Glen Weppler started working at the University of Guelph in 1998 as a Residence Life Coordinator. His career has brought him across several Ontario institutions, including McMaster, Georgian College, TMU and Waterloo.
Having been in the field for so long, what's your take on the ways student housing is changing?
Well, one thing that’s really changed over time has been the design approach to building residences. There's actually some really interesting research that just came out in the past year from Shelagh McCartney that talks about it. The crux of it is when residences were built decades ago, they used more traditional “dormitory style” buildings – typically featuring double rooms that load straight onto the hallway, with shared washrooms and a lounge space or two.
That configuration was very popular in the 60s and 70s. Then, something happened. We started to see more typical self-contained units: suite apartments, townhouse-style. Things began to trend towards this idea of privacy, and a greater expectation of single bedrooms. But Shelagh McCartney's research demonstrates that's actually a detriment to students. Many of us had that suspicion as professionals, but now the studies demonstrate the power of connecting more social experiences when you have shared spaces. The more shared spaces you have (ideally including sleeping quarters), the more the student experience is enriched.
A major element of what’s changed is the opportunity to build community. It’s really interesting because a few decades ago, students and/or their families would have to come right into the admissions office to submit their application or to make a payment. There were plenty of face-to-face interactions whereas now, all those functions are done online.
So there are fewer opportunities to interact face-to-face, which means there's fewer social interactions, and I believe that’s the primary goal of residences: to create that sense of community. But lots of things have changed, and so those things aren’t as natural or easy to come by as they used to be.
Lastly, the staffing structure has changed and diversified over time. Residence life professional staff used to be more generalist, and now there are many more specialized roles that have been produced over time, enabling institutions to dedicate resources to particular issues, whether it's international students, equity, diversity and inclusion case management, and so on.
So that's really interesting. When you're planning out your student housing project, those moments of community are something that used to come more naturally, but now you have to plan more strategically around creating those moments.
Absolutely, there's huge value in what we would call those chance encounters. So much about student life in higher ed is programmed and planned, but the relationship-building and the genuine nature of informal interaction is beautifully chaotic. What we can do is think about how to build in the way that’s most conducive to those moments. For example, being cognizant of the pedestrian flow of students throughout the building and creating lots of shared spaces for interactions. Our newest building on campus has six lounges on every floor. It all helps to create those important moments that make a place feel like home.
Switching tacks, how does the influx of international students play into driving changes in student housing?
It absolutely does. From a student experience or a resident life perspective, it creates lots more opportunities for people to learn, welcoming people from different cultures and different backgrounds. We've known about how international students enrich housing life for a long time now.
In the residence environment, you spend a lot more time there than in a classroom. So students get to experience those valuable moments of challenge where they run into unfamiliarity and have to understand what’s important to a student of a different culture.
From a facilities perspective, we have to consider different things as well. For example, bidets are something that haven’t been the norm for us historically, but now we’re seeing increased demand for that type of infrastructure. Gender-neutral washrooms being another.
From an occupancy perspective, historically, if it was largely Canadian students who were applying, then universities knew that culture. They knew when they could visit schools, when they could open up applications, when they could expect payments, how the payments would come in. There was a general understanding as to how all of that worked. And as we've increasingly drawn in students from outside Canada, much of that changes because students have to consider how they're going to transfer their money or when they can apply, how they have to factor in their visa application, how they have to consider their travel and so on.
So it makes it a richer environment, but a more complex environment. Processes that used to be fairly typical now have to be re-considered.
What’s something that the entire industry could be doing better as far as student housing?
I'll say that it is in the collective best interest of campus housing professionals in Canada to do more benchmarking. One of my criticisms of post-secondary education in Canada is that we don't research ourselves enough, so we don’t understand ourselves enough.
Benchmarking is such a key component of doing better. Understanding ourselves by comparing ourselves over time, and understanding similar institutions, it’s essential. Then we can dig deeper on institutions that are doing better than their benchmark comparators would suggest and try to understand why.
The thing is, benchmarking has proven to be hard because different institutions have access to different resources, so the funds to be able to do it aren’t always available to everybody.
Plus, it does demand time – something not a lot of professionals have. You need to make a point to pause and reflect, do the necessary analysis to understand what questions should be asked. Collecting the findings of a survey and then understanding how they can best be applied – that takes time and effort if you’re doing it in-house.
So that’s where third-party services like CRI become valuable. But I think we absolutely need to do more research for some of the reasons I highlighted before: the field is changing, higher ed is changing, education is changing, campus housing, and student services are changing. If we're not benchmarking, then we aren’t understanding what that change means for our students' experience, and for how our operations run.
Finally, do you have any advice for schools that are looking to take the best next step on their housing projects going forwards in this availability crisis we’re having?
The number one piece of advice that I would offer is that working on clarity of the desired outcomes at the outset is absolutely critical. The more detail you can give those outcomes, the better.
We define our targets with three questions: What are we trying to do? Who is doing it? And when do we want it done? If we can answer those well and get maximum reasonable detail on those, then that will help ground us.
These are important because inevitably when you get into a project, opportunities come up and then that turns into scope creep and things become bigger than they were. The workload increases for reasons that you don't necessarily understand and more challenges come up and then it becomes chaotic.
So the way to help guard against taking on more than we wanted or overreaching on resources is to be grounded in our desired outcome – the target that we established at the beginning and spent a lot of time clarifying.
Whether that's informed by a benchmarking tool, a new program that we want to offer, or a new partnership we want to explore, I really suggest taking a lot of time up front to do your due diligence in that way.