How planning, design, and operations shape the student experience
Colleges are increasingly challenged to align physical spaces and student services with evolving expectations, limited resources, and institutional goals. In this article, authors Kim Martin, Dr. Laura Kane, and Dr. Andrea Becker examine how integrated planning and intentional design can help institutions navigate these complexities. They outline key considerations for selecting the right operating model—whether traditional, facility-driven, or program-driven—and offer a framework for assessing current assets, identifying gaps, and prioritizing investments. With a focus on defining each institution’s targeted new reality, the piece guides campus leaders in developing strategies that connect mission, space, and operations to deliver long-term impact on the student experience.
Redefining the Student Experience
Today’s higher education leaders face unique challenges. Many campuses find themselves either with not enough space to meet today’s students’ needs, or sometimes with spaces no longer aligned with these needs, or even a mix of both scenarios. These varied challenges necessitate creative, mission-aligned thinking around meeting student outcomes and expectations, shuffling of resources, and new opportunities for revenue generation.
Some are still digging out of the operational impacts from the COVID era, and other nuanced challenges, such as:
- Mental health crises that require enhancing student health and wellness resources
- Changing patterns in how students connect and establish a sense of belonging
- Rising market competition is matched by growing expectations for exceptional customer service and individual efficiency
- Organizational challenges due to decreased staffing, low morale, and limited budgets compel campus leaders to try to do more with less.
A Changing Collegiate Landscape
There is significant pressure to respond to this changing landscape; student life assets—including student centers, campus housing, and recreation and wellness centers—must now serve different roles than in the past. Sustainable problem-solving necessitates a holistic and integrated approach that goes beyond individual offices and spaces to encompass every touchpoint of the student journey. This involves understanding what students need to feel supported, engaged, and valued, and what your campus is uniquely positioned to provide. A college must identify the intersection of student needs, institutional strengths, and niche market opportunities and strategically invest in areas where these align to maximize impact, drive value, and fulfill its mission. Only then can an institution proceed with confidence to assess current physical spaces and programs to design and implement intentional experiences that align with these needs.
“For colleges and universities, transformation isn’t just about new buildings or new programs—it’s about rethinking how campus life functions as a whole.” – Kim Martin
Defining a shared vision for the student experience that is unique to the campus and derivative of institutional goals is a critical first step to maintaining a thriving campus community where students, staff, and faculty feel a strong sense of belonging and connection. That, in turn, facilitates solutions to the toughest challenges today’s college leaders are confronting.
Spaces + Places
Prioritizing Spaces and Places for Best Results
Defining and delivering the best results involves rethinking institutional priorities, reorganizing existing services, reimagining staff responsibilities, and strategic resource allocation. Shifting student profiles (financial accessibility, academic expectations, etc.) continually compete with external factors like off-campus market dynamics and funding pressures, both of which compete with institutional initiatives like campus master planning and regional economic development.
7 Essential Questions Every Institution Should Ask Themselves
“When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.” Karen Martin, author, The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos
That is why successful colleges know when to take a step back to develop concrete and actionable answers to high-stakes questions, such as:
- What services, resources, programs, and amenities must be provided to support the institution’s mission and strategic objectives?
- How can the delivery of these services, resources, programs, and amenities be optimized?
- How much additional space and infrastructure must be dedicated to student life facilities and programs to meet the needs of current and future students?
- What spaces and places are required to support success and seamlessly integrate academic and co-curricular experiences?
- What duplication of efforts can be streamlined, and partnerships can be developed to optimize resources?
- What policies and financial restructuring should be considered for investment in the student experience?
- What is the impact on the overall cost of education?
Bringing Your Team Together to Understand the Gaps
It might seem evident that some or even most of these questions cannot be answered by one individual. In fact, ideally, they compel leaders and stakeholders to come to the table and engage collaboratively—to better understand their current operations, opportunities to realign, and where gaps remain. Understanding these gaps and the reasons they exist directly informs the solutions needed to close the gaps.
“Future-focused institutions must move away from a siloed approach to delivering the student experience and instead adopt a strategic, enterprise-wide model to support the overall student life ecosystem; holistic thinking around student success outcomes must inform decision-making in resource allocation and reimagining student spaces and places.” – Dr. Laura Kane
Achieving Strategic Outcomes
Keep Your Eye on Your Targeted New Reality
The combination of institutional context and strategic criteria determines what type of plans are required to optimize student outcomes. To evaluate both criteria, a strategic visioning analysis is an important first step. Colleges have a starting point (current conditions) and a targeted new reality—the basis of all institutional needs. Utilizing diverse stakeholder involvement to evaluate the objective through outcome categories facilitates criteria development grounded in institutional mission and purpose, allowing for innovative solutions grounded in the institution’s objectives to ensure consistency and mission alignment.
What Are Your Institutional Priorities?
A strategic visioning and prioritization process requires campus leaders to chart a course toward their targeted new reality and is filtered through outcome categories such as academics, community building, societal responsibility, enrollment management, and financial performance. While some priorities overlap, each bucket has distinct drivers through which success is measured. Each driver is important. However, a disciplined analysis helps campuses identify agreed-upon institutional priorities. This, in turn, illuminates which drivers are the more essential to delivering the targeted new reality.
