Colleges Scramble to Offer Perks
The University of Virginia, which founder Thomas Jefferson considered his proudest achievement, boasts an $18.5-million aquatic and fitness center with three pools, a cafe and a mega-screen projection system enabling students to watch movies while bobbing about in inner tubes. “Jaws” was a recent hit.
Occidental College in Los Angeles spent $14 million this year to renovate one of its historic buildings into “The Servery.” The trendy eatery offers an on-premises bakery, a sushi bar, an alternative foods table and a pasta corner with an electronic sign that, a la Disneyland, counts down the minutes until a customer’s food is ready.
And at tiny Trinity College, an all-women’s Catholic school here in Washington, officials have launched the first capital drive in the school’s 100 years. They are seeking $15 million to turn a 70-year-old dining hall into a food court and construct the first new building on campus in four decades: a sports center housing a gymnasium, swimming pool and other athletic facilities.
“We absolutely have lost good students who would have come here if we had had a gymnasium or a swimming pool,” says Trinity’s president, Patricia McGuire. As for the food, “the old-fashioned steam-table cafeteria with huge tubs of green beans swimming in water just doesn’t cut it anymore. And it’s very hard to get students to eat mystery meat.”
Universities small and large, public and private, serving the wealthy and the not-so-well-connected are all seeing a boom in construction of recreational sports complexes, upscale food courts and other amenities designed to make campus life more attractive to prospective students. And behind the boom is old-fashioned free market economics.
With the baby boomers long gone, many colleges and universities have more classroom spaces than students to fill them. Schools are competing any way they can--especially for students who don’t need extensive financial aid or remedial instruction. Often that means investing millions of dollars to make campus life more attractive.
“Universities are trying to move their nonacademic facilities up to a higher level,” says Kevin Hom, a New York architect whose firm specializes in such projects. “It’s what students are accustomed to and what parents want their children to be accustomed to. The definition of minimal survival is different than it used to be.”
No separate figures are available on how much is being spent on amenities, but they are believed to constitute a substantial portion of all college and university construction. Nationwide, institutions of higher learning spent more than $7.3 billion on construction, additions and renovation projects of all kinds in 1998, up from $6.4 billion in 1993, according to American Schools and Universities magazine, which has been conducting annual surveys for more than 20 years. But by the end of next year, the total is expected to more than double, reaching $15.1 billion.
Officials at California’s private colleges say the trend is clearly visible at their schools.
The Claremont colleges boast updated food service and sports centers, whereas USC is planning to build several facilities, including a cultural and sports arena, a student center and a performing arts center. Pepperdine expects to begin construction next year on a major building project that will include enhanced amenities. Whittier College has created a fitness center that is open 24 hours a day. It also has a new radio station, coffeehouse and student-run nightclub.
The state’s public schools--the UC and state college campuses--have done little such upgrading, officials say. Under state law, students must finance such construction by paying higher fees, and that has dampened demand. But there are signs of a new clamor for amenities. Students at UC Davis, for instance, recently voted to pay higher fees in exchange for recreational sports facilities.
In addition to sports amenities and trendy eateries, colleges are making sure that dorms have microwave ovens and in-room refrigerators, as well as computer hookups, cable television and extra electrical outlets for the plugged-in generation.
Temple, a gritty, no-frills urban university, has just spent $10.5 million to build a recreational sports complex with two floors of the latest exercise equipment, an indoor track with skyline views and an eye-popping motorized climbing wall that lets you scramble up Yosemite’s Half Dome without getting more than 2 feet off the ground.
“It’s an absolute requirement for the average kid going to college to have these exercise facilities--not just the basics, but high-tech stuff like the climbing wall,” says Tom Maxey, director of enrollment services at Temple. “Unquestionably, we live in an exercise era.”
Even that ultimate symbol of country club living, the golf course, has become a talking point for recruiters. Schools with elbow room, often those located outside urban areas, are well positioned to offer something that catches the eye and offers prospective students a chance to hone their golf game, which can be a valued skill in the business world.
