HCC is now “Houston City College,” reflecting expanded Bachelor degrees

The Satellite
41

The 100 yr plan where they upgrade the campus with extra gathering places and entrance markers which is that 35 mil will transform the campus by 2027. They are adding a freshmen dorm bringing the on campus pop to 10k not counting the 2 or 3 k right off campus will do wonders. So we’re heading in the right direction but let’s see after 2027. It seems we will all be impressed after it’s all done in 2 yrs. At least we’re trending in the right direction.

The upgrades are to make students etc want to spend more time on campus. However it’s the on campus students to make it all happen and by 2027, we should be around 25% residential not including the other 2 or 3 k nearby.The commuters may always just leave but we’re building a good core number of residential kids to make things better

2 Likes
42

Don’t agree with a CC offering 4 year degrees as they can tax people in their district for upgrades while traditional 4 years can’t do the same - HCC used that to overbuild the last few years and has stagnated their enrollment with too many specialized campuses within 5 miles of each other

1 Like
43

I’m skeptical about the centennial plan making the necessary changes. It seems mostly like a beautification project. It’ll certainly make the campus look nicer, but I don’t see a lot of good study/small meeting places in there.

1 Like
44

Actually I don’t think any do regularly. It wasn’t until 2024 that the student body at UT petitioned to get the student section enlarged. It was only 13,000 (far less than 25,000). In their student body proposal they pointed out other schools student sections of other major name brand schools and they also were often less than 20,000.

Fix the campus, the students are not broken.

1 Like
45

So correct. I did a quick look at top 20 lists for universities. Maybe 4 or 5 were in a P4 and 1 or 2 were actually top in football.

I think the focus should be on top academics as a separate discussion for building sports fan bases. Trying to get “correct” students just to up athletic donations and attendance will not work out well in the long run.

1 Like
46

Academics?

I thought UH was just a social gathering for sports

4 Likes
47

Correct.

1 Like
48

For the three amigos it is.

49

That changes when you focus on public schools, though. Of the top-25 public schools, the only ones not in a P4 conference are either William & Mary or the various UCs. The bulk of AAU publics are, too.

That said, I think the Yap 3 are generally wrong about the way these things work. Schools like UT and GT have a lot of students attending football games and hanging around campus because they’re good schools, not the other way around. Good schools attract students who want to live on campus, because people generally want to live close to the places where they spend time. Forcing a bunch of students to pay for dorms when they’d be otherwise fine living elsewhere doesn’t change who the students are and whether they want to be there.

50

I see the same arguments every single time. I’m going to give the perspective of someone who was an ecstatic coogie teenager up to someone more reasoned and ‘involved’ in stuff on campus. Keep in mind my only reason of going to the campus now is to do my dissertation work and that’s it (as I have grown tired of academia and just wish I could be in industry already).

I will put it straightforward. CAMPUS LIFE HAS BEEN WORSE POST-PANDEMIC.

We can argue every, single, time about beds on campus. That we’re in a P4 conference, that our rankings are going higher, okay dokay coolio.

THAT. DOESN’T COMPARE.

If the argument is centered around why students want to stay on campus, then why haven’t the lease spots been taken up here?

image
image1284×1248 78.8 KB

The only business to come in was a Concentra. The empty lot between the SBux and 7-11 was supposed to be a chick fil a but I guess that pulled out.

Why has the Rooftop, taken over by the Nook in 2021, been closed since January of 2024? In fact, it was only open from August of 2022-December of 2023. All the months in between, it has been closed. That place used to be open until 2am, alongside the coffeeshop, but now have hours that are ridiculous and the ‘community vibe’ is dead. Same spot where Pink’s Pizza ended up closing.

Why is it that no other businesses oriented towards the University Community, that being BOTH UH and TSU, have opened up in the area? Not just for 3rd ward, for UH & TSU.

How is it that UH has a more established culture problem than before COVID? Where are the “it’s a great time to be a cougar” vibes?

