with it, increase tuition revenue coming from that category of students.

In its recently finalized Central District redevelopment plan, KU is counting largely on AAP revenue to fund about $6.4 million of the $21.8 million annual sublease payment required to realize the project.

Partly because it’s important financially, partly because it’s new and partly because it’s not 100 percent transparent because of being a partnership between KU and a private business called Shorelight Education, I’ve been trying to routinely check in on the program.

For the same reasons, KU faculty also are following it closely, and AAP leaders have visited Faculty Senate and Faculty Senate Executive Committee meetings to answer questions and give project updates. (Background: When the Journal-World requested a copy of KU’s 15-year contract with Shorelight, a Douglas Country District Court judge granted the company an injunction barring the contract’s release to the newspaper. However, AAP folks have always been available for interviews and provided numbers for my subsequent stories.)

On Tuesday, two administrators shared a few new AAP developments with the Faculty Senate Executive Committee.

Most notably, starting this fall the AAP — so far just for freshmen — will open to first-year graduate students, said Roberta Pokphanh, AAP academic director.

First, here’s how the current program works: Shorelight recruits students from around the world, who pay a flat fee of about $45,000 to participate. The all-in-one-style program provides 12 months of room, board, tuition and activities. Coursework focuses on intensive English and cultural instruction. Students emerge with about 30 credit hours and, hopefully, go on to enroll at KU as sophomores and continue through graduation.

The AAP’s new master’s program will work basically the same way, but the students will be first-year graduate students and emerge with six to nine credit hours toward a master’s degree, Pokphanh said. A number of master’s programs have already agreed to participate, she said.

Pokphanh said she expects the first year’s cohort to be very small, probably less than 10. Although they probably won’t be able to provide a count until the semester begins — it turns out international students don’t exactly plan ahead like stateside college applicants are accustomed to.

“These are students who expect to be applying in June or July for a program beginning in August,” Pokphanh said. “That’s the international reality that we face.”

She said the AAP also has started offering a shorter version of the program (two semesters instead of three) for freshmen who come in with higher English proficiency and thus need fewer English classes to move forward.

At the beginning of this school year, there were about 250 students total participating in the AAP program. In the program’s first year, participants came from China, India, Vietnam, Russia and Nigeria.

Stuart Day, KU’s acting senior vice provost for academic affairs, told the Faculty Senate Executive Committee that Shorelight continues expanding to new countries. Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is a current recruiting target, and Latin American countries including Colombia and Mexico will come next, he said.

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• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.