Universities are luring remote staff at corporations to move from urban hubs to college towns, as companies look to continue flexible work arrangements for their employees.
At least two colleges — Purdue University and West Virginia University — are supporting programs for these remote workers, betting that this mode of work will have staying power after the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to scattered workplaces.
Universities have long hosted corporate incubators, but the new programs represent another way the pandemic has shifted the way colleges think about who works on campus, and why. Many universities are considering how employees’ desires for remote work will affect their own human-resources policies. These colleges, however, are making a play for other people’s employees, showing that campuses will both influence and be affected by this major shift in where Americans live and work.
Purdue is set to hold a visitors’ weekend for a small group of applicants for a so-called “remote-working community” in the campus’s business-and-research park, which is operated by the university’s research foundation and a development company. These people will uproot their lives — some with a deal-sweetening $5,000 — to move to West Lafayette, Ind. They can live at discounted rates in housing built in the Purdue park and access campus facilities, including the library and a co-working space.
This is a “once in a generation” business shift in which “all companies are rethinking their corporate footprints,” said David Broecker, the Purdue Research Foundation’s chief innovation officer. The foundation is one of the entities supporting the work-from-Purdue program. College campuses could be ideal places for individuals or for businesses to set up strategic clusters as they move away from having large headquarters, he said.
Such an atmosphere is what drew Jon Antel to the program. Antel, who has been working remotely in New Jersey during the pandemic, misses the “community feeling that comes from being in college and being surrounded by a lot of people you know.” He started looking for incentive programs for remote workers in March.
Antel works in information technology at SelectQuote Insurance Services and has never been to Indiana. Still, he is “99 percent” sure he will move in August through the program for at least one year. “I don’t see anything holding me back.”
Part of the reason the program appeals to him is that he went to a small college, and Purdue will offer a different environment.
“I’ll be able to experience some of that university stuff — the true university stuff,” including connecting with Ph.D. students to explore whether that path might interest him, he said.
West Virginia University and its state’s tourism agency are teaming up to try to recruit outdoor enthusiasts to Morgantown, Shepherdstown, and Lewisburg. The campus is offering free certifications — in remote work or remote management — through its business school. Other incentives, backed by donors and the state, include $12,000 in cash over two years, the subsidizing of activities like skiing and rafting, and co-working space and social programming.
The idea of a remote-worker program predated the pandemic, but Covid-19 accelerated employees’ abilities to choose where they worked — and it also deepened their interest in the outdoors, said Danny Twilley, assistant dean of the university’s Brad and Alys Smith Outdoor Economic Development Collaborative. (A $25 million gift from the Smiths to the university last year will, among other things, finance several of the incentives to program participants, including the cash payments, Twilley said.)
More than 7,000 people have applied, and the campus expects to choose 50 people for its first cohort, in Morgantown. The university plans to move into the other locations later.
One reason universities may be well situated to be stewards of this program? They are versed in retention strategies, regularly deployed to make sure students stay on track to graduation, Twilley said. He said the university is planning an orientation program to establish a sense of place and belonging, as well as monthly recreational activities.
‘Built-In Community’
Continued remote work remains popular 15 months after many workplaces shut down their in-person offices. Professors at Stanford University; the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, in Mexico City; and the University of Chicago surveyed 33,250 people about their opinions on remote work, and of the 21,280 able to work remotely, about 31 percent said they want to work from home five days per week. A survey by Redfin, the real-estate brokerage, found that more than 60 percent of respondents from the New York City area would think about moving if they could work remotely full time. (In Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle, more than half of respondents said the same.)
Remote employees want to be in places with amenities — locations with “substantial infrastructure” and a “built-in community,” said Evan Hock, co-founder of MakeMyMove, which promotes incentive packages for relocations and has listed the offerings of both West Virginia and Purdue. The company and Purdue developed the incentive package together, he said. He expects college towns to hold these employees’ interest, he said. “Ultimately, the bet that the university is making is that more smart people in a region is better.”
Universities have long been selling points for community leaders seeking to widen their regions’ appeal to possible new residents, an effort that may well be supercharged by the pandemic. But now it comes as colleges are rethinking the relationships of their own employees to their workplaces.
Human-resources staff and other college leaders are considering whether white-collar staff who don’t interact with students — think data analysts, accountants, and lawyers — should be allowed to work remotely in the fall semester and beyond.
One big question is whether the in-person experience that administrators stress as a selling point — for both potential new hires and prospective students — would erode with more work-from-home among college staff.
In one communication about employees’ working in person, Lehigh University administrators wrote that “after more than a year of separation, we want to enhance the sense of community at Lehigh. … You’ll soon be reminded why working on our beautiful campus with our exceptional staff and faculty is such a special experience.”
It’s that vibrancy that colleges are selling with remote-work magnet programs to recruit outside staff to campus areas. College towns offer many opportunities to collaborate, which will be attractive to remote workers, Broecker said.
If Purdue’s employees were working remotely, would that lessen the appeal? No, said Antel, the IT employee. In his field, “we’re built to work remotely. The real value I see at Purdue,” he said, “is being with the direct program participants and being with master’s and graduate students.”
When Antel was deciding whether he wanted to say yes to the Purdue program, he walked into the room of Shahil Shrestha, his roommate and friend from college, with a piece of paper. It was time to make a pro-con list. He needed to make a decision by the next morning.
Shrestha had been skeptical. But he brainstormed with Antel, and by the end of the conversation, Antel planned to say yes — and Shrestha decided to apply, too. Shrestha is working remotely in membership services and data analysis at the Arthur W. Page Society, a professional group for communications executives, and he is also pursuing an master’s degree in data science online.
“I was looking for a university environment, a more dynamic environment,” Shrestha said. Next weekend, he will be one of eight program applicants to visit campus, take a tour, meet other participants, and visit the co-working space. He plans to spend a little extra time there exploring the state.