UH is putting up THEIR weight in terms of the housing and P4. In terms of on campus activities, they only really go on during school hours, which annoys the undergraduates, and in that boat, includes people that I have spoken to about the subject in Greek Life, CV3, and Bleacher Creatures.

It isn’t going to take the buy in from the students and the school, but the third part is the people around/supporting the school.

I will say it now and again: if people are really interested in cultivating an entertainment district, it isn’t going to first come from the city, or the school. It’s going to have to come from the community, or people willing to prop up the community. Gentrification IS happening. I see it daily, I see new housing pop up whether it’s student housing or a bunch of townhomes. People are buying in for that value.

Where are those that would be licking their chops ready to profit off of University Students who will willingly spend their money on something next to them in the evening.

Places were thriving before the pandemic.

1 Like
51

“98% of UCLA’s true freshmen live on campus, even without a housing mandate.
That’s a goal to shoot for.
NO WONDER UCLA is so widely regarded as one of America’s top urban public research universities, if not THE top.”

Have you ever been to ucla?
Have you even visited ucla’s campus?
How in the world can you even compare it to ours?
law you brought up the same blip comment every few months or so as if you are doing this on purpose. Last time you brought up the same idiotic point I even added a ucla campus map for your information. I included what is on ucla’s campus and next to it. Westwood and our campus?
You gotta be doing this on purpose.
At the same time you ignore that we now have more UH students living on campus than uta and atm. This in itself is the biggest change that U of H has experienced in the last few decades. This is short of remarkable.
Only you law can have any issues with some students commuting. You have no clues why some students commute. Again we have now more students living on campus than uta and atm. Do you even realize how huge this is?
You want every student to live on campus? Are you going to write a blank check so they can? There are only so many rooms to accommodate our students.
Do you want to meet Houston’s new Mayor with a blank check? That way an entire area can now have new grocery stores, playhouses, restaurants, clubs, bars, movie theatres, ice cream parlor, pilates studios, farmers market oh don’t forget to have a garden guided tour.
uta and atm have benefited from the puf for over a century. This is equal to having access to $Billions.
What can you do with $Billions law if you were Mrs. Khator? You can pretty much do whatever the blip you want. At the same time UH has had to put two pennies together since we became a University. What we have accomplished since our creation is nothing short than remarkable. Every building, stadiums has been built through tireless fund raising. We have redefined the art of finding pennis under the coach. At the same time two universities have unlimited resources to draw from. These same two universities have the abject attitude to tell everyone that our campus is equivalent to the highest Venezuela’s security prison.
You keep posting about commuting students. You are a lawyer. Why don’t you take your Don Quixote commuting students passion and redirect it and get us access to the PUF? That my friend will be a game changer. Deal?

52

We’ve gone over this ad nauseam, UH has a majority of students from the HOUSTON METRO, UCLA, UT, ATM, TT all have students from outside of their respective cities. Of course they have to stay in the dorms. Stop trying to spin it as some choice they have, if they lived close to campus, they’d just drive over as well if given the choice and save some money. You’d shut out Houston kids from a Tier One P4 education just because they want to save money and drive from home? Or worse, insult them by saying they aren’t worthy students and they should just get a certificate from HCC? That’s one of the great things about living in Houston, accessibility. And all I hear from the three amigos is shut out those kids! They are ROI! We need out of state kids! Pathetic.

3 Likes
53

Yes you did read that I was addressing law’s insults? Right?

54

Also: THERE. IS. NOTHING. WRONG. WITH. COMMUTERS.

Sure, Whitmire made a dud excuse to stop the housing mandate. That doesn’t mean we have to get students to live on campus. Some WANT to commute, some WANT to remain in their more comfortable areas other than near campus (not talking about it being the 3rd ward, but LGBTQ in Montrose, the hip students in heights, allen parkway is popping up). Some students just want to live there and not be at the campus, since there’s more to do in those districts and their school is just ten minutes away.

The current population of campus has more than 50% of students OUTSIDE from Harris County. This is what the demographic is shifting to.

Some parents (including my slightly conservative middle eastern parents) WANT their kids to have the college experience. If I came home immediately after class, they would WONDER WHY.

