Month: July 2026

In late June, Western Kentucky University announced a $350 million public-private partnership for student housing, the largest residential investment in the university’s history. Another nine-figure student housing deal is queued up in Boston, and most university leaders say they expect to use P3s more, not less, even as the enrollment cliff moves from projection to news cycle.

A nine-figure bet on residential life, placed directly against the cliff. Let me tell you what I think of that bet: I like it. Investing in on-campus housing, and using P3s to build it at speed and scale, is exactly the right instinct at exactly the right moment. The institutions making these bets are being brave, and they are betting on the right thing.

But a bet on the right thing can still be an incomplete bet.

Housing Succeeds Only When Students Choose to Stay

I am not a bond analyst, and I do not need to be one to make the point that matters. Every student housing deal ever structured, however it is financed, is ultimately repaid by one thing: a student deciding to live there, and then deciding to live there again next year. That is a demand question, and after more than three decades in this work across nearly 500 higher education campuses, I can tell you that demand is not a demographic constant handed down by the birth rate. Demand is a design problem. The beds are the vessel. What you pour into them determines whether the bet pays off.

The Dining Strategy Predicts Whether They Will Stay

If you want to know today, years before the ribbon cutting, whether a housing bet will succeed or fail, there is one place to look: the dining strategy. Show me a project where the dining strategy came first and shaped the building, and I will show you beds that fill themselves. Show me a project where dining is an amenity line in the program, and I will show you a mandate doing all the heavy lifting, for as long as the mandate holds.

Read almost any announcement in this space and dining is in it, to the industry’s credit: a central dining facility intended to support student engagement. But look closely at what dining is in that sentence. It is square footage, rendered beautifully and intended, in the passive voice, to support engagement. The question that almost never gets asked is whether the program filling that square footage will be designed to create the daily social gravity that fills the beds upstairs. The new housing gets a dining facility. The deal never gets a dining strategy.

The strategy should shape the facility, not the other way around. When it comes first, developed through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking, it determines where the venue sits on the path of daily life, how it flows, what the hours are, and what it feels like to walk in at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday. Get that sequence right and dining becomes the engine of the entire residential ecosystem.

When the Dining Program Is Mediocre, the Recalibration and Seeking Begins

Failure does not arrive with a protest. It arrives quietly, order by order. When a beautiful new dining facility opens with a mediocre program, students, within a few weeks, start seeking off-campus to meet some of their daily (mid-day, late-night, weekend) food needs: delivery, pickup, the grocery store. Every one of those transactions is extra money, spent on top of a meal plan that is not delivering, usually financed by family or financial aid. The frustration compounds with every workaround, every attempt to patch the problem with policies that let students spend meal equivalencies, an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Then comes the moment every one of these projects should be designed to prevent: the financial recalibration. The student and the parents sit down, add up what living on campus actually costs once the workaround spending is counted, and reach a conclusion that is perfectly rational and perfectly devastating to a housing pro forma. The money for housing and food is better spent off campus. The building did not fail. The program failed the building.

The good news: this is not only a solvable problem. It is a preventable one.

What Great Dining Actually Creates

Done right, the strategy does not build a nicer cafeteria. It builds a social ecosystem that meets students where they are and elevates them: a place so compelling and magnetic that students, regardless of mandate or class year, want to live in residence because of what living there does for their lives. Not a room and a meal plan. An all-inclusive journey, deliberately designed to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime, life-altering experience: friendship-building, social knitting, the daily strengthening of emotional intelligence that only happens when young people share tables, routines, and a community they trust.

I will make the claim plainly, because I believe it to my core. The friendships, the community, the emotional security and well-being, and the elimination of food insecurity outside the classroom will have more influence on the personal and professional arc of a student’s life than what they learn inside the classroom. In the accelerating churn of information and technology, colleges’ enduring academic job is to teach students how to learn. The durable human capacities are built in the residential experience, or they are not built at all.

Abundance Thinking makes this real. An all-access, unrationed program, with no student ever doing math at the door, turns the dining hall into the community’s living room and kitchen, and makes food insecurity a structural impossibility inside that residential community rather than a charity program bolted on after the fact.

The Questions to Answer Before You Break Ground

There are six questions every institution should answer before approving a housing project. We have written extensively about each of them, but they begin with ownership, understanding The Student Clock, and designing dining before architecture, not after. The last is the one number that never lies: if the mandate disappeared tomorrow, how many of these students would stay, and stay on the plan, voluntarily? That is the real occupancy projection.

Bet on housing. Bet big. Just make sure someone at the table is designing the reasons students will keep choosing it, because that, and nothing else, is what repays a $350 million bet against the cliff. Your dining strategy will portend the outcome either way. The only question is whether you read it before the groundbreaking or after.

See It for Yourself: SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient

None of this is theory. It is on film. Invest nine minutes in our official mini-documentary, “SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient,” directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nick Nanton, and endorsed by 18 trusted industry leaders: university presidents, senior vice presidents of administration and finance, and the auxiliary services executives who live with these decisions every day.

