Who You Learn With, Who You Live With

 

Office markets have struggled since the pandemic, as increased remote work and other employee preferences reduce the amount of space companies need (sometimes all the way down to zero). I may prove to be wrong, but I suspect that while the new equilibrium may be lower than pre-COVID, it will still be a healthy amount of square footage, as there remain many benefits for employers and employees alike to be physically together, particularly in amenity-rich and multi-modal downtown settings.

What I can predict with greater confidence (again, doesn't mean I won't be proven wrong) is strong demand for on-campus housing at universities across the country. This is driven by a number of factors:

* Communities where universities are located can be expensive, incentivizing schools to be directly involved in meeting that demand

* Dorms can be money-makers for schools, if you are able to charge a premium for rent while keeping costs low through philanthropy or tax-exempt financing

* Town-gown relations are often exacerbated when a critical mass of students live off-campus, yielding issues around trash, traffic, and parking

But perhaps the biggest driver of bringing more students onto campus is a desire to intensify the social experience students can have during their four years in college. After all, the benefit of higher education is way more than just what you learn from your professors in your classrooms. It's also who you learn with, a profound influence that is multiplied many times over when the interactions extend beyond 9am econ class to include late-night philosophical discussions, midnight pizza runs, and the mundane day-to-day of sharing space with a roommate who started out as a complete stranger only to become the most important person in your life for eight months.

I've written countless grad school recommendation letters, and I keep coming back to wanting to emphasize how the candidate will be an active and positive contributor to the community that the school is building when it assembles a class. At the grad school, people are choosing into a program, and in turn a school should want to choose people who will enhance the learning experience for their classmates.

At the undergraduate level, it's the same but different. College students are younger and still figuring out who they are and what they want to be about. All the more that your four years are profoundly influenced by who you share space with, in the classroom but also in the cafeteria and dorm and community.

I think this is universally true, but it takes different forms at different places. Big-time athletic programs create a lifelong fan and in turn lifelong inclusion in a huge alumni network of fellow fans. Faith-based institutions seek to select and mold people of character, whose values will be formed and sharpened in the crucible of living and learning together. Every school has a culture that we learn about, are shaped by, and in turn help contribute to. 

A university wants this, badly. So it organizes freshman orientation, curates traditions, and provides spaces and experiences to build it up. Residential life is a natural extension of that, since it literally carries into the wee hours. It is no exaggeration and no small thing that who you learn with and who you live with can shape who you become for the rest of your life. What a wonderful opportunity that lies ahead on college campuses around the country.