WHY move from a comfortable bedroom, with meals on the table, a working AC, a private bathroom, a place to park, and an easy support system to a shared bedroom the size of a closet, with a mandatory low quality meal plan, unreliable internet and utilities, and random house rules?

Especially when said parents actively ENCOURAGE their kids to get as involved as they want with the campus anyway? There’s always a place to crash if they need it.

Focus on the area, then the kids will come. These new freshman dorms are going up for the students that aren’t in Harris County to come in.

Like seriously, I can find more spots to eat and hang out around UH Sugarland, a campus with dead nothing, than at main.

2 Likes
55

These threads about UH being a commuter school are insults to every U of H student that is a commuter student.
Can you imagine a “commuter student” reading this threads?
Is it the message that we want to send to these same students? When at the same time we are working to build hard core followers?
I will write it every chance I get. Give us PUF money and we will build the school of all school even though we are “land locked” Can you imagine having all kinds of amenities on campus? Yes with PUF money the sky is the limit.
Some or just a couple of posters keep bringing back this moronic commuter point.
With PUF money we could have built a 100,000 seat stadium.
With PUF money we could have a golden dome…just because we could.
With PUF money we could have built a 30,000 Fertitta arena.
With PUF money heck we could pay the entire city of Houston to come to our games.

1 Like
56

I think this hints at the real underlying issue – neither UH nor TSU students have a lot of money to spend. UH has by far the lowest-income students of any P4 school, and one of the lowest in FBS. We have about twice as many first-gen students, by percentage of student population, as UT or A&M. UH students overwhelmingly come from backgrounds that are likely to get hit hardest by inflation, and TSU’s students have it even worse. Plus, the Third Ward has the highest poverty rate of any Houston neighborhood, and Eastwood and Second Ward are up there, too. That’s a pretty straightforward explanation for student life getting worse post-pandemic. Those are the demographics of a dead neighborhood. Gentrification is, as you mentioned, eventually coming for the surrounding neighborhoods (I see it every single time I go through East End) but that’s a slow process.

I’ve said it before, but student life is funded with daddy’s credit card, and UH overwhelmingly doesn’t have that. Given that, if we want to boost campus life, there are only three ways I see to do so:

  1. Recruit higher-income students. With the pragmatics of whether we even could do that aside, I would be strongly opposed to this approach; UH is one of the best institutions in the country at providing a high-quality education to demographics that wouldn’t otherwise be able to access one. (This is the preferred approach of most of our resident gum-flappers.)
  2. Subsidize entertainment. Have UH (or someone else who’s willing to make this their pet project) buy tracts of land adjacent to campus and offer sub-market rate rents to things like bookstores, coffee shops, bars, etc. It’s an open question how sustainable this approach would be, and it would probably draw the ire of local residents and politicians.
  3. Take UH, and push it somewhere else. This is obviously cost-prohibitive, and everyone would hate it, but if someone had several billion dollars laying around that they didn’t need, this is probably the fastest option, and the one most likely to work.

In reality, I don’t think there’s a feasible way to solve this issue. People like to compare us to UT Austin a lot, but they’re right next to one of the richest neighborhoods in Austin, and their students come from families twice as rich as ours. Their families are flush with cash, comparatively, and their students are much less likely to need, for example, a job to feed themselves after school. It’s way, way, way more palatable to build stuff near them than it is to build near us.

1 Like
57

Is Georgia Tech a good school?
Yes, it is indeed a very good school. Is their campus as nice as FSU or Clemson?
NO. Some say it is a s…hole, horrible, skid row. Sounds familiar?
This idea of commuter students harming UH AAU standing is more than stupid. It makes no sense whatsoever. You either want to learn or not. I stated the obvious above. To compare us to ucla is idiotic. Does law have $M’s to buy out TSU and make it part of UH then does law have money to transform all neighborhoods surrounding U of H into a five stars hotel? The answer will be no.

1 Like
58

Lmfao. Have you ever been to GT? You know not of what you speak.

2 Likes
59

I think we can