Welcome to the Sponsored Campus

To welcome new students to campus, the University of California at Berkeley packs eight days with up to 12 hours of mandatory activities. The orientations introduce freshmen and transfer students to the campus and nearby city of San Francisco; teach them about sexual violence, mental health, and alcohol use; and give them the opportunity to make friends while ziplining in the woods or racing in giant inflatable balls.

Orientation is also students’ introduction to Berkeley’s major corporate sponsors. In freebie bags they get a reusable mug from Peet’s, Berkeley’s preferred coffee provider. The student leaders who shepherd orientees around all week wear fluorescent yellow shirts from Under Armour, which has an exclusive contract to outfit Cal’s athletics teams and funds student programs on campus. And for — physically, emotionally — exhausted parents who have just dropped off their kids, Bank of the West sets up a lounge area with couches and refreshments near its branch inside the student union.

“The environment that’s set is very welcoming, relaxing, which is great for people understanding that: Hey, we care about you. We understand you’ve just moved your student in. You’ve been walking around all day long. Have a seat,” said Anissa Hagedorn, who manages Berkeley’s business partnerships. “And of course that’s an opportunity for the bank to talk about the benefits of banking with them on campus.”

Private industry has long been woven into college life, with companies acting as vendors, donors, and potential employers of students and graduates. In recent years, however, companies and universities alike have sought to embed corporations even more deeply into the college experience.

Now, the university’s official bank may not only offer a branded debit card but also build a branch on the institution’s grounds, host internships for students, and help fund the student food pantry, as Bank of the West does at UC Berkeley. Or take Herff Jones, which provides the caps and gowns for graduates across all seven of the Indiana University campuses — and sponsors content for IU Bloomington’s Office of First Year Experience Programs, so that freshmen and transfers are introduced to the company before they’re entirely sure they’ll make it to graduation. “It’s building a brand connection much earlier than they would in the past,” said Valerie Gill, the associate vice president for business partnerships for Indiana University.

What makes the new generation of university corporate sponsorships different, experts say, is the depth to which companies are involved in student life, the coordination required across campus, and, frequently, exclusivity. Universities are offering corporations the chance to be their official banking, office-supply, insurance, air-travel, solar/alternative-energy, or grocery partner, to name a few. Institutions are able to get more money for exclusive deals than they would from having several companies compete within campus boundaries, several experts said.

The trend of more-encompassing partnerships picked up in the last five years and “hockey-sticked” in the last two, said Andrew Judelson, the executive vice president for national sales at Learfield IMG College, a company that manages collegiate sports teams’ marketing rights. Berkeley launched its University Partnership Program in 2015, and Indiana University created its Office of Business Partnerships in 2019. Meanwhile, Learfield and a competitor, JMI Sports, developed programs to expand their services beyond athletics in 2016 and 2015, respectively.

The demand came from corporations that had already become accustomed to advertising to students and alumni during sports games and wanted to reach other students too, Judelson said: “Brand-side partners were looking to get beyond athletics, to engage with the university ecosystem or community 24/7/365, versus just Saturday afternoon in the fall.”

In addition, companies are looking for new ways to woo people, as consumers have become inured to traditional marketing tactics. In a survey of 15,600 13- to 21-year-olds worldwide, the National Retail Federation found that these young people were “less likely to form brand attachments than previous generations” and want “quality and authenticity” from brands, “not … marketing hype.”

“It’s really difficult to reach these young consumers nowadays,” said Jonathan Jensen, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies sports marketing. Previously, Jensen worked as a consultant, negotiating sports sponsorships on behalf of brands. “They don’t watch television. They don’t have cable. They’re not reading magazines. A lot of them don’t have a car, so they’re not seeing billboards,” he said. “If you’re able to get on campus and reach them in a nonthreatening environment where they might be more predisposed to be marketed to, that’s a huge win.”

Companies’ interest in marketing across campus coincides with tightening budgets at many public universities. These institutions are looking for creative ways to raise revenue in the face of budget cuts from the state. “We are certainly experiencing here a huge decline in state funding,” said Amy Gardner, the executive director of Berkeley’s business-partnerships office. “There’s a general need and push for revenue generation.” (In California, state funding for higher education declined from more than $11,000 per student in 2002 to less than $8,000 per student in 2018.)

Young adults as a group don’t have a lot of spending power, but college students’ value to brands lies in their future earning potential. “If you can get a 20-year-old as a customer now,” Jensen said, “they might stay with you for another 50 years.”

What Campuswide Agreements Look Like

So what do these agreements look like? Through public-records requests, The Chronicle obtained contracts governing campuswide sponsorships at four public universities in the South. In addition, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill posted two of these contracts online. The University of California at Berkeley’s public-records office didn’t return documents to The Chronicle in time for this story, but its business-partnerships office makes an unusual amount of information available on its website.

These documents show universities receiving substantial sums for an array of rights, some of them quite unexpected and expansive. The amounts are still dwarfed by what companies will pay to outfit colleges’ sports teams and advertise during games. For top-performing athletics departments, marketing deals can run to more than $10 million annually. Still, the sums involved in non-athletics agreements are nothing to sneeze at.

