BOO!!!
We should all want for UH to be THAT school.
Or at least…AAU and USNEWS Public Top 50 have always been Renu’s goals (and mine).
It’ll be hard to achieve it under the model that you’re OK with.
UH downtown is that replacement school so we can afford to trend more to residential then it covers that need. We can still take commuters but not as many.
1 Like
UH downtown/sugar land/clear lake?
3 Likes
Whitmire forgot about UH downtown when he nixed our freshmen deal. It could work bc of UH downtown as the new commuter school.
UH Downtown and Clear Lake have about half as many undergrads combined as UH Main, and neither of them are particularly well-situated to grow into that role. That’s not to say that it can’t or shouldn’t be done, but in either case, it would be a heavy lift. I’m not educated on the economics of such a thing, but it might very well be easier to just establish a new school to serve that role.
…like the UH satellite campuses?
Let the satellite campuses be the commuter campus serving the non-traditional student.
Make the 100 year old 50,000 student main campus the traditional campus serving the traditional student and find a way to encourage development to support that type of campus just like every othet csmpus as large as ours (both in small towns and huge cities).
Seriously, how hard is this??
2 Likes
Check out the master plan for UH sugar land and some of the other satellite campuses. They are expanding system wide.
Way harder than you think, actually. I can’t name a single college that’s established that environment post-WWII. The go-to example is FSU, but they were a large Women’s College for decades prior to that.
Really, after the Interstate Highway Act passed in 1956, it’s probably pretty close to impossible to get there, since you’ll have to convince a substantial number of students to give up their cars to make it happen.
You keep writing the same thing.
Now this is for you law.
Give us some ideas on adding local businesses (with locations) that will make our campus a destination.
Waiting for your response. Thank you.
A&M as we know went from all white military to allowing women and minorities in which is way tougher than our freshmen mandate or what we want to do. In ways the admin wants it to be more residential bc of the dorms they built and the 100 yr upgrades with gathering places.
Eh. VT and Clemson did that one, too. I literally cannot name a school that was a commuter school in 1960 and isn’t one now, though.
UT -Austin is our best comp.
It is a large Texas public school in a large Texas city (with tons of things to do)
We need to become UT-A version 2.0
2 Likes
UT, of course, established itself in that location some 70 years before cars were a thing, when the City of Austin was much smaller. If UT-Austin were established today, it would look much different. We have 70 years of in-built car-centered development to overcome that they never had.
We missed our best window to develop a generational pipeline when the grads in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s sent their kids to other schools.
Then the influx of first generation immigrants came to Houston in the 80s and 90s and filled the void of having traditional students as they went elsewhere, which is why we ended up at a school attended by many minorities since the 90s until now.
We need more out of towners or from counties farther out like the trend seems to be with 48 % from Harris county then the rest from further out counties per the UH data. If we accept too many local people then they are going to commute more often than not. Build more dorms and recruit out of city and further out. We only need a few thousand of these to help out.
3 Likes
Hard to attract kids from San Antonio when UTSA has a transfer pipeline to UT-Austin,
Hard to attract kids from Dallas if they can utilize the UT-Arlington to UT-Austin pipeline.
The kids that are local to Austin will go to Texas State if they don’t get into UT.
The kids from the rural schools see A&M matching their lifestyles and ideas since they see UT/UH having the same environment.
The kids with wealthy parents will see TCU/SMU/Baylor as a preferred option due to Greek life and the image of exclusiveness.
I had friends who grew up going to a local Catholic high school here in Houston and most of them never considered UH unless a scholarship was offered, only big name state schools were applied to along with the usual private universities.
I also worked a part time job back in the day with some high school kids who attended underfunded high schools and only UH/UT/A&M/PV/TSU were on their preferred list.
I’d open up a grocery store, and provide incentives for restaurants, bars, and a bookstore.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true; the CAP program exists for kids who want to go to UT, but a lot of students know that there’s a really substantial risk that you either fail to “CAP in” to UT or you don’t get your desired major even if you manage to technically get admitted. The much bigger blocker for UH is that UT-Dallas and UTSA are fine enough schools in their own right.
I do think that UH would be well-served trying to make inroads with kids in Austin and especially Fort Worth, though; neither of those cities have particuarly good commuter schools. If it’s a choice between “commute to another major city” or “live at UH,” I think UH is (or can become) a substantially more palatable option.
3 Likes
Fort Worth has options of North Texas, Texas Tech, and UT-Arlington.
I think some of the Oklahoma schools offer in-state tuition for residents in the north Texas area but I’m not sure if that is still true.
To pull the kids from Austin that didn’t get into UT, we have to offer degrees, grad schools, and other programs that are better than Texas State.
We have the advantage of law school, pharmacy, architecture, etc over Texas State but for the kids just wanting to do liberal arts/social science, business, education etc then they would rather attend Texas State.
I mean, technically yes, but Denton is 40 minutes north of Downtown Fort Worth and UT-Arlington sucks. The Oklahoma schools are competitors in that space, but bluntly, UH is ranked higher than either of them and should be able to compete in that space.
We do that. There will always be some portion of students that want to stay closer to home, but for the portion that want a bigger, better school, UH is very arguably the best option and we should make that known to them.
1 Like