STUDENT HOUSING
How Universities Can Compete for Students in a Changing Landscape By Paul Choquette, III It is a difficult time to run an American college or university. Challenges lurk around every corner: there’s policy uncertainty in Washington with potentially significant financial impacts, changes to U.S. demographics could cause changes to enrollment trends—not to mention the rising costs associated with a degree. This broader environment makes it far more challenging for administrators to win what is rapidly becoming a fierce competition for student attention and enrollment as they apply to a wider range of schools than ever before. Schools with modern, updated, and amenitized physical At the University of South Carolina, the P3 model is infrastructure—facilities supporting a new home for the School of Medicine. and housing alike—are Photo Credit: The SLAM Collaborative, best equipped to win this The Boudreaux Group competition and manage the current and forthcoming challenges facing the sector. Given the tough financial climate, that might seem like bad news. But that misses a truly exciting trend in the industry: schools can engage in public-private partnerships (P3) with integrated, experienced firms to reduce costs, deliver projects at speed and scale, and bring an adaptable model to position themselves for success.
be delivered against academic schedules and conducted in a rapidly evolving landscape for students and administrators. Gilbane’s design-build-finance-operate-maintain model allows the firm to accelerate schedules, support long-term accountability and save schools money. Under this model, the company manages the entire construction and development process from start to finish. It also handles the long-term operation of the facilities themselves—creating one point of accountability. The model works.
Case Study: Palm Beach Atlantic University At Palm Beach Atlantic University (PBAU), Gilbane is helping deliver a $240 million development with a new, 25-story mixed-use residence hall. The partnership is creating 990 new student beds, and generating new dining, health, recreation and parking facilities. The endeavor, however, costs just $9 million of university equity while correcting outdated master leasing agreements that were preventing PBAU from retaining housing, dining and parking revenue. The project broke ground several months ago and will be finished ahead of the 2027-28 academic year.
Case Study: University of Rhode Island This model is also being applied to the University of Rhode Island, where Gilbane is designing, building and developing 1,100 new student beds across 400,000 square feet. It includes two new residence halls with apartment-style suites as well as the reconstruction of graduate student housing. A similarly accelerated timeline applies: the first phase will be done in 2027, with the new campus facilities fully completed in 2028.
The Student Housing Supply Crisis
Expanding Beyond Housing
Let’s start by looking at student housing. There is an extreme mismatch between supply and demand on America’s campuses. The top 175 American universities had capacity to house only about 20 percent of students on campus in 2025. The situation is not much better off-campus, with the overwhelming majority of privately-owned, purpose-built student housing near campuses 95 percent occupied. This drives prices up even as students expect innovative amenities on campus. Gone are the days of the traditional dorm we remember from our own college experience, with just about a fifth of students preferring that arrangement. Instead, students increasingly want single rooms or apartment-style living, coupled with social programming to foster a meaningful sense of connection. And this no longer applies to just undergraduates or underclassmen: upperdivision students also want to live on campus.
The Gilbane P3 model brings expanded solutions to existing educational clients and helps those higher institutions deliver more PBAU is investing in a new, 25-story mixedthan housing. The power use residence hall. | Photo Credit: CUBE3 of the approach can help universities with projects that may require complex phasing, long-term operating plans and coordination with multiple stakeholders. At the University of South Carolina (USC), the P3 model is supporting a new home for the School of Medicine on its emerging Health Sciences Campus. This verticallyintegrated approach brought predictability to USC and will deliver state-of-theart classrooms, research labs, medical simulation spaces, a health-science library and event spaces, creating a new a permanent downtown health sciences campus for the university on an accelerated timeline.
Demographic Shifts and Rising Competition It’s also worth considering the upcoming demographic changes coming to the sector, with the number of American high school graduates expected to have peaked in 2025 and projected to decline for the next 16 years. This tells us that there could be some demand relief to a housing submarket with no current vacancy. It also reinforces that institutions will now find themselves subjected to far more competition for student attention and dollars.
The P3 Model as a Strategic Solution That’s where the P3 model comes in. Gilbane has helped colleges and universities renovate or create 16,000 modern student beds last year alone in a way that shows that creative solutions across the built environment can overcome just about any challenge. The primary issue to solve is, as usual, financial. But there is also urgency. These projects must
A Path Forward for Colleges and Universities College—and the built environment that shapes it—is changing quickly, and so are student (and parent) expectations. But as each of these transformational developments demonstrates, solutions to these complex problems do exist. Better yet, those solutions can be executed without additional strain on alreadystrapped financials. For administrators, parents, and students alike, this is a breath of fresh air. And for all concerned with the future of American higher education, it is a reminder that while college may change and evolve, those that smartly plan for the future will be here to stay. Paul Choquette III is Regional President for Gilbane Building and leads the firm’s national Public-Private Partnership (P3) strategy.
The University of Rhode Island North Building. Photo Credit: Catherine Scott, University of Rhode Island
www.schoolconstructionnews.com | may 2026 | 17