A look at the details of one of Berkeley’s biggest partnerships shows where the money might go and the kinds of benefits companies and institutions trade during these deals.

The Bank of the West had been a Cal-athletics sponsor for two decades before it signed a campuswide deal with Berkeley in 2015. With the new agreement, the bank will give the university about $1.7 million in cash and support every year for 10 years. Some of that revenue goes to the central campus’ core operations. About $247,000 annually is pledged for student programs and $100,000 for the alumni association, The Daily Californian reported. (Gardner said she couldn’t confirm the revenue split between programs.)

In return, Bank of the West gets to be called Cal’s official bank and has the exclusive right to promote its financial products on campus. Where there used to be a variety of ATMs on campus, there are now only Bank of the West machines. The student-union branch — the location of the orientation lounge — was a part of the deal.

Students often get to offer input on corporate deals before they’re signed, according to Adam Orford, a doctoral student in energy and resource studies and president of Cal’s graduate-student government. He added that his government promotes one of Berkeley’s sponsors, Peet’s, which funnels some of its on-campus revenues into a grad-student travel fund. “We emphasize that the money comes from the Peet’s deal,” Orford wrote, “and try to encourage folks to buy coffee on campus.”

Other agreements The Chronicle learned about brought substantial, although not quite as large, revenues to campuses.

In 2018, Canon agreed to pay the University of Louisville $112,500 a year for 12 years, according to a document The Chronicle received in a public-records request, to take over all printing services on campus. More than a quarter of that payment must go to Learfield IMG College, which Louisville hired to broker this and other sponsorships. Over all, in the 2019-20 academic year, Louisville earned about $580,000 from non-athletics sponsors, including PNC Bank and Commonwealth Credit Union. That works out to be about $26 per student.

In 2016, Clemson University signed an agreement with JMI Sports for the latter to negotiate campuswide sponsorships on the university’s behalf. In return, JMI pays Clemson at least $600,000 a year, with the opportunity for more, if revenues exceed certain bars.

Integration into Campus Life

In addition to simple marketing rights, these deals often mean greater corporate presence in classrooms, student hangouts, and other spaces where private industry might have been scarcer before. Such details often don’t show up in the initial contracts but are instead negotiated later, as companies and university business-relationships offices work together to identify what might get a company in front of students’ eyes.

Business-partnership staff argue these deeper relationships are better for students too. Brands need to “engage in a meaningful way,” Gardner said. For example: “Showing that they have these shared values with us.” Berkeley’s major corporate partners help fund a push to reduce campus buildings’ carbon footprints and a “basic needs skills” course that teaches students how to grocery shop, cook, and stick to a budget. In several agreements The Chronicle learned about through press releases and public-records requests, universities’ official banks ran financial-literacy classes for students and faculty.

At Saint Mary’s College of California, students will manage a part of University Credit Union’s investment portfolio “as part of class curriculum,” according to a press release from December. A spokesman for the college didn’t have any more details because the program is still new and being developed.

And while many experts said neither brands nor universities want to see a lot of logos and ads on campus, they are still a part of the deal. In a request for proposals to buy campus multimedia rights, the University of Kentucky offered up a list of spaces on the grounds available for branding: wayfinding signs, recreation-facility signs, student-center signs, parking-structure signs, dining-hall signs (excluding franchised restaurants), and digital billboards. In addition the university noted open ad spots on buses, bus shelters, parking permits, visitor-parking tickets, parking maps, the guest Wi-Fi-login page, and uky.com.

Does Anyone Notice?

Universities might be willing to sell boundless space, but faculty members The Chronicle contacted — most of them members of their faculty senates — seemed hardly to notice the presence of sponsors on their campuses.

Gregory R. Heim, a professor in Texas A&M’s business school, hadn’t noticed the university’s official banks much, besides the fact that Wells Fargo seemed to run all of the ATMs on campus. Jensen, the athletics-marketing expert, hadn’t really seen the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s sponsors outside of sports games.

On the other hand, Bryan Huang, a Berkeley undergraduate and student-government officer, could clearly state where he’d seen Cal’s biggest sponsors: Bank of the West in the student union, Peet’s in the dining halls, Under Armour in the gym. But he saw their presence as a win-win for all. “The company is prominently featured in relevant locations, the school gets compensation, and students have quality, convenient options for their needs,” he wrote in an email.

Orford suggested an engaged student body can act as a counterbalance to both the university administration and the corporations seeking access to campus. “If we were not invited in, we would be knocking on the door,” he wrote.

Indeed, one major Berkeley partnership came under fire from students recently. In 2018, an undergraduate discovered that the Bank of the West’s parent company, BNP Paribas, invested in private-prison firms contracted by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The editorial board of the student paper, The Daily Californian, called for the school to end the partnership.

Over the next year, activist groups, on and off campus, protested Bank of the West and other banks, as well. Finally, in 2019, BNP Paribas announced it had pulled its money from private prisons and wouldn’t invest in them in the future. The university kept its partnership.