Planning for Belonging: The Strategic Role of Student Experience and Housing

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Episode Transcript

[Music Intro]

Brian Trainer, Host: Welcome to Trends + Tensions in Architecture and Design, presented by BHDP, where we discuss trends in architectural and interior design and the competing priorities or tensions that arise from integrating new ideas into existing organizations, enterprises, and institutions. In this episode, “Planning for Belonging: The Strategic Role of Student Experience and Housing”, we are joined by Dr. Harry Titus, Vice President for Student Experience and Dean of Students at Lenior-Rhyne University, and Mike Garvey, Higher Education Client Leader at BHDP. I am your host, Brian Trainer, Senior Strategist for BHDP. Let's get started. 

Today, we're going to talk about the student experience on campus and how that factors into master planning. Our first guest, I'm going to let them introduce themselves. Dr. Titus, who are you and what do you do? 

Dr. Harry Titus: Absolutely, thank you so much for that. My name is Dr. Harry Titus, and I get the privilege of serving as the Vice President for Student Experience and Dean of Students at Lenoir-Rhyne University. 

I like to tell folks in my role as Vice President for Student Experience and Dean of Students, I get to serve as the architect of our student experience. My work is advocating and supporting the experience that our students are getting both inside and outside of the classroom. 

My team collectively works to provide students with that holistic experience, and I get to champion that experience by shouting all of the great things that my folks are doing.

Brian: I like that very much. And also, today we have Mike Garvey. Tell us who you are and what you do. 

Mike Garvey: Thank you, Brian. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Mike Garvey, and I am a Client Leader for the Southeast for Higher Education for BHDP. I have been in architecture and design here in the southeast for about 20 years. I've been with BHDP for about four years, and my role here is really one of relationship development with the higher ed institutions around the southeast. 

Brian: So, what we want to talk about is the student experience and how that factors into master planning. That's our first question.

Harry: I am not someone that went to school for architectural frameworks and design or master planning, so this is a cool opportunity to blend what I have studied my entire career and what I do with BHDP. As we think about the student experience and factoring that into master planning, what that means is that we want to ensure that the voices of not only today's students, but students five to ten years from now are included in that experience. We want to ensure that students are helping drive how we are shaping whatever that plan may look like. 

For us at Lenior-Rhyne, we focus on the housing experience. We wanted to ensure that we were including what students want and their holistic experience into this plan, but also what are the things that we aren't thinking about that they are engaging with or in after hours when no professional staff members are around.

We wanted to hear from our students to ensure that we were building, creating, and planning for the things that are going to help retain them. The things that are going to help them feel as if they belong, and the things that are going to help them feel they have a safe and caring environment that allows them to thrive inside of the classroom.

Mike: When it comes to residence life for higher education, it's bigger than just the time they spend in their dorm room, sleeping, resting, that kind of thing. It's what are the things that they're doing outside of classroom, but that still affects their whole student experience on your campus. That life outside of the academic life.

One of the things we saw in that research is that as Generation Alpha arrives, and the students beyond them, there's an increase in the amount of time students are spending, and anticipate spending, on things that are not their academic life. Not that academic life is going to taper off; we see that more plateauing. 

But a larger amount of time is being spent on things on campus that affect the whole student experience, and the residence life aspect of any institution plays into that. To that point, it made sense, I think, in your minds that 'hey, we really need to take a focused look at this', since students coming are going to spend and invest more of themselves in those experiences.

Brian: Mike, that was one of my questions. Why should we care about the student experience specifically after hours, once class is done? Harry, why is that important to Lenoir-Rhyne?

Harry: Absolutely. We are a residential community, and that is something that we heavily believe in. Being a residential campus and a residential community, we understand the value of what a residential experience can bring to the overall student experience. They typically, after hours, are engaging in clubs and activities both inside the residence halls and in other places on campus. 

We know that a lot of learning happens after hours, and a lot of learning happens when they're not in the classroom. Also, the diversity of experience that they gain, learning how to work with people that may have differences than they do. Engage in conversations that are authentic and informal. Those things matter. Being able to build their own network of community, that matters as well. A lot of that happens outside of the eight-to-five hours when they are hanging out in a lounge in the residence hall or in the student center. 

For me and my team, as we thought about engaging in master planning and the student experience, we recognized that it wasn't only about new construction or new builds, but it was about looking at the makeup of where our residence halls sit.

This is a very holistic approach as we work to think about, again, what the students want now, but what they are going to want and need five to ten years from now. 

