There’s no escaping it, for housing departments across the country, the number one topic of the season is cost. The student loan crisis shifted the views of what students and families are willing to pay and gone are the days of students choosing a college or university based on the wow-factor amenities of the residential complex. How different housing departments react to this challenge will be the make-or-break decisions that lead them into the future.
Spelman Johnson sat down with colleagues at the 2024 ACUHO-I annual conference, to talk about their approaches to the housing dilemma. While every institution is different, with its own unique place in the market, it quickly became clear that there are two main philosophies when it comes to tackling cost. Here’s what we heard: “efficiency equals survival.”
On top of families seeking better value for their money, the struggles experienced with this year’s new FAFSA launch have further driven home the importance of housing departments seeking cost savings across the board. For many, the thinking is simple, if your customer thinks you’re too expensive, lower your cost (or at least stop costs from rising as quickly as your competitors). While cost controls have been a common practice for housing departments since the beginning of campus housing, we’re seeing institutions lean into controls harder than ever before, in ways large and small, over the short and long term. Ideas such as eliminating trays from the dining hall, purchasing local foods, reusing wastewater for irrigation, building up to LEED standards, and slowly reducing the square footage of shared academic and housing spaces. These small incremental cost savings are making a significant difference across colleges and universities.
What’s more, these measures send a signal to institutional financial officers to continue to support housing and dining programs, because they are lean, offer value for money, and can singlehandedly increase retention, persistence, and graduation rates for students.
But there’s a drawback. As multiple colleagues confessed, there’s a point where cutting budgets significantly lowers the quality of what you’re offering. Many of these efficiencies are ingenious but one-time measures. Once you’ve eliminated a service, you can’t keep eliminating it again every year, as expectations rise for you to make annual cuts. This puts institutions at a clear risk of being in a race to the bottom.
The alternative? Create value.
Other institutions have been rethinking their value propositions. Costs of attending college has been spiking well above inflation for decades, and yet many aspects of what colleges and universities have offered remains unchanged. Despite the profusion of stories about new residence halls and complexes across the country, these are still outliers, and most new students are greeted at move-in with a similar experience. So why would students (and their families) agree to pay significantly more for something that represents the expectations of another era?
The quick answer to this from many housing departments is that it’s not that easy to improve quality. It takes massive capital influxes and often major partnerships to upgrade the quality of buildings and facilities. If efficiency can be a race to the bottom, then the upgrade game may be a race alongside private real estate developers with whom institutions continue to partner.
But there’s another way forward, and it starts with crystalizing what housing and residential life departments are really offering for the money, which is a place for students to thrive and persist year after year until graduation and beyond. A common theme from department leaders we spoke to is that the strength and quality of our housing and residential life teams drive the value we create.
Any housing veteran will tell you the same thing, a staff rich in wisdom and skilled in the profession will provide a value to the student that makes an impact so profound they will talk about it with others. That, more than new bathrooms (or insert any other new amenity), is what increases a customer’s willingness to pay for the experience. Departments that think this way see themselves in the business of creating learning environments. That has just as much to do with people and the quality of interpersonal interactions with students, as it does with a clean, safe, and welcoming physical residence hall environment.
So how are institutions creating value through quality staff? Four ways.
Getting real about student success learning models.
The era of the wellness wheel and traditional programming models has long been over, but the intent was on the right track. Change the focus to the actual program outcomes. In the rush (or in many cases, the slow walk) to residential curricula, different models have been floated, with arguments over assessment and theoretical underpinning. But it’s worth remembering the key proposition for housing is that building individual relationships is what helps prevent students from falling through the cracks.
Instead of making it one person or one team’s job to make sure no one falls through the cracks, a number of directors are realizing that this should be the primary objective of everyone in their units, whether they supervise custodial or dining staff, from front-desk staff, to security, to conduct officers. Every single staff member can, and should be, a node for relationship building. Instead of happening intermittently, the strongest departments are the ones where this is happening, as a rule, everywhere and where student success outcomes undergird the department’s mission.
Tapping into existing expertise.
How do you train everyone in the department, especially new additions, in the art of building relationships? You shore up the generational knowledge transfers between the staff. Creating workplaces that support and encourage intragenerational knowledge transfers build up everyone’s abilities and perspectives. As new generations enter the workforce and older generations step back, there is a greater need to create a culturally responsive synergy between employees and to adjust the disconnect that often causes a rift between staff.
Professional development isn’t extra, it’s the job.
Two years of a college student affairs preparation program is not enough. For the future of the profession to thrive, time “in the seat” still matters but so does taking the time to focus on skill building. Strengthening onboarding for leaders at all levels, investing in institutes that offer in-depth knowledge on a subject, or seeking out continuing education certificates are a few ways that departments are futureproofing their business models.
Amplify stories of staff who demonstrate the skillset.
How do you convey that student success is everyone’s responsibility? You make a practice of telling student success stories within your department and across the institution. Notice that every team tells stories of someone who went above and beyond, but few make a habit of doing this for every level of the organization. If staff regularly hear stories of one small way they made a difference, they are far more likely to continue doing it.
What is a culture? It’s the stories of “the way things are done around here.” Smart leaders realize they can shape that narrative by what they call out. Best of all, your staff are probably already doing this and it’s time to jump in.
So now what?
In a time when so many housing departments are feeling the crunch, with scrutiny of their cost structures, the complicated choices break down into a simple choice, do you do less (so you can cost less), or do you find a way to do more with what you have? In a profession that has always been more about people than walls and dining halls, many institutions are realizing that the best answer is to double down on the skills of our people, because that has always been our true source of value.