David Porter is the pioneer of creating community with Next-Gen Residential and Retail Dining crafted through the lens of SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ and Abundance Thinking for campus dining programs.
This week more than a thousand auxiliary services leaders and their business partners gather in Chicago for NACAS C3X. The opening keynote, chosen by the association that represents campus dining, housing, bookstores, and card services, is titled “Better Together: The Surprising Science and Joy of Social Connection.” Monday afternoon a panel from Northeastern, Temple, and two national partners will present “Turning Auxiliary Services into Student Success Engines.”
Two months earlier, in Anaheim, the takeaway from NACUBO’s annual meeting was that boards no longer accept facilities and operations as cost centers. Trustees now expect chief business officers to justify that spending as investment decisions, with a return, in plain language they can repeat to a parent.
Put those three facts side by side and the industry is confessing something. It knows connection is the outcome that matters. It knows auxiliaries produce it. And it still organizes, budgets, and grades the one building that can deliver connection to every student, every single day, as a service line whose highest ambition is to break even.
What the Word “Auxiliary” Tells a Freshman
Look the word up. Auxiliary: supplementary, secondary, providing support to the main thing. Nobody on campus calls the library an auxiliary. Nobody calls the science building a cost center. Those are the mission. Dining, by contrast, sits on the org chart under business and finance, is measured by net contribution, and gets discussed at the cabinet table only when the operator wants a price increase or a student complains about the chicken.
Now try the word at home. Is your kitchen an auxiliary room? It is the one room where the family actually happens: the place people wander into without being summoned, where the day gets debriefed and the argument gets settled and the kid who has been quiet all week finally talks. Housing is not a home unless there is a 24/7 social vortex, also known as the kitchen, and a campus is not a community unless the dining commons plays that role for eighteen-year-olds who arrived knowing no one.
Over the past thirty-six years of interviewing newly minted freshmen on campuses across the country, I ask what they were looking forward to about college back when they were high school seniors. The answer comes back in two words, almost universally: freedom and social. Not one of them has ever said the curriculum. We fund the curriculum lavishly and leave the two things they actually came for to chance, in a building we label secondary.
The Return the Boards Are Asking For
Here is where the NACUBO trustees and the NACAS keynote are describing the same asset from opposite ends of the hall.
Colleges have long known the pattern: when a new student connects socially within roughly the first 45 days, the odds of returning as a sophomore rise sharply. Friendship is produced by repetition without obligation, the same faces at the same tables at the same hours, until the accidental third dinner with the same crew quietly becomes a friend group. Only one venue on campus delivers that two and three times a day, for four years, to every student regardless of major, and asks nothing of a freshman except that she be hungry. That is the last Big Mix, and it happens in the residential dining commons or it does not happen at all.
Across nearly 500 campuses over more than three decades, programs rebuilt through SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™ have historically lifted retention by one to three points, often while the incumbent operator kept running the kitchen. I am not a CFO, so run your own numbers. Take one point of retention, multiply it by the net tuition, room, and board you keep for every student who comes back, and set that figure next to the line item you call the dining subsidy. On most campuses it is not close. The dining commons is the highest-return building you own, and it is the only one you have never asked to produce a return.
What Governing It as an Investment Actually Looks Like
If the keynote is right, and the science says it is, then four things follow, and none of them require a capital campaign.
First, the institution owns the vision. Not the operator. Campus leadership has to create a granular picture of what a world-class residential and retail dining program is on this campus, by location, method of service, daypart, meal plan, and brand portfolio, and then hire a contractor or a self-op team to execute it. Do not abdicate your responsibility to an FSP’s sales team. You may rue the day.
Second, the person running it is a social architect in chief, a builder, not a caretaker. A general manager executes a playbook. A Director of Dining designs the room so that joining a table is easy, staying is natural, and sitting alone is a choice rather than a sentence.
Third, measure the thing the board actually cares about. Voluntary participation is the purest measure of value. If your commons holds roughly 70 percent meal plan participation without equivalencies, swipes, or exchanges propping up the count in retail on or off campus, you have a Social Coliseum. Report that number to trustees next to retention, every quarter, the way you report occupancy.
Fourth, run the room on Abundance Thinking. Hours built around the Student Clock instead of the labor schedule. Predictable Abundance, so the good stuff is still there at 8:45. Table configurations that invite joining, so a freshman eating alone is still inside the hum of the crowd. Accidental collisions designed with intention.
Our mini documentary, SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE™: The Missing Ingredient, directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Nick Nanton, was filmed on four campuses across two countries. The voices are first-year students describing what it feels like when a campus engineers belonging instead of leaving it to chance. Watch the mini documentary. They are describing the science in the keynote, from the inside of the room.
The Question to Bring Home From Chicago
Sunday afternoon a thousand leaders will sit in a ballroom and nod at the science of social connection. Monday they will walk an expo floor full of lockers, kiosks, and apps designed to make sure students never have to sit down with anyone. The distance between those two rooms is the distance between what the industry knows and how it is organized.
So here is the challenge for everyone flying home Wednesday. Put one item on the next cabinet agenda: where, physically, on our campus are friendships supposed to form, and what do we call that building on the org chart? If the answer is “auxiliary,” you have found the reason your retention initiatives keep chasing a number that a room three hundred feet from the president’s office produces every night at dinner.
Loneliness, attrition, and the empty bed in the new residence hall are not only solvable, they are preventable. But not by a service line asked to break even. Promote the room. Govern it like the investment the science says it is. Then walk it at 6:30 on a Tuesday and watch the return show up.