Brian: So, I understand a little bit about a campus-wide study from a master planning perspective as far as inventory goes. How many classrooms of what sizes, and how that relates to class schedule. But, doing something that's more about student experience and residence life, how do you go about gathering that information when it's a little less checking boxes and formulas in an Excel file?

Mike: I can speak to that, Brian. When we're talking about master planning, as you hit on, it's a lot of data collection and understanding. Using our process at BHDP, understanding where an institution is today, understanding what their vision and goals are, and maybe how a planning exercise will tie into their strategic plan.

Lenoir-Rhyne happened to have just gone through a new strategic plan with the new president last fall, and then understanding what that establishes for where they want to be X years from now.

Whether it's an increase in enrollment, whether it's a change of their brand, whether it's an increase in programs, whether it's all kinds of measures and metrics of who we want to be as an institution. So, then the master plan, whether it's campus-wide or whether it's focused on a specific aspect, has to be in service of that.

When it comes specifically to a residence life master plan, what we're looking at there is oftentimes, and is the case with Lenoir-Rhyne. We'd like to increase the number of students that are choosing to remain on campus, that are choosing to live on campus. That's one big goal. And then certainly other goals and other metrics, but that's one big one.

What do we have now, in our inventory, that we can offer for residence life? How do those compare to peer institutions? Where are we ahead? Where are we lacking, and what needs to happen to those pieces of our residence life puzzle to help us accomplish that goal of increasing? 

In Lenior-Rhyne's case, the retention rate that we have as students mature from freshmen through sophomore and juniors and seniors, and keeping them on campus longer, and having that full lived on-campus experience. What are the things we need to do that are going to augment and support that and help us get there for those goals? 

Harry: Just to add to that, based on what Mike just said, it's comprehensive in the fact that it's not just our student experience team working through this. We're also thinking about how does this correlates with enrollment. 

As we think about increasing enrollment, do we have this space available, but are we prepared to actually engage in increased enrollment based on the current offerings we have? Let's think about long-term planning for new offerings that maybe we don't have today.

This plan allows us the ability to be forward-thinking. What do we need, four years, five years from now, to meet the demands of our projections as we think about increased enrollment long-term? It's about, as Mike said, not only getting students housed, but we want to retain them.

The way we do that is by ensuring that the experience is satisfactory. That they're getting within our residence halls, and they have something to look forward to. 

We want them to grow with their housing, right? We do that by creating this master plan to give us a clear plan on what we need to do to ensure that our students feel, as they grow in their classification, they're growing with the ability to live in different types of housing styles as they move forward.

That gives them something to look forward to. If they're having a great experience, we're going to hopefully retain them at a higher rate as well. 

Brian: I want to go back to earlier you had mentioned Gen Alpha and some research done with that. Are there generational needs or drivers that influence the master planning? What's different about this generation that's coming and is that making you think about the housing experience differently? 

Mike: It certainly is. The students that are going to be hitting campuses and coming to campuses that we would classify as Gen Alpha would be students arriving in the early 2030s.

They have a more holistic approach. Understanding of wellness and the entire person than any generation we've seen before. The research and surveys that we have done bears that out. What that is translating to is they are looking for both independent and communal residence life in combination. 

From a mental health standpoint, they want the individual dorm rooms where they have a place in a private bedroom to go and retreat to reboot. They want communal living too. What we're going to see, I think, is a return to residence halls that still have more of those individual bedrooms, but that also have shared common spaces, even within a unit of, say, four bedrooms. So that it forces them to get out and interact with their roommates, with their suite mates. 

Then we're also going to see, maybe, a return to communal bathrooms. I know we think back to our college experiences decades ago, where it was the big restroom at the end of the hallway. We could actually see a return to that, where it forces the students once a day, twice a day, whatever it is, to leave their room and go interact with other human beings. That's good for that sort of communal wellness. 

They've got their independence, they've got their own room that they can go to a retreat to and that they can decorate however they want, that they can get away and have their reset. But then they have to go out for anything else, interact with others, and learn how to grapple with others. 

Brian: I've heard the phrases “together alone” and “alone together”. Are those factors that weigh into the housing experience, and how would you define them? 

Mike: Certainly. Generation Alpha, from the research that my colleagues did, is the one that we're calling “together alone”. I'll define that specifically because they do get confusing when you go back and forth. Previous generations, like Gen Z, might have been looked at as “alone together”. 

The way that we break down the difference in defining those things is Generation Alpha wants to be “together alone”. That is small, curated groups of friends. The number five or six keeps coming up. Where they are together with their friend group, but away alone. 

