Empty Seats and Silent Halls: The Paradoxical State of University Campuses in the Digital Era
To regain their relevance in the 21st century, campuses must choose between embracing modernity, or rejecting it.
The campus of the 21st century is in an awkward place.
Technology has completely transformed education, with learning increasingly taking place online. Meanwhile, universities are still operating on a centuries-old model, entirely based on the principle of astronomically-expensive in-person learning.
With each year that goes by, this model seems increasingly irrelevant and difficult to justify, while universities cling to the familiar, out of fear that the future doesn't include them.
In this way, the modern campus is on the cusp of an institutional mid-life crisis, and all wait with bated-breath to see how they will handle it.
Will they grow a pony tail and buy a leather jacket? Will they lease a Miata? Or will they age gracefully into the silver fox we all know them to be.
The Absolute State of the Campus, 2023
When was the last time you took a stroll around your local suburban campus? You will experience an unshakable feeling that you're trespassing on some kind of restricted-access CIA compound.
You will find yourself surrounded by expensive-looking buildings and beautiful landscaping, but precious few people. Amidst the eerie silence, tumbleweeds seemingly mock the sheer decadence of CapEx on display. In the distance, a PhD student scuttles into a building. Beside a giant plastic chess board, the world's saddest food truck waits in silent desperation.
To borrow a modern phrase - the vibes are off, my friends. The contemporary campus is without sauce. There is no juice to be had here anymore.
Online learning has permanently undermined
the relevance of the campus
The slow but steady adoption of online learning means most major universities now offer online alternatives to their in-person lectures and tutorials. The pandemic accelerated this trend, and most campus' attendance numbers have not recovered.
The end result is the worst of both worlds - a hybrid system where students rarely come to the campus, while still paying extortionate fees for the traditional, physical campus experience.
On the ground, campuses have become strange places. Some are so poorly-attended that they can barely support a heavily-subsidised cafe. The student bar closes at 3 (pm!). Educators have no idea whether they are going to be teaching to an empty room or a full house.
Confusion over this hybrid model has lead to significant challenges for campus planning. After all, how can you make informed long term decisions about the size of classrooms, lecture theatres and buildings when you no longer have any idea how many students will actually attend?
Few universities are taking a firm stance on a future model based on lower attendance, out of anxiety that it will mean less of everything else. Less funding, less jobs, less research - less university.
City campuses are depopulating suburban campuses
Around the world, universities are investing in city campuses, leveraging the swathe of benefits and adjacencies that come with a CBD address. The driving rationale behind this trend is to improve the student experience and create opportunities to collaborate with industry. While this trend is great for CBDs, it is yet another nail in the coffin for the suburban campus. As key faculties relocate to CBDs, the suburban campus is drained of yet more life.
Many degrees are bloated and redundant
Highly technical and consequential careers will always require a university education. However, many other careers simply don't - and we shouldn't be hoodwinking young people into taking on surreal amounts of debt for them.
I want to dwell on this point for a second to give it some much needed emphasis. From the outside looking in, many university degrees seem either bloated beyond belief, or completely redundant.
At the same time, it is incredible how much university graduates don’t know. How is it possible for someone to receive 16 years of education and still require on the job training?
Graphic design does not need a 3 year degree. Town planning does not need a 4 year degree. Send your most heartfelt thoughts and prayers to the poor architects, who are so overeducated, accredited and qualified (and indebted) that they probably should have just done medicine.
The legacy campus model is ancient
The legacy model of campus-based learning is at least centuries, potentially millennia old. Part of the reason universities have such massive fees is the cost required to build, maintain and upgrade campuses. Billions upon billions being spent - all driven by a model that was developed during a time when a common way to die was getting kicked in the head by a horse.
I don't claim to be an expert in education, but I have to believe that we could come up with a better system that is more responsive to the world we live in today.
How universities have been responding
Propelled by centuries of momentum, universities are understandably clinging to the old model and are doing their best to ram this square peg into the round hole of the 21st century.
They are choosing to understand the crux of the problem as simply a need to attract students back to campus - asking the question “What if we made campuses like a theme park-slash-luxury hotel for students?”
To me, this approach is at best a losing battle and at worst a lost cause. Education was the primary reason campuses were built, and now education has fundamentally changed.
It's like getting divorced and trying to fix the situation by luring your aggrieved wife back into your house with a bahn mi truck. Dear Universities, your wife hates you! She's already on Tinder! It's gonna take a bit more than just getting her back in the house.
