Another LAC auspicious financial comfort?

[Hibush]

The New York Times has an article today on colleges and universities picking up unused office space on the cheap to accommodate their expanded needs for classrooms and dormitories.

The one that stood out to me was Sacred Heart in Connecticut picking up the posh old General Electric HQ down the street. SHU--despite having a few things in common with struggling schools--appears to be doing very well with enrollment and finances. That makes it worth noting as a bright spot in the landscape of small Northeastern religion-affiliated colleges.

SHU has moved the business college and the education college to that campus.

Both the graduate and undergraduate programs are growing. Net tuition is over $40,000.  Big majors include nursing and education, for which there is a lot of demand. Those emphases also lead to a predominantely female student body.

Their business school is named after Jack Welch, which makes me wonder what kind of management they teach at a school named after "Neutron Jack." And whether SHU leadership follows any of his principles.

[apl68]

There's a lot to be said for re-purposing a building where feasible, as opposed to building something brand new.  It depends on the condition of the building in question, and whether the location makes sense.  Sometimes it's more economical. 

And sometimes a re-purposed site wouldn't really cost less, but has a very desirable location.  When our library building was being planned, the planners had a choice between re-purposing a site downtown, and clearing trees and building on undeveloped land on the other end of town.  They chose the latter, which has resulted in the library ever since being exiled far from downtown, local schools, parks, or even very many households who are within convenient walking distance.  Our location in the effective middle of nowhere has really hurt us in the long term.  Going to the trouble of re-developing that downtown site would have kept the library downtown, to the benefit of both the library and the health of the downtown district.

[lightning]

Our medical center recently acquired a nearby vacated office building. It's working out OK.

I used to joke about my uni buying the dying shopping mall that was down the street from us. But I was making a half-joke. I thought it would have been really cool if we absorbed the mall. We would have gotten not just more teaching, research, and office space, but we would have gotten more parking, an additional food court, and student hangout space and a bookstore and coffee shop for faculty to hang out.

BUT, it was cheaper to simply build a new building farther away because it's easier to get money from a donor to build a new building, but really hard to get a donor to refurbish and repurpose a dying shopping mall.

[apl68]

BUT, it was cheaper to simply build a new building farther away because it's easier to get money from a donor to build a new building, but really hard to get a donor to refurbish and repurpose a dying shopping mall.

There is that, all right.  People who have millions of dollars to give tend to want something big and shiny and new to put their names on.  It's evidently one reason why colleges that really need investment in building up their academics end up spending millions to build new buildings instead.  The same thing happens at public institutions, since legislatures are more likely to fund highly visible pork-barrel construction projects.  That's how the nearest four-year college to our town got some new dorms built a few years ago.

[Hibush]

it was cheaper to simply build a new building farther away because it's easier to get money from a donor to build a new building, but really hard to get a donor to refurbish and repurpose a dying shopping mall.

Death and decay are indeed not donor bait. I could see the mall having Sears Hall at one end and Marshall Field Hall at the other. But the donors behind those mall empires are gone.