ON CAMPUS
campusreview.com.au
The student hub at Flinders University. Photo: Peter Barnes
The race to renovate
Universities are increasingly
investing in their campuses
to attract foreign dollars.
By Paul Roberts
F
or as long as they have been in
existence, universities have been in
competition with one another for the
best students and faculty.
The earliest universities in the Middle
Ages knew the power of a celebrated
lecturer in drawing students across Europe.
Young institutions, as demonstrated
by Leiden University (established 1575),
actively sought to distinguish themselves
by recruiting renowned foreign
scholars through high salaries and low
teaching duties.
Fast forward a few hundred years
to the 21st century, though, and the
pitch of competition has never been
so acute. The financial landscape of
academia is undergoing transformative
changes throughout the world. As direct
government funding becomes ever more
scarce and tuition fees grow ever more
pivotal, universities are competing within
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an increasingly consumeristic marketplace
for money, top-flight academics and – the
focus of this article – students. And their
battleground is the campus.
There are few tools at a university’s
disposal more powerful than the campus
when it comes to elevating itself above
the crowded field of competitors. In a
2013 survey conducted by the UK Higher
Education Design Quality Forum, over
a third of students recorded that, when
deciding which universities to study at,
they rejected institutions because of the
standard of the physical environment.
So how are universities investing in their
campuses to capture the hearts and minds
of today’s students? This article takes a brief
look at three trends.
HUBS
Australia is at the forefront of the trend for
student-centric development. The concept
of the ‘hub’ building, a one-stop shop
where students can study, meet friends,
eat and drink and access administrative
support, is exemplified at the University of
Adelaide’s Hub Central (2011) and Flinders
University’s Student Hub (2016).
The hub typology is the product of the
convergence of two of the most prominent
themes within the higher education
landscape: the shift in learning paradigms,
and students’ growing expectations of their
campus experience.
By uniting the core principles of the
student experience – teaching, learning,
social, pastoral – hubs are perceived as a
key means of answering market demands.
At the University of Adelaide, the student-
centricity of its Hub Central was such
that its design was shaped by a student
consultation process. Over 9000 hours of
student involvement went into its creation.
Now, though, the model is being
enlarged to the scale of the precinct. In
2017, RMIT completed the New Academic
Street, a five-year project to redevelop
the lower levels of four existing buildings
and create two new infill buildings at its
city-centre campus. Existing rooms were
reworked for informal student use, a plaza
served by a cafe was created, all student
services were brought into a single location
for the first time, and new internal laneways,
mimicking those of Melbourne’s CBD,
house retail.
ANU is currently overhauling the
tired, 1970s Union Court at the centre
of its campus to deliver a student heart
(scheduled opening 2019), comprising
consolidated student services, residential
accommodation, outdoor amphitheatre,
performance venues that double as lecture
theatres, shops, informal learning spaces
and more.
INTERNATIONAL APPEAL
Few universities today are not investing in the
student experience, but while the attention
of most concentrates on the undergraduate
experience, some universities are pursuing
a more focused route by homing in on two
specific student groups: international and
postgraduate students.