"Placemaking" can only do so much
I publicly admit, nothing will drive me to commute for an hour like the truly breath-taking prospect of AstroTurf and an outdoor ping pong table - but not everyone feels like I do.
To be fairer to the placemakers (bless their hearts), if you can invest a lot of attention and resources into consistently nailing the execution, placemaking strategies can be transformative - but in reality, most places in need of making can’t commit this level of attention and spend, nor can they attract the talent with the ability to properly execute these strategies.
Even when done well, in the context of universities, strategies like placemaking and student experience precincts are at their core, a fingers-in-the-ears refusal to acknowledge that the old model is on borrowed time.
To me, it comes down to this question:
If placemaking is the main reason students are coming to campus, isn't that a pretty damning indictment of everything else the campus is supposed to be for?
These are huge, expensive precincts with incredible potential and they should have more reason to exist than Taco Tuesday.
Even place-based learning is going online
Another way universities are trying to rope students back onto campus is via place-based learning. It basically just means taking every opportunity to focus the curriculum around some kind of hands-on, group based or in-person activities.
But like everything and everyone else in the world, even hands-on learning is becoming increasingly-online. As virtual reality and augmented reality technology improves, education will become a major growth area for the sector. VR startups like Labster are already proving this true, with VR labs across a range of courses and giving online institutions yet another edge.
Innovation is not a point of difference
You will not find a modern university that isn't pursuing the ever-elusive and intangible Innovation in their strategic plans and corporate strategies. It is the baseline expectation, not a point of difference - yet it is something almost none are actually executing well.
As a side note: this also applies for Sustainability, Wellness and Inclusivity - they're perfectly fine things to pursue, but just know that literally every other university is doing the same.
It’s the equivalent of thinking that enjoying Star Wars makes you some kind of quirky nerd. My dear friend, it’s the most popular cultural franchise of all time, enjoying Star Wars is aggressively normal.
Many universities are operating under a similar fantasy, where some tall, handsome, charming (and well-endowed) corporation or research institution graces them with a brand new, $150m, 7 storey facility on their obscure 3rd tier campus the outer suburbs of a regional city. When this auspicious day finally comes, they will be blessed by the power and majesty of Innovation - whatever that even means.
While I’m a big supporter of self-belief, this reeks of wishful thinking and begs the question “Why would anyone choose to do this, instead of conglomerating where the action already is?”.
It's a tough sell and it's no wonder why universities are at least partially admitting defeat and moving to city campuses. If you can't attract ‘em, join ‘em!
Things might seem fine right now, but time is running out
This extremely silly period we are in where students go into six-figure debt to finance architectural masterpieces that sit empty while they learn online is simply too absurd to continue unabated.
As soon as some competent, well-regarded institution offers a compelling and affordable online platform that achieves mass acceptance amongst mainstream employers, campuses will be in big trouble.
Below I have outlined what I see as the two overarching choices facing campuses, to redefine their role in the 21st century and end this weird transitionary period of ambivalent confusion and identity crisis.
So, what should universities do then?
Campuses were the literal delivery mechanism for education, but digital learning needs physical places less and less.
So the question is, as this trend solidifies into the status quo, what becomes the purpose of these big, expensive, physical places?
Australian cities are suffering from a crisis of stagnation
Please indulge this already far-too-lengthy article by allowing me to zoom right out.
Thanks to the exhaustively-documented doom loop of bad political and economic incentives and resulting policy quicksand, each and every Australian suburb is essentially a UNESCO heritage-listed village - preserved in amber, unable to ever change.
On top of that, the precious few sites that do have the ability to renew are administered by layer upon layer of prohibitive policy and politics, seemingly arranged with the express purpose of preventing anything new from happening.
This is manifesting in so many ways, via the housing crisis, the astronomical cost and time to deliver new infrastructure, the endless business cases and consultation processes, our inability to deliver trees on brand new streets - I could go on.
This is the sad, flaccid state of Australian cities. Powerless to solve our own self-inflicted problems - and with no-one to blame but ourselves.
But herein lies the opportunity - campuses could be the key to testing and demonstrating new ways of delivering cities, because campuses are some of the only places still capable of change.
Strategy 1: Diversify or Die
Transform campuses into laboratories of urbanism
Consider these two factors:
Campuses are some of the only places within Australian cities where deviations from norm are actually achievable; and,
Universities also have the ability to enact strategies over much longer timeframes than most other actors in development industry.
