Kirkwood may build student housing

CEDAR RAPIDS - Kirkwood Community College is considering building on-campus student housing for the first time in its history, the school's president said this week.

At a meeting of the school's trustees Thursday night, Kirkwood president Mick Starcevich said Kirkwood envisions a 300- to 400-bed dormitory with cluster-style living, in which two or four bedrooms share a living area and bathroom.

A 400-bed building of that type would cost $30 million to $35 million, Starcevich said.

In a unanimous vote Thursday, the trustees gave Starcevich approval to contract with an architect and choose a site for the building. The school is looking at three possible locations on its campus, Starcevich said: connected to Iowa Hall, next to Nielsen Hall or in the space currently occupied by the college's truck driving program facility, some parts of which have been demolished.

Kirkwood this fall commissioned a survey of Iowa parents, asking them what features would make them more or less likely to send their children to the school.

'Almost all of them said you need to have student housing,” Starcevich said. 'Parents want something that we control, that we own.”

Board members expressed some concerns about the business viability of on-campus student housing but agreed that students would benefit from having what they called 'the college experience” at Kirkwood.

Starcevich said the school also is considering building a student center, possibly in the new building. The dorm would be open only to students, he said, and students would likely have to commit to something similar to an apartment lease to live there.

Kirkwood administrators toured dorms at the University of Iowa and the Des Moines Area Community College, Starcevich said. About 4,000 of Kirkwood's 14,268 students currently live in privately owned housing near campus, according to the school's website.

Also at the meeting Thursday, trustees approved a request from Starcevich to implement at $25 technology fee beginning in the fall of 2015.

The fee will be charged per semester to each student, Starcevich said, regardless of how many credits they are taking. Starcevich said his aim in implementing the fee is to maintain Kirkwood's claim to having the lowest tuition in Iowa.

Because of tuition freezes and the new performance-based funding model approved this year by the Iowa Board of Regents, Starcevich told trustees, Kirkwood's tuition doesn't seem as low to students.

'We don't look like as good of a bargain,” he said. 'We're going to be looking at making up those dollars in ways that are - and this sounds bad - less visible to our buyer.”

At the heart of the matter, Starcevich said, is competition among Iowa colleges for students pursuing degrees in the arts and sciences. All of Kirkwood's applied programs operate in the red and are subsidized by its arts and sciences programs, he said - a balance that could be threatened if arts and sciences students choose to go to four-year universities instead.

'They're going to come after us (for arts and sciences students),” Starcevich said of the regents. 'When you take away our arts and sciences programs, that takes away our ability to fund all our other programs.”

Kirkwood also is considering implementing course-specific fees for some of its applied programs, he said. The school announced this month that it is ending its horse sciences program.

Starcevich said Kirkwood has cut $3 million from its budget this year, but there are no plans to close more programs this year or next year.

'I hate it,” he said of the technology fee. 'I'd just as soon everybody does tuition and no fees, but it's not going to happen.”

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