Virginia Tech, in rural Blacksburg, has a top-ranked football team, for instance, but what struck one parent visiting the campus recently with his son, a high school senior, was how much his hosts talked about the on-campus golf course. Three times, he and his son were asked whether they played.
But the demand for quality amenities is not limited to wealthy campuses.
Although Trinity now serves a predominantly minority population and attracts many first-generation college students, that doesn’t mean expectations for amenities are lower. McGuire tells of bumping into a disgruntled father in his daughter’s dorm.
He was fumbling with a set of rabbit ears on her television set. “How do you expect these girls to get good reception if you don’t have cable?” he demanded. McGuire tried to suggest that the room’s new Internet link was more important, but she got the message.
The father represented the voice of the market. “I think of it every single day of my life,” McGuire says.
Northeastern University in Boston, like Trinity, serves many middle- and working-class families and also faced a financial crisis several years ago. Yet it too is now investing in amenities.
Though Northeastern’s founders sought students “from the humbler walks of life,” the school’s new 81,000-square-foot Marino Recreation Center contains the full panoply of StairMasters, aerobics studios, basketball courts and saunas. It also includes a full-service supermarket, a French bakery and an Italian restaurant.
There are indoor trees, bubbling fountains and paper lanterns. Plus custom-made omelets at a breakfast bar. Northeastern has “transformed the traditional gulag dining hall environment into an upscale restaurant experience,” in the words of Terry Yanulavich, the school’s communications director.
Even a school with as many natural attractions as Colorado College in Colorado Springs is taking no chances. Though it is so close to the Rockies that its new dorm rooms feature views of Pikes Peak, the school is installing a 27-foot indoor climbing wall.
In some cases, the private sector is making it possible for colleges to get the new facilities they want without bearing the financial burden.
The Ambling Cos. of Valdosta, Ga.--currently building upscale dorms at the University of Maryland--is one of a handful of firms that do not require colleges to put up the capital for construction. The builder arranges financing, then leases rooms directly to students and shares the revenue with the university. The system allows schools to modernize and compete without going into debt--or annoying alumni with yet another round of fund-raising calls. Ambling even manages the facilities, sparing the college the headache.
To be sure, many schools have expanded academic facilities as well. There is a boom in college library construction. And classroom buildings are being added at Temple and elsewhere, with an emphasis on electronic marvels such as pull-down screens linked to the Internet and ready access for student laptops.
But it is the perks, school officials say, that are helping drive up the costs of higher education. Even in cases where builders finance the construction, the costs are passed on to students, and many administrators, education experts, not to mention parents, worry about the financial burden. But most colleges, private as well as public, feel they have little alternative if they are to remain competitive.
“We don’t have the luxury of choice,” Temple provost Corrine Caldwell says.
Caldwell sees amenities as vital to not just recruiting but also to retaining students, an important economic and academic issue. “If you provide this community that they can get attached to in a whole lot of ways, they’re going to stay with us.”
New York architect Hom, who is working on massive new student centers at the State University of New York’s Stony Brook and Binghamton campuses, agrees. His buildings are meant as “town centers” for the huge schools, he says.
With a similar goal in mind, Temple’s new Tuttleman Learning Center includes comfortable niches for study, previously a rarity in the school’s utilitarian buildings. The new Soft Bytes Cafe offers access to the Internet, loaner laptops and, of course, gourmet coffee.
And if Temple’s amenities still lag behind the University of Virginia’s, maybe it’s because Jefferson had a head start.
When he designed the classical Rotunda building that overlooks his “scholars’ village” in Charlottesville, Jefferson included a tunnel under the front steps, in which the sons of the early 19th century planters exercised in bad weather.
Advised the author of the Declaration of Independence: “Give about two hours every day to exercise, for health must not be sacrificed to learning. A strong body makes the mind strong”--words now emblazoned upon the wall of UVA’s Aquatic and Fitness Center.
