What’s New in Freshman Housing? Buildings That Help Students Make Friends

For a building that looks like it could well have been on the campus since the 1920s, the big new first-year residence hall that will open this month at the University of Delaware is informed by a surprising amount of contemporary data.

Students invariably say they want to live in suites with private baths, but years of survey results at Delaware demonstrated that traditional double rooms, communal bathrooms, and plenty of lounge and study space would lead students to make more friends and feel more connected to the institution.

Hourly checks of several buildings’ lounges showed what types of furnishings get the most use — not sofas and easy chairs, but tables near or with power outlets. “Soft seating fills up last,” says Jim Tweedy, the university’s director of residence life and housing, but still serves to telegraph that a room is indeed a lounge.

Even the new building’s location is data-driven. Peter Krawchyk, vice president for facilities and university architect, calculated walking time to Memorial Hall, at the center of the campus, from the remote site originally envisioned for the project — “the back 40,” as it’s known. The walk would have taken freshmen 14 minutes, a figure he used to argue for shoehorning the new building into an empty space just off the South Green, where it is surrounded by the university’s classic red-brick Georgian buildings and is only six minutes from Memorial Hall.

“This is our campus. Why wouldn’t we want to put students in the middle of it?” Mr. Krawchyk asks. “The tendency in a lot of universities is to put housing farther and farther away,” leaving the campus core for “more institutional uses.” But at Delaware, he says, there’s now “a good understanding among senior leadership that the students become the center of the campus.”

The building here is among the latest examples of campus housing created especially for first-year students, who in the past were often simply assigned to whatever buildings or rooms were the least desirable. As residence-hall administrators have become increasingly sophisticated, however, they have recognized that contemporary freshmen present different challenges from their predecessors — challenges that buildings can be designed to help solve. The goal, ultimately, is to improve retention.

“This is the first generation of students ever to come to college with all of their high-school friends on their phone,” says José Antonio Bowen, president of Goucher College, which is building a freshman village. “Students are more socially isolated when they arrive, and we have to nudge them a little harder to get them to make new friends. The temptation is to return to your old friends.”

New relationships are vital, says Mr. Bowen. “People leave because they’re lonely. There are other reasons people leave, too, but one of the big ones is: ‘I don’t fit in. I don’t have any friends.’” Among the tools Goucher’s new buildings will use to help students meet their classmates are staircases that open into lounges, as well as double rooms too narrow for comfortably watching a wide-screen TV.

Much of new first-year housing has traditional double rooms and ample common space, says Dennis Lynch, a principal at the architecture firm Ayers Saint Gross who worked on the Goucher buildings and on first-year projects at Emory and Virginia Commonwealth Universities. “You pretty much have to leave your room to do anything other than sleep and study.”

Housing administrators, he says, will latch onto anything that pulls students out of their rooms. Laundry facilities, for instance, have been moved up out of basements and put beside lounges, because “students will hang out near their laundry.” He adds: “All these little things that seem mundane, we’re trying to leverage them to help students connect with their peers.”

Mr. Bowen’s favorite trick, he says, was to leverage students’ need for Wi-Fi. “I made the internet faster in the lounges,” he says. “They noticed in about the first 18 seconds.”

‘Communal Experience’

The new four-story building here at Delaware, the South Academy Street Residence Hall, will house 517 of the university’s roughly 4,000 first-year students in “neighborhoods,” each with a lounge and two communal bathrooms with individual toilet and shower stalls. (The bathrooms are identical, giving the housing staff maximum flexibility in assigning them.) Each of 14 neighborhoods will accommodate 34 to 40 students, including one student residence-hall adviser. The first-floor common areas include, among other amenities, a demonstration kitchen in which students can offer cooking lessons for their classmates and an expansive lounge opposite the main door. The lounge has an elevated area that can serve as a stage for student performances.

The architects, from Robert A.M. Stern Architects, worked hard to disguise the 143,000-square-foot building’s size. They broke it into a series of volumes arranged around more communal space: a west-facing courtyard that will offer movable furniture and built-in outlets. And they hid the fourth-story rooms under dormers in a roofline echoing those of nearby buildings by Charles Z. Klauder, a prominent architect who worked at a number of universities and drew up a master plan for Delaware in 1917-18. Kevin M. Smith, a principal in the architecture firm, happily reports that people unfamiliar with the campus have mistaken the $58-million building for a renovation of an existing Klauder structure.

The university’s residence-hall inventory includes a range of structure types, and years of survey responses have allowed Mr. Tweedy to analyze which of those contributes most to students’ well being. That is judged by asking students whether they would recommend the university to friends and whether they would enroll again if they had it all to do over again. “When we saw some of our older areas outperform some of our newer ones,” he says, “it gave us pause.”

“My places that are most successful are those that give students a kind of natural connection,” he says. As a result, the university now gives a top priority to what Mr. Tweedy calls “the student communal experience.” When any construction or renovation project gets underway now, he says, “We look at it from the perspective of, How does this build community, how does it build first-year identity, how does this build a network, and how does this help students become engaged on campus and make personal contributions to their environment?”

New construction isn’t essential, he notes. The university remodeled a 1960s complex a few years ago, doing comparatively little to the individual rooms but giving the main common area what he says was a striking reimagination. “We’ve been able to break up the space and give a lot of places for students to feel like they’ve got their own corner, but can still see and be seen.”

It’s recent construction that poses problems. About 1,000 first-year students here are housed in suites in buildings less than 20 years old. “They’re beautiful buildings. They’re spacious. Their public areas are very generous. But those are more challenging for students in terms of developing that social connectedness,” Mr. Tweedy says. “They’ll still be able to do it, but we have to put in probably two to three times the amount of effort from a staff perspective and a programmatic perspective, because the building doesn’t naturally assist.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.

Correction (8/7/2017, 10:40 a.m.): This article originally included an incorrect company name: Robert A.M. Stern Associates. The correct name is Robert A.M. Stern Architects, and the text has been updated.