Maybe they're hanging out in someone's communal residence space in their residence hall. Maybe they're in a small study room together, something along those lines. They're with their small, trusted group of friends, and they're apart from larger spaces, larger groups. That's “together alone”. 

What we saw with Gen Z and prior is “alone together”. That's how we would define people being more individual by themselves and in large spaces where there were others, but they weren't with them. They were alone, but together with others. 

The shift, I think, comes from seeing violence, unfortunately, on college campuses. We've gone through COVID, other events, other global things like that. That has driven Gen Alpha towards a heightened sense of awareness, a heightened sense of caution about being alone in big public spaces, where, unfortunately, bad things can happen.

Brian: The next question for you, Dr. Titus, is how has the housing experience evolved at Lenoir-Rhyne?

Harry: Yeah, I think that over the past several years, we are seeing more students wanting to live on campus, due to the market around us. Rent is not as cheap as it once was in our area. So, students want to live on campus. 

All of our students currently, if they live on campus, have an unlimited meal plan. So, we've seen a reduction in food and housing insecurity as we think about students that are living on campus, because they have that unlimited meal plan for our dining options.

That has also helped us address other needs that we are seeing happening. For some of our students, this is home year-round. We have to sometimes offer housing for students during summer breaks as well, due to circumstances. That has evolved into more students needing to live on campus year-round.

We have also seen, over the years, including more professional staff members within our residential communities, to help with creation of belonging activities and initiatives that support students holistically. When I arrived here about three years ago, we had one full-time staff member in housing, and now we have three.

We have grown the team that's working to meet that need because, again, we see the value of the residential experience and how it impacts the overall collegiate experience. We are putting a lot of attention on that experience. 

Brian: How does the housing experience differ based on size of institutions? Lenoir-Rhyne, where do you fall? Are you a big school, or are you a smaller school? Where do you fall in that spectrum, and what's different about it? 

Harry: We are a small, private liberal arts institution. What that means for us is that our housing experience has to be tailored to every single student that we are engaging on our campus, or who wants to live on our campus, because we're small. 

We usually average anywhere between 820 to 860 students living in housing currently. The goal is that is going to grow over the next few years. For us, that means, as a first-year student, they already understand the experience they're going to get as third-year students, because they talk to each other. They visit each other in different housing options, right? 

We want to ensure that second and third-year students are being champions for us about the housing experience for incoming students. We want to ensure that second- and third-year students, and even for our seniors and graduate students, have a great experience living on campus, so that they can be ambassadors for us as they engage with first-year students around the experience.

We want them to not only talk about how you get to live in this cool option. We want them to talk about how that enhanced their overall experience, how that supported their academic endeavors, and how they felt more connected to their faculty, their peers, and the staff members on campus.

We're working to build and create that holistic experience as a small, private, liberal arts institution. 

Brian: Mike, did you want to add to that as well, since you’ve worked with both? 

Mike: Harry was on the right track there when he was talking about that holistic experience. That gets into what I talked about a little while ago with the approach that students are going to be arriving on campuses from Gen Alpha, with a complete view of their wellness. That's not just their mental health, as we've talked about, their rest, that sort of thing. It's also their academic wellness. 

That connection between being an on-campus student, having access to academic resources, having connections to faculty, having group study, having other folks that are pursuing the same academic courses and avenues that you are, and undergirding that aspect of your wellness and of your success. That's a key part of the residence life experience as well. 

Brian: It seems like, from what Harry said, Mike, that the focus on student success, one of the sub-benefits, is that they know that they matter.

I feel like at a bigger institution, it might be easier to disappear. You're curating something that makes people feel special. To that, are there other benefits that come from focusing on student success? 

The first one I can understand, the financial argument is, if they want to stay here and they keep coming back every year, that's tuition, and that's good. Are there other, little fuzzier benefits that you've noticed? By focusing on student success, what outputs are there for the university that increase that experience, that make them those brand ambassadors for Lenoir-Rhyne?

Mike: And I'll certainly let Harry speak to that. 

But from a larger arena standpoint, focusing on student success really helps with some of that, especially in the first- and second-years, first year to second year retention. That's where you lose most of your students as an institution in higher education. From first year to second year is the largest drop off.

All the data you look up will show that it's the students not coming back for their sophomore year because they hit that freshman wall and go, “Whoa, this is way more than I expected. I'm way out of my depth”. Interventions when it comes to academic success in that first year are very crucial to getting them to come back.

Once they come back for their second year, there's a much higher likelihood that they're going to make it the rest of the way. I think that's one key aspect of it, that retention. 

Then also your graduation rate. All schools are looked at from the standpoint of a six-year graduation rate. It's nice to think we all get out in four, but the realistic number that the federal government uses is the six-year graduation rate. You can have a positive impact on that, which is one big measuring stake for any institution out there, public or private. 

You can have a big impact on that when you focus on student success. Students that feel empowered to accomplish the difficult courses that are before them, that have the help they need to grow mentally and undestand what they need to learn and then succeed. Get the grades they need to learn the things they need to.

That becomes a self-fulfilling cycle, right? The more success they see, the more momentum they gain, and the more it propels them towards graduation. 

Harry: I think those are both the top two that we really focus on. That retention and those graduation rates. I think the other thing too, it helps with faculty and staff engagement with students, which plays onto student success, especially when you target students by a community.

If you have a first-year community, we can do targeted outreach to those students with faculty and staff, or the second-year community. 

A sense of belonging plays a huge part, which then helps post-graduation. What does donor engagement look like for alumni who had a great collegiate experience?

A lot of times, when you talk to alumni who are giving back to the institution, they typically can go back to a time where they had a great experience in the residence halls with a roommate, with a suitemate, with a neighbor, to talk about what enhanced their overall collegiate experience and why they are supporters to that institution.

You obviously have the graduation rate, you have the retention rate, but I think you also have the donor engagement, the alumni support, and the faculty and staff engagement to our students who are living in our communities, all in the name of student success. All of that plays into what we think about as we think about student success and what it means to an institution from a holistic experience.

Brian: Fantastic. Mike, I'll pose this question to you first. Is there anything that you would like the listeners to take away from this specific topic? 

Mike: I think the one key takeaway would be change is coming in students. The evidence bears that out. With a smaller pool of students to be recruiting from, as the enrollment cliff that we've talked about for years starts to arrive, institutions need to be thinking about how their campus is preparing for that smaller pool of students we are going to be competing for, and how are we going to be ready for them when they get here.

The time to think about being prepared for those students is not when they arrive. To tip my hat to Lenoir-Rhyne, the time to think about it is now. As we're sitting here recording this podcast in 2026, 5 years before they arrive, any changes you're going to make to your campus, it takes time for that to play out.
Not just the design and the construction, which is our aspect of it, but as Harry pointed out, the donor alignment, the alumni outreach, the fundraising, the engagement with the community. Those are processes that take a lot of time. 

Thinking about how you are planning for the smaller pool of students you're competing for in the years ahead, thinking about that now puts you ahead of your peer institutions. 

Brian: Thank you, Mike. Dr. Titus, same question. What would you like listeners to take away from today? 

Harry: Absolutely. I think there’s a few things. First thing is, for any institution that are spending time right now, thinking about how do they transform or elevate their residential experience, in particular.

One of the biggest things is finding the right partners is critically important. For us, going with BHDP was very intentional, because they’re really focused on small institutions. We saw this more as a partnership than as us saying, “here's some money, come help us figure this out.”

We saw this as a partnership, and it really aligned with where we were as an institution and with our strategic plan to work to really move through this process. Finding a collaborator to help navigate this process is critically important. That's the first thing I would say.

As you navigate these processes, it is critically important to find a way to ensure that you have the voices of students as part of this process. We did that through focus groups. I think that the voices of our students today will help inform what we need for students in the future, because students now are giving us critical feedback and understanding of what they need right now as a first-year student, and what they believe they're going to need by the time they become a senior. It is critically important that you infuse the voices of students within these processes. 

Those are my two main things. It's finding a great partner and collaborator and ensuring that you're infusing the voices of students. It should be created with the support of students, to ensure that you are prepared for future generations, as you think about the future of your residential plans. 

Brian: Awesome. Mr. Garvey, thank you again. And Dr. Titus, thank you for joining us this time. Hopefully, you had a nice experience.

Harry: Absolutely. Thank you all. 

Mike: Thank you, guys.

[ Music Outro]

Brian: Thank you for joining Trends + Tensions in Architecture and Design, presented by BHDP, for this episode, “Planning for Belonging: The Strategic Role of Student Experience and Housing” with Dr. Harry Titus of Lenior-Rhyne University, and Mike Garvey of BHDP. If you appreciate what you have heard, please rate, subscribe, and give us a review. I am Brian Trainer, your host, and I hope you’ll join us for another episode of Trends and Tensions to see what topics drive design.