The Wharton School, the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, will open a branch in San Francisco next year, school officials announced Tuesday.

Wharton West, as the new school will be called, will offer an MBA program geared toward working professionals.

Classes will begin at Wharton West next fall. The Wharton School's new campus aims to attract students not only from California but also from other Western cities like Denver and Seattle.

Each year 100 people will be admitted to the two-year MBA program, which will be tailored to meet the needs of working executives. Students will attend courses for two consecutive days every other week, to allow students to continue work while in the program. Tuition for the two years will cost nearly $100,000.

The Wharton School plans to allow students at its Philadelphia campus to spend the last semester of their MBA program at Wharton West.

Robert E. Mittelstaedt, vice dean of the Wharton School and director of the Aresty Institute of Executive Education, said that there is currently no degree-granting program for professionals on the West Coast.

"It's a niche that's not being served right now," Mittelstaedt said.

Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley have MBA programs, but "neither one offers a program for working professionals," Mittelstaedt said.

Stanford's MBA program is for full-time students, and Berkeley's evening program is convenient only for students living in the area, he said.

Harvard Business School offers programs for executives and has a research center in Menlo Park, Calif., but it does not award degrees through its California executive training programs.

The Wharton School's Philadelphia campus already has a special MBA program geared toward professionals. Mittelstaedt said that Wharton West is "an extension of the Wharton School program we have had for 25 years in Philadelphia."

Wharton West brings the school closer to many of its alumni. In recent years, 20 percent of Wharton's graduating class has ended up in California, including as many as 30 percent of last year's graduates, Mittelstaedt said.

Wharton administrators hope the new program will bring in endowment dollars from West Coast alumni.

California is not new territory for the Wharton School.

"We have held an office in California for three years" for research purposes, Mittelstaedt said. Many Wharton faculty members conduct research in California, which is home to large businesses in industries like technology, banking and insurance.

Wharton West has been several years in the making.

"Over the years we have been telling ourselves that if California were a separate country, it would be the sixth largest country in the world," Mittelstaedt said. "The plans evolved over the past year; there was no bomb that dropped."

Mittelstaedt said that although the San Francisco location will place Wharton West next to Silicon Valley, the program is not targeted at dot-com executives.

Members of faculty of the Wharton School in Philadelphia will travel to California to teach the courses at Wharton West.

But Mittelstaedt said that he doubts that the new program will spread the Wharton School faculty too thin, as many Wharton faculty members on sabbatical already conduct research in the region.

"I think it's all going to have a positive benefit," he said.