When Wallace Loh got his first look at the college he would soon run, he was floored. Named president of the University of Maryland at College Park in 2010, Loh arrived on campus at a time when the university enjoyed a well-earned national reputation for athletics, business, engineering, and research, and for having easy access to the nation’s capital.
But it was hardly a sight for sore eyes.
“President Loh thought he’d be coming to this terrific, dynamic place where the landscape mirrored our success,” says Ken Ulman, the university’s chief strategy officer for economic development. “And then he drove down U.S. Route 1 and said, ‘This is it?’”
Leaders at the state flagship were beginning to understand what higher-ed institutions around the globe are realizing: To attract and retain students and improve their quality of life, universities need to enhance and upgrade their physical environments.
When courting prospective students and faculty, a college typically emphasizes a number of features — the experience of its faculty, the quality of education, its research opportunities and reputation — much more than it does the aesthetics and value of its campus.
But looks do matter.
Colleges that want to keep more students on campus should heed what prospective students are telling them about the importance of place. In the United States, 43 percent of students said they make their college decision based largely on their first impression of the campus environment, according to a university lifestyle survey conducted in 2017 by Sodexo, a global facilities-management and food-services company.
The campus of the future is a place for collaboration and creativity, but it must also provide spaces to disconnect.
The survey also found that a whopping 83 percent of students believe a campus’s physical environment is more important than a university’s reputation.
“When students visit a campus, they can’t see educational quality, or the numbers of tenured faculty, but they can see gleaming buildings and nice amenities,” says Kenneth Steele, a higher-education strategist and futurist at Eduvation, a Canadian firm that has worked to help hundreds of colleges and universities with branding campaigns.
“This is especially important for young students who are looking to spend four years on campus,” Steele says. “It’s almost like they’re looking to book a four-year cruise or trip.”
Students seem to intuit that spending their college time in a place that is safe, pleasant, and full of things to do is a crucial factor in fruitfully navigating their experience, and, he adds, “The campus remains a really important factor in student success.”
Even as many colleges are adding distance learning and competency-based programs that students can take part in remotely, higher-ed institutions are changing their campuses and surrounding areas to better accommodate students who prefer to live on or near campus, or at least spend a lot of time there.
As they invest more in physical spaces and begin to use them in innovative ways, colleges can do more than make their landscapes and buildings more pleasing. They can also create work and internship opportunities, encourage the growth of places to eat and shop, construct links with surrounding neighborhoods and towns, and redesign their campuses so students have places in which to work more collaboratively, or to unwind.
INSEAD, a graduate business university based in France with campuses in Abu Dhabi and Singapore, builds collaboration rooms and co-working spaces at all of its locations, as well as active-learning classrooms where students can move around and engage in hands-on work. But INSEAD also makes sure to include quieter areas that serve as silent rooms or meditation spaces.
“The campus of the future is a place for collaboration and creativity, but it must also provide spaces to disconnect,” says Minh Huy Lai, managing director of the university’s MBA program.
Many North American colleges see such spaces as a way to help students deal with anxiety and depression.
“Colleges are dealing with a mental-health crisis,” says Steele. “Anything we can do to make people more comfortable on campus — green spaces, walkability, places to chill out — we should be doing. As colleges look to develop more of these areas, they should pay more attention to the psychological effects of space.”
Steele notes that more universities are providing other amenities, such as international food courts run by chefs, better athletic facilities, and workout gyms.
“Students are becoming more demanding,” adds Lai. “They’re behaving more like customers, questioning old processes and demanding new services.”
Changing scenery can also be a perk for students, one that can result in a more-rounded education INSEAD allows its students to attend all three of its campuses during their years there; 77 percent takes the university up on its offer.
In College Park, Ulman was charged with turning President Loh’s impressions, and what came to be his campuswide vision, into something tangible.
A decade ago, the university’s sprawling campus featured a gleaming new arena and engineering building. But its fringes were showing their years. And the land to the east just off campus was a mess: Old strip malls with empty storefronts, student hangouts that could be best described as dives, a surfeit of rundown liquor stores — and not much else.
Recognizing that it had to increase its footprint to maintain its vitality and better serve its 40,000 students, the university hired a development consultant, began buying key parcels of off-campus real estate, and wooed businesses to fill new buildings. In the years since, the university has channeled $2 billion in public and private investment into making U.S. Route 1 and parts of campus along its edge into a vital part of the UMD experience.
“We believe that building up the area as a Greater College Park is an absolutely consistent part of our brand,” Ulman says. A new four-star hotel, along with new apartments and condo buildings, academic research buildings, an arts center, and off-campus nightclubs attest to the region’s transformation.
To overcome a history of “town/gown” tension, the university began to hold regular discussions with local partners. It recently spearheaded a joint venture to rebuild College Park’s City Hall.
“We’re on the phone with community people every day,” says Ulman. The university is also working with a nearby town to revamp and reopen an old school as a child-care center. It continues to promote the addition of coffee shops, housing, restaurants, retail, and other amenities just off campus, while finding ways — new bike lanes, connecting bridges — to link them to campus.
“For our people on campus and beyond,” says Ulman, “these are the kinds of developments that really improve the quality of life.”