Using the defined student experience as a guidepost, colleges can then determine how to optimize impact based on the time, energy, and investment needed to reach their targeted new reality, helping to ensure that cornerstone priorities like (for example) student engagement, facilities, and operations are carefully integrated.
Integrated Solutions
Align Student Life Assets with Institutional Plans
One-size-fits-all fixes have been replaced with institution-specific prioritizations. A thoughtful and comprehensive strategic assessment helps campuses identify the best path forward to manage the campus experience—an approach that is best for them based on mission and desired outcomes. Student life assets must first and foremost align with the institutional strategic plan and integrate with the campus master plan.
Many universities employ similar, tried-and-true, integrated methods to identify their unique path. Managing the campus experience must be grounded in student engagement with stakeholder input. Market analyses present valuable quantitative and qualitative data on current on- and off-campus market conditions. Space planning helps institutions better understand how and when campus spaces are being utilized, and the extent to which these important physical assets are being optimized. Peer benchmarking offers insights into how similar institutions operate, yielding best practices to emulate and customize.
“An intentional focus on student experience and operational excellence will drive lasting, campus-wide transformation.– Successful campuses must chart their own course through strategic, data-informed planning grounded in mission, engagement, and impact.” – Dr. Andrea Becker
What Is Your Institution’s Ideal Operating Paradigm?
Campus leaders also must consider the lifetime impact of operations and the varied operating paradigms of student life assets including associated benefits and challenges. Integrated planning advances shared decision making and clearly defined shared goals, facilitating the allocation of constrained resources such as finances and staffing against competing institutional priorities. This approach helps campuses make deliberate decisions to reach their targeted new reality and to reap the benefits of resulting efficiencies. The operating paradigm informs revenue streams, and ultimately staffing needs and operating expenses.
Fee-Based Approach to Provide Stability
A fee-based approach is the low-risk option, barring significant enrollment fluctuations. It’s subsidized by student revenues/fees, sometimes through tuition allocations, and therefore generally yields stable fiscal performance.
Facility-driven Approach Adds Potential Reward of Speculative Revenue
A facility-driven approach is higher-risk and potentially higher-reward. Through this paradigm, campuses seek to optimize funding through speculative revenue from outside sources, such as facility rentals for weddings or youth camps. When incorporated during otherwise low-usage times (e.g., summer months), a college can secure revenue for offerings that might otherwise be dormant. The advantage is a streamlined organization; however, this approach requires specialized skills to be successful and can limit facility availability.
Maximizing Revenue with a Program-Driven Approach
Finally, the program-driven approach maximizes revenue by offering a large menu of offerings, generally with tiered pricing structures. This fee-for-service model bears the highest risks, but also the highest rewards. The upfront investments are greater, as a campus must hire more skilled staff in specialized areas, as enhanced customer service is important for attracting and retaining long-term users. The primary advantage of this approach is high satisfaction, and there is potential for speculative revenue. The primary disadvantage is that since a substantial amount of revenue is speculative, it requires a high level of commitment and skill to execute.
Some colleges adopt hybrid approaches, or sometimes they’ll employ one paradigm for an aging wellness facility and another paradigm for the just-opened conference and event center. The key is understanding the range of possibilities and which approach most closely aligns with an institution’s mission, present-day limitations, and targeted new reality.
The Right Plan: A Pathway for Sky-High Possibilities
Align with the Right Team to Maximize Outcomes
Every day, throughout each day, B&D works closely with campus administrators and leaders to help them articulate the importance of aligning strategic criteria to create a shared vision for the student experience; identify necessary resources required to define and deliver the student experience in support of institutional outcomes; and assess existing campus offerings and conduct gap analyses in alignment with the defined student experience. This planning process is essential, empowering colleges to remain nimble when responding to challenges. CENTERS helps universities meet their goals by developing customized operating paradigms and executing operations in alignment with these outcomes.
Planning and development efforts should prioritize creating environments that cultivate belonging through collaboration across departments and divisions, strategic resource allocation, and innovative partnerships. By focusing on the desired student experience as the driving force, institutions can unify efforts, break down silos, reduce inefficiencies, capitalize on shared resources, and ensure all aspects of campus life connect to an integrated, meaningful experience.
Ultimately, success lies in redefining the student experience as a shared institutional mission, one that harnesses collective creativity and resourcefulness to build a supportive, inclusive community where all students can thrive.
Whatever the challenge—leadership transition, enrollment fluctuations, or resource constraints—CENTERS has seen it and helped universities overcome it. The sooner you get started, the sooner your targeted new reality will be achieved.
About the Authors
Dr. Andrea Becker, Associate, Brailsford & Dunlavey, is a former director of residential initiatives, possessing expertise in residential life, co-curriculum development, and as a faculty worked to connect in and out of classroom endeavors to enhance the student experience and overall strategic positioning.
Dr. Laura Kane, Senior Associate, Brailsford & Dunlavey, is a former dean of student affairs at Kenyon College and has expertise in student engagement, student governance, student transition programs, and residential life.
Kim Martin, Vice President of CENTERS, is a former campus professional, has advised over 100 colleges and universities on the planning and operations of campus centers.
To learn more about them and how they catalyze and optimize university assets and outcomes, contact them anytime at abecker@bdconnect.com, lkane@bdconnect.com, or kmartin@centersusa.com.