The combination of these two factors means that campuses have the potential to be considerably more different and interesting than anywhere else in the suburbs.
In this way, campuses could expand their conception of themselves to more closely resemble that of American-style college towns - but within a city. That is: a walkable mixed use cluster of trip generators and destinations, services, amenities, infrastructure and conveniences that play a central role within their broader community. Critically, this would give campuses so many more reasons to exist and for people to actually be there - because education in isolation is no longer sufficient to fill that role.
So!
If the past model took for granted that education was the destination…
And the present model is begging students to come back to campus with the promise of place-based attractors…
Then this proposed future model asks the question, what if the suburban campus was a place where you could:
Live
Work
See a concert
Go to primary school
Catch the train
Watch your kid play soccer
Catch up with friends for dinner and drinks
Go bushwalking
Exercise
Take your kid to daycare
Retire
And yes, go to university
Sounds like every other vibrant and diverse mixed use precinct™? I’m not done yet!
Campuses could use their innate flexibility, research capacity and long-term mindset to show leadership in confronting the crisis of stagnation facing Australian cities - becoming Laboratories of Urbanism. Places that experiment with new urban forms to solve the challenges of urbanisation and demonstrate better ways of doing everything.
In real terms, here’s some ideas about what this renewed model could involve:
New housing typologies - demonstrating temporary emergency housing, prefabricated housing, co-living models, disaster-resilient housing, 3D printed housing, and new construction methods using upcycled materials.
Integrating emerging technologies into the urban environment like smart city strategies, automated vehicles, augmented reality, inclusive design elements - the works! At one point in time, campuses used to be the only place in the world you could use the Internet. What’s the next version of that?
Experimenting with new and better ways of greening buildings and streets and overcoming the challenges facing delivery in Australian cities.
Demonstrating circular economy technologies and processes like energy generation, water and waste management and food production on site.
Now imagine all of that and a giant plastic chess set.
The catch? Campuses are hamstrung by decades old legislation
Many campuses are governed by planning frameworks established in the mid 20th century - a time when the legacy model of place-based learning was not in question. As a result, these regulations generally only allow land uses that are related to education.
For example, you're often not allowed to build housing unless it's student housing - let alone experiment with new models, materials and construction methods. You're allowed to build facilities for research, but not manufacturing functions - and we wonder why we absolutely suck at innovation. You're allowed to build small retail, food and beverage tenancies, but only to service students and staff - and we wonder why campuses are a post-COVID ghost town.
Any campus looking to seize upon an opportunity faces a lengthy and fraught process of making an application via this ancient legislation or face the one-size-fits all restrictions of the local planning scheme.
These outdated planning frameworks must be overhauled in a way that allows campuses to experiment with different land uses. Each campus needs the freedom to choose their own adventure and find their identity within their unique context.
Strategy 2: Campus Classic
Going all-in on the old school model
I appreciate that what I’ve proposed up until this point is no small feat and is an intimidating task. So if all that’s too scary and difficult, the only remaining avenue that has any semblance of strategic clarity is to go all in on the old model.
This is to say that “We (the University), understand that the world has changed, but we believe so strongly in the value of a campus based education, we are going to mandate in-person learning.”
The Internet? Yes, we’ve heard of it and we do not care for it.
Up until like 10 minutes ago, all of human education has taken place in person, and I would have to think that most people ascribe some amount of value to this.
The truth lurking beneath all of this vicious modernity is that doing everything online is dehumanising and is worse in almost every way, to the benefit of almost no-one.
So go all in on the in-person education! No more hybrid learning! No online alternatives! If you miss a lecture, you missed the damn lecture! Tell the world that a degree from your institution means you are actually going to be there, actually learning at the actual place. *gets down off table*
Those who value that will pay for it; and those that don't, won't.
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The fact I can read this from Ireland and it applies perfectly to the universities here shows how globally driven this issue is! Campus's will respond to the business decisions of the universities and they have some big decisions to be make! P.s. Giant chessboards solve all problems.
"If placemaking is the main reason students are coming to campus, isn't that a pretty damning indictment of everything else the campus is supposed to be for?" -- Exactly. If universities had stuck with their original purpose of exploring ideas and critical thinking, in-person gatherings would be a no-brainer. But with the "here, learn this" model, paying for brick-and-mortar and collecting all that debt is an often foolish choice.