By GREG WINTER
New York Times
In the abstract, Kathy Anzivino believes there must
be some
pinnacle of amenities that universities simply cannot
surpass, some outer limit so far beyond the hot tubs,
waterfalls and pool slides she offers at the University of
Houston that even the most pampered students will never
demand it and the most recruitment-crazed colleges will
never consent to put it on their grounds.
She just has a hard time picturing what that might be.
"There's got to be one, but what it is, I don't know," said
Ms. Anzivino, director of campus recreation at the
university, which opened a $53 million wellness center this
year.
Beyond its immense rotunda stands a five-story climbing
wall that looks as if it was transported straight from
the leisure pools outside.
"Everyone says it looks like a resort," she said.
Whether evident in student unions, recreational centers or
residence halls (please, do not call them dorms) the
competition for students is yielding amenities once
unimaginable on college campuses, spurring a national
debate over the difference between educational necessity
and excess.
Critics call them multimillion-dollar luxuries that are
driving up university debts and inflating the cost of
education. Colleges defend them as compulsory attractions
in the scramble for top students and faculty, ignored at
their own institutional peril. And somewhere in the middle
sit those who have only one analogy for the building boom
taking place.
"An arms race," said Clare Cotton, president of the
Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in
race. From the outside it seems totally crazy, but from the
inside it feels necessary and compelling."
Students now get massages, pedicures and manicures at the
Coast. It holds 53 people.
Play one of 52 golf courses from around the world on the
room-sized golf simulators at Indiana University of
Pennsylvania - which use real balls and clubs.
Only about 100 miles away, Pennsylvania State University's
student center has two ballrooms, three art galleries, a
movie theater with surround sound and a 200-gallon tropical
ecosystem with newts and salamanders. Oh, and a separate
550-gallon salt-water aquarium with a live coral reef.
what its peers enviously refer to as the Taj Mahal, a
657,000-square-foot complex featuring kayaks and canoes,
indoor batting cages and ropes courses, massages and a
climbing wall big enough for 50 students to scale
simultaneously. On the drawing board at the
park, complete with water slides, a meandering river and
something called a wet deck - a flat, moving sheet of water
so that students can lie back and stay cool while
sunbathing.
"The base minimum is a thing of the past," said David Rood,
a spokesman for the National Association of College
Auxiliary Services. "There is a lot of one-upmanship going
on. Whatever the students want is pretty much what they're
getting."
To finance the boom, universities are borrowing money at an
escalating pace. According to Moody's Investors Service,
public and private universities issued $12 billion worth of
bonds in the first three quarters of 2003, a 22 percent
increase from last year and almost three times as much as
in the same period in 2000.
The vast majority of that borrowing has been for
construction, Moody's said, and while some of the surge
reflects a desire to refinance earlier projects at better
interest rates, most of it stems from the current
transformation of the nation's campuses. Though that
includes classrooms and research buildings, Moody's said,
the blitz of new student unions, dormitories, recreational
centers and their related perks is "probably the No. 1
driver" of the trend.
"Are they driving up the cost of education? Absolutely,"
said Naomi Richman, manager of Moody's higher education
rating team. "By catering to the students they're trying to
court away from other schools, they're making their product
more expensive."
In almost all cases, the debts for these facilities are
paid by mandatory student fees that will continue for
decades, often a few hundred dollars a year per person.
Because students usually have some initial role in
approving the projects, through surveys, representatives or
even referendums, colleges like to point out that students
are willing to tax themselves to reap the benefits, whereas
tuition increases simply show up on their bill.
Nonetheless, critics retort, future classes of students and
the parents who support them will have had no say at all.
Perhaps even more important, they contend that the
amenities race is purely discretionary, and therefore much
harder to justify than the myriad expenses colleges can
scarcely control, like labor contracts, health insurance
premiums and fuel prices.
"We all want our children to live better than we did, but
this is overkill," said Representative Howard P. McKeon, a
California Republican who has vowed to introduce
legislation to curb rises in college tuition and fees.
"When colleges tell me that they can't control their costs
and then they build this, I find it hard to believe."
But how discretionary is the amenities race? Surely not all
the bells and whistles are defensible, college officials
concede, but given the expectations of students who have
grown up with DVD players in their own rooms, any campus
without, say, a nightclub and a food court is as obsolete
as an eight-track cassette.
"These are not frills," said Daniel M. Fogel,
president of
the
The University of Vermont plans to spend up to $70 million
on a new student center, a colossal complex with a pub, a
ballroom, a theater, an artificial pond for wintertime
skating and views of the mountains and Lake Champlain.
By today's standards, Mr. Fogel said, that is rather
modest.
"Harvard can count on enough bright kids willing to sleep
on thin mats of straw to go there," Mr. Fogel
said. "That's
Harvard."
Colleges have become so attuned to the amenities race that
the University of Vermont's architects, a firm called WTW
that has worked on about 50 such projects in the last
decade alone, took the trustees on a tour of other campuses
to survey the competition.
And though the contest has made it as far as the Ivy League
- Cornell is investing $259 million in what it calls
"student life" and residential facilities alone - there is
a preponderance of activity on public campuses for a simple
reason.
They are keen on challenging private colleges, luring
out-of-state students who pay higher tuitions and keeping
locals from taking their dollars elsewhere.
"Those who can't go anyplace else, that's one thing, but
most students are mobile," said Mitchel D.
Livingston, vice
president for student affairs at the University of
Cincinnati, which is spending $200 million on a main street
of sorts, with everything from outdoor cafes to what he
called a "mall style" student center.
"When they go on tours, within 15 minutes they know whether
we're in or out," he said. "These amenities are playing a
major role in that decision. They want to be `wowed.'
That's their language. To be `wowed.' "
By some measures, the competitive bid appears to be paying
off. Since opening its new recreation center in 2001, for
example,
freshman class with the best grade-point average in the
university's history.
"I wouldn't pretend that was the only factor, but it was
one of them," said Kathleen E. Hatch, the university's
recreation director.
"Is $40 million worth it?" she asked. "Well, $40 million
becomes a part of the profile of becoming world class,
which is the new tag line. It's helped put us on the map."
But while students liberally line up behind lavish
facilities, there is no shortage of detractors who bemoan
the price tag that can accompany them.
Liza Greifinger, a
19-year-old sophomore from
mountains, and was not put off by any lack of luxury. As
for the impending student center, she said: "It's
definitely excessive. Out-of-state tuition is already so
high, and people are complaining about it."
Still, there is another, equally powerful audience that
many universities are eager to impress: donors and alumni.
Last year, the
million sports complex with luxury boxes and a skating rink
that is open 15 hours a day. As Linda A. Acciardo, a
university spokeswoman, put it: "People don't
give to
institutions that look like they need money. They give to
institutions they are proud to be associated with."