Watch it here: SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient

 

When students who are no longer required to purchase a full meal plan voluntarily buy one anyway, at the same $6,000 to $9,000 price point sold to incoming freshmen, the exceptional value of your dining program as the heart of your campus’s day-to-day social ecosystem is unimpeachable. There is no counterargument. There is no asterisk. There is only the market, speaking plainly, in the one language that cannot be misread.

With the exception of meal plan participation at the 80 percent level in your dining hall(s), no leakage, no equivalencies or exchanges, no cheating, almost every other number your dining program produces is polluted by compulsion. No mandate on earth reaches that far; you only arrive there when students far beyond the requirement are opting in and eating where your community actually gathers.

Participation rates, satisfaction scores, revenue per bed: when the customer is required to be there, the data measures your policy, not your program. But the cleanest signal of all is voluntary participation at the full all-access level, the one number compulsion cannot touch.

The senior who has aged out of every requirement you have. The junior in an apartment with a full kitchen. The commuter who drives past forty restaurants on the way to campus and buys the top plan anyway, with her financial aid or the help of her family, when nothing in the student fee schedule compels her. That student is the purest measure of value that exists in campus dining. No plan architecture on earth compels that.

 

What the Volunteer Is Actually Buying

 

Be clear about what the volunteer is not buying. Calories. Nobody needs eight thousand dollars a year to be fed. A grocery run and a modest kitchen deliver the same nutrition for a quarter of the price; every student can do that arithmetic, and today’s families do it in their sleep. If food were the product, the voluntary all-access buyer would be an economic impossibility. A rounding error. A unicorn.

Yet on campuses that build their programs correctly, the unicorns keep showing up at the cashier’s office. They are not behaving irrationally. They are buying the things that never appear on a menu: time they do not spend shopping, cooking, and scrubbing pans. Access without arithmetic, the freedom to walk in at any hour, alone or with six friends, without doing math at the door. And above all, a seat in the social heart of the campus: the table where their people are, the accidental collisions, the guaranteed answer to the two quiet questions every student carries: where do I go when I don’t want to be alone, and where do I go to make a new friend? Belonging is the only product on a college campus that voluntarily commands five figures a year, and dining is the only place it is sold three times a day.

Food is the excuse. The volunteer is the proof.

 

The Instinct That Destroys the Evidence

Now watch what most campuses do when the voluntary number is low. Do they ask what the program failed to offer? Almost never. The instinct is to expand the mandate. Require the sophomores. Then the juniors in university housing. Then bolt a dining fee onto everything that moves. Each expansion manufactures revenue. Each one also destroys evidence because every student you compel is a witness you have silenced. The wallet was the only way they could tell you the truth, and you took it away.

A campus that mandates its way to full dining halls is a restaurant that padlocks the doors from the inside and then brags that nobody leaves. The revenue is real. The verdict is missing. And the verdict always arrives eventually, because every compelled student becomes a sophomore, junior, or senior with options, and every senior becomes an alum who remembers your dining hall either as the center of their world or as the fee they finally escaped. One of those alumni answers the phone during the capital campaign. The other one doesn’t.

Let me be fair to mandates: honestly priced and generously designed, a residential requirement is a legitimate tool for building community, and I have defended it for my entire career. But a mandate is a floor you build on, not a scoreboard you point to. The scoreboard is the volunteers.

Pro tip: when we engineer this level of value for your resident and non-resident students, the friction typically associated with live-on requirements of one, two, or four years with mandatory meal plans evaporates. Students do not fight to escape a room they love being in with a meal plan that truly works for them. The cloak of invisibility you can wrap around your mandate is a next-generation residential and retail dining program that is worth more than the meal plan costs.

And, believe it or not, when that value is created properly, the only place it can be found is on your campus. No restaurant row, no delivery app, no grocery store can sell a seat at the center of a student’s own community. Every hour your team spends defending the requirement is an hour that could have been spent building the reason no one questions it.

 

The First Free Semester

So here is the audit I would run on any campus in America, and it takes one afternoon. Find every student who reached their first free semester this year, the first term in which no rule required them to hold any plan at all. Now answer two questions. What percentage kept a plan anyway? And what percentage bought the biggest one?

That cohort is your program’s true report card. Not the survey, not the participation rate, not the revenue line. The first free semester is the moment your student customer actually has the freedom to choose, and whatever they do next is the market’s verdict on everything you built. If the number is growing, you are manufacturing value, and every plan you design should widen that door. If it is small and shrinking, hear this clearly: no satisfaction survey, no mandate expansion, and no clever plan redesign will fix it, because the students have judged the value and declined, and they are the only jury there is.

The volunteers are telling you the truth. They are the only ones left who can. Food is the excuse. Belonging is the outcome. And a student who pays six thousand dollars for belonging when no one makes them is the finest compliment your campus will ever receive. Go find out how many you have. Then have the courage to believe the number.