Upscaling the American College Community

Last year, on the corner of the busiest intersection in College Park, Maryland—home of the University of Maryland’s flagship campus—a small but significant change took place. After 30 years of business, a derelict pizza shop closed its doors and, in its place, a popular chain of Portuguese chicken restaurants opened. This seemingly innocuous change is significant, not because of the reduction of pizza slices per capita (there are some 13 pizza joints near the campus) or the loss of a neighborhood institution. It is significant because it represents a microcosm of shifts taking place in College Park and many other college communities: upscaling.

There was a time when college communities were known, among other things, for cheapness. Cheap pitchers of beer at grimy bars. Cheap apartments and houses for rent. And, yes, even cheap slices of pizza. Goods and services were cheap in response to the well-worn mantra of the broke college student. If you wanted to attract college students, you competed on price more than quality. To be sure, there are still vestiges within every college community of businesses seeking to attract poor college students with basement prices. However, in many college communities there is a perceptible movement away from cheapness as a guiding business strategy. Instead, entrepreneurs are actively pursuing a more affluent segment of the consumer market.

As a professor of higher education, I have had the privilege of visiting many college communities, and in almost every case, the trend of upscaling is evident. By now, we’ve repeatedly heard and/or read about manifestations of this trend, particularly related to student housing. College communities have witnessed the construction of luxury apartment buildings, many of which are mixed-use developments, combining residential and commercial spaces. What this means in the context of college communities is that restaurants and convenience stores line the first floor of large apartment buildings. Students only need to walk down the hall and take an elevator to buy a burrito.

There are signs of upscaling beyond food and housing. Coffee shops feature designer roasts and every imaginable combination of espresso, milk, and flavoring. Bars are becoming less grimy and more glamorous, with signature cocktails and craft beer. Well-known fashion and technology brands are vying to occupy locations that receive heavy student (and parent) foot traffic. Entertainment venues like movie theaters are rolling out more services that carry higher prices. Mirroring trends in college pricing, the net effect of upscaling is that virtually everything in college communities is becoming more expensive. No matter where they look, students see opportunities to spend.

In some college communities, upscaling has been part of a purposeful plan to attract wealthy students and encourage faculty, staff, and young professionals to live near campus. As The New York Times recently reported, college communities in Philadelphia, Nashville, and Raleigh are building luxury housing not just for students, but also for members of the “creative class” in an effort to cultivate a “trendy live-work enclave.” The most idealistic of city planners hope that marrying the intellectual vibrancy of colleges with high-end housing replete with amenities will pull in young professionals and spark innovation, business creation, and economic growth. Some college communities—such as those David Brooks labeled “latte towns” in his analysis of the new upper class—have long flourished thanks to synergies between colleges, capital, and creativity.

Yet one question that arises from the upscaling of college communities is what it truly means for students, faculty, and staff. On the one hand, few people complain when an ugly building is torn down and replaced by an exciting restaurant. Who doesn’t want another option for late-night delivery or weekly office lunch? Additionally, from a safety perspective, there is value in students living in newer apartment complexes that are completely up to code. In the interest of work-life balance and protecting the environment, creating a college community in which faculty, staff, and students live nearby campus and forego long commutes is certainly beneficial. In fact, some would call the changes afoot in college communities as “smart growth.”

On the other hand, there is reason to challenge the notion that students, faculty, and staff have become affluent enough to explain and justify upscaling. If anything, research and experience suggests that colleges are welcoming increasing numbers of low-income and financially precarious students. These students may be the first in their family to attend college, they may be working adults, or they may be returning to school after a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Upscaling may price out those students who can’t pay to play, causing them to stop out or drop out, either due to financial pressures or a sense of marginalization.

The large proportion of students who rely on financial aid means that taxpayer money may be used to meet higher prices for goods and services. In this way, it is possible that the federal government subsidizes the “trendy live-work enclaves” developing within college communities. There are, of course, students from wealthy families attending college, perhaps enough to create a strong incentive to scale up. Still, the incongruence between mounting student loan debt and the transformation of college communities suggests to me a faulty assumption of affluence among students.

In addition to low-income students, international and graduate students may acutely feel the squeeze occasioned by upscaling. International students are generally not eligible for financial aid, and they may be shocked upon arrival at how far (or, more appropriately, not far) their money goes. We would be naïve to think that all or even a majority of international students come from wealthy families who can pay for what has become the quintessential American college experience. Much of the conversation around luxury housing in college communities has focused upon undergraduate students and young professionals. Graduate students, who may be attempting to support themselves and dependents on a paltry stipend, are seemingly excluded from the calculus of upscaling. As more and more luxury apartments are constructed, it becomes difficult for me to imagine how graduate students make ends meet.

Faculty and staff are perhaps better positioned to enjoy the fruits of upscaling in college communities because they earn a salary. It is true that if you want to convince faculty and staff to live near campus, you need more than cheap beer. Most faculty and staff desire decent housing options, reliable public transportation, good schools, and, if at all possible, places to exercise, relax, and enjoy a meal with family and friends. But this does not mean that faculty and staff seek luxury. Affordable housing and transportation remain paramount concerns, especially given that higher education continues to suffer through budget cuts that make the possibility of merit and cost-of-living pay increases a recurrent department meeting joke. Amidst the steady rise in the proportion of part-time instructional faculty at many colleges, the logic of upscaling is particularly twisted. In other words, while there are certainly benefits to changes underway in college communities, I’m left wondering who, precisely, constitutes the affluent segment of the consumer market.

College communities hold an important position in the American cultural imagination. We easily retrieve images of tree-lined streets, quaint pubs, funky shops, and red brick academic buildings. Having not visited every college community, I would guess that there are many places that still embody this description. However, I have seen enough to contend that our imagination is stuck in a version of college communities from thirty or even fifty years ago. Many of today’s college communities have dramatically changed in ways that require deep pockets to live comfortably. It is not at all coincidental that the college affordability crisis has emerged in tandem with the creation of college communities that are playgrounds for the affluent.

Concentrated Campus-Based Consumption Areas

In a previous post, I described the Chipotle Effect, or the rise of a consumer logic among college students based on individualization and personalization. Part of what spurred this idea was the explosion of Chipotle-like eateries on and around my campus. Even as I write this, a new Mediterranean restaurant is opening a few blocks away, structured around the same assembly line idea: you pick your platform (e.g., bowl, sandwich, pita, etc.), pick your toppings, and hit the road.

On the one hand, it has been nice to see any development happening in a town that has been slow to recover from the 2007-2010 financial crises. Construction has resumed on a number of projects, and I have heard of others in the pipeline (get excited ::read with sarcasm:: for more hotels and luxury student apartments). On the other hand, one has to wonder at the trajectory of College Park’s development—what is the end game? Not all development, in my mind, is of equal value, and I, for one, have difficulty understanding the need for another burr-eatery when we still have no community-cohering coffee shop or bar showcasing local craft beer.

The concept of “smart growth,” from the field of urban planning, offers one way of evaluating development in College Park. The University of Maryland is actually home to the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education. Indeed, the state of Maryland is considered the birthplace of the smart growth movement as a result of Governor Parris Glendening’s landmark executive order introducing the idea. The basic notion driving smart growth is that population growth and economic development are not inherently bad—they just need to be realized in a smart way. This means checking the environmental, economic, and social costs of suburban sprawl. In the poignant words of James W. Rouse:

Sprawl is inefficient. It stretches out the distances people must travel to work, to shop, to worship, to play. It fails to relate these activities in ways that strengthen each and, thus, it suppresses values that orderly relationships and concentration of uses would stimulate.

Sprawl is ugly, oppressive, massive, dull. It squanders the resources of nature—forests, streams, hillsides—and produces vast, monotonous armies of housing and graceless, tasteless clutter.

But worst of all, sprawl is inhuman. […] The vast formless sprawl of housing pierced by the unrelated spotting of schools, churches, stores, creates acreage so huge and irrational that they are out of scale with people.

So, if not sprawl, then what? According the Smart Growth Network, development imperatives should be:

• Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
• Create walkable neighborhoods
• Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration
• Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place
• Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost effective
• Mix land uses
• Preserve open space, farmland, and critical environmental areas
• Provide a variety of transportation choices
• Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities
• Take advantage of compact building design

With this list in mind, is College Park’s development smart? They’re getting a few things right. There are certainly a variety of transportation choices, although many of these options owe their existence to the town’s proximity to Washington, DC. Additionally, several of the development projects are trying to reuse existing buildings and promote walkability to public transportation and the seasonal farmer’s market. As for all of the other items on this list, College Park falls remarkably short. The new housing options are the same luxury student apartments. There have been concerns raised about a planned business incubator and research park affiliated with the university being built on vital meadowlands. And, finally, College Park seems to be selling itself to the highest development contractor and paying little attention to creating a distinctive sense of place.

The result is not smart growth, but rather the spread of what I would call concentrated campus-based consumption (CCC) areas. CCC areas arise in response to the college student consumer market. Some would argue that, in an era of rising tuition and struggling middle-class families, the presence of this market is questionable. I beg to differ. This market is thriving, and there appears to be no shortage of disposable income among at least a sizeable subset of today’s college student. This is one of the more interesting aspects of the conversation surrounding the mounting costs of higher education. Very few people have considered the extracurricular spending that has become a cultural norm—spending on housing, laptops, cell phones, clothing, coffee, and the other accoutrements of being a college student.

Business owners have capitalized on the existence of this thriving market. They are building mega-complexes that, while located within walking distance of campus, remind one of Rouse’s description of the sprawl that is “out of scale with people”. These complexes are multiple stories tall, housing thousands of students. They often feature a similar constellation of businesses: convenience stores, grab-and-go eateries, and perhaps a frozen yogurt place. A world is thus created for the average college student to orbit consisting largely of quick consumption sites. There is nothing unusual about a college student leaving their luxury apartment, buying a massive iced coffee in the morning, heading to class while talking on their iPhones, picking up a burrito, and sitting down to tap out a reading response on their MacBooks, before heading out to a bar for the night. Little thought goes into this routine beyond: “such is college life.”

Development in College Park hinges upon CCC areas. These are not designed with the community mind, but rather a large enough number of college students with enough disposable income to sustain a market. The fact that these areas depend upon college students is evinced by the great efforts expended to facilitate spending. They create pseudo-dining plans, or meal cards, so that college students can buy with a quick swipe. They pass out coupons at the student union, and advertise heavily in the student newspaper. Finally, it is worth noting that most of the businesses in CCC areas prepare for the quiet summer months—the offseason—when student consumers leave and their sales drop. It is in the summer months that it becomes clear that these areas are not built to strengthen the wider community.

The trajectory of College Park’s development is troubling. In lieu of constructing a distinctive college town with sustainable, community-minded development, we have rows upon rows of burr-eateries preying on a population of college students, many of whom have been encouraged to think of little beyond studying their way to upward mobility and buying their way to self-gratification. This is, admittedly, a rather narrow, pessimistic view of students. It is also somewhat self-condemning, as my routines sometimes resemble those of the students with whom I interact daily. Still, after six years of living and working among college students, I see unfortunately few counterexamples. As a firm believer in the idea that our behavior is shaped, in part, by the spaces we inhabit, I suggest here that we need smarter growth to help redirect the college student orbit, making possible smarter decision-making and lifestyles.