Why would a university have housing?

There's nothing quite like a high-stakes elevator pitch to crystallise your thoughts on a topic — especially when it has been sprung upon you at short notice!

Recently, I found myself in precisely this scenario. I was asked to prepare a single slide for the C-suite of the institution I am working for — an old, urban, world top 50 university — explaining why it was investing in its residential system.

Despite only having a few hours to prepare, I managed to complete the assignment to their satisfaction. However, this experience forced me to confront the reality that I didn't already have a clear answer to this question. I needed every minute of the lead time I was given to formulate a decent response.

I was shocked to realise that, despite my decade-long dedication to this field, I hadn't already created or encountered a compelling and concise justifications for the importance of university housing.

Perhaps I had assumed the value of university residences was so self-evident that it didn't require hard thinking. This attitude, it seems, was shared by most others as well: in my entire career, I had never been asked to do this before, nor had I seen any publications tackle the question directly. While many could list the benefits of residential communities, no one seemed to have addressed the fundamental question 'should we bother with them, or should we allocate our resources elsewhere?"

The absence of discourse in this realm may partially explain why, in my view, university halls and colleges have such haphazard approaches to evaluating and justifying their value-add. Rather than being anchored in a clear framework, their rationales are most often a grab-bag of mottos, mission statements, self-reported student sentiments, anecdotes and photographs of smiling students. Reviewing these documents often feels like marking a poorly written essay, where every possible argument has been crammed in, hoping that that one of them will influence the reader.

Nevertheless, I still had an assignment to complete, and those of us in the profession need to make our value more explicit, so what did I come up with?

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How student residences benefit their parent universities

I won't share the exact slide, I can provide the essence of it here:

One significant realization I had was that the benefits of a residential system extend far beyond fostering happy, persistent, and learning students. This was a question of resource allocation after all and there are various financial rewards to the institution for investing in residential communities such as expanding the number of productive assets, and improving fundraising from alumni.

To ensure coherence, I categorised all the benefits of residential communities into just three 'parent categories.' These were:

Housing helps students solve painful problems throughout their education journey.

Housing improves return on invested capital and generates positive cash flows for the institution.

Housing creates conditions that enable the institution to self-strengthen and grow.

I feel the categories are quite balanced — one is about the direct impact on students, one is about money, and one is about institutional improvement.

Then, with those categories acting as the pillars of this 'framework', all that remained was to list out the intuitive, wide-ranging and widely-understood benefits that a residential system produces, and attach them to the most appropriate category. It wasn't possible to include every conceivable benefit on a single slide, so it looked something like this:

Housing helps students solve painful problems throughout their education journey:

• Housing is a decisive factor for prospective students from other geographies who are contemplating enrolling at the institution.

• Residents enjoy, on average, greater levels of student development and success.

• Residents feel, on average, a stronger sense of connection and belonging to the institution.

Housing improves return on invested capital and generates positive cash flow for the institution:

• Housing operations are generally profit centres, not cost centres.

• Housing assets are usually cash flow positive.

• Housing is a productive use of land with high yields per square metre.

• Having residents enlarges the retail and the night economy of the campus.

Housing creates conditions that enable the institution to self-strengthen and grow:

• Housing creates fanatical alumni who are more likely to advocate for, and give to, the institution.

• Housing can reduce the cost of acquiring students by raising offer conversion/yield and improving student retention.

• Housing has a captive and engaged audience, which can be used as a testing ground for innovative new programs and ideas.

And there you have it: an explicit justification for a residential system that is both clear and versatile.

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Clarification:

If I were to anticipate the reaction to this from my colleagues in the sector, several might find this assessment overly cold, business-like and utilitarian. While I'm not blind to the other wonderful benefits not explictly mentioned above, I offer these few points in my defence for not including them:

1. The intended audience of this was senior executives whose interest in this topic was through the lens of resource allocation.

2. This was an exercise in developing an elevator pitch for housing, not an exhaustive account of all possible benefits.

3. Nearly every benefit not mentioned here can be traced back to one of those above. If we ever got down to a truly hard-nosed analysis of where the 'parent' university actually experiences the benefits of having a housing system, all those benefits would need to be, by definition, experienced outside the housing system. Benefits to the housing system itself are not benefits to its auspicing institution. Only the knock-on effects can genuinely be counted in an exercise like this.

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Cover image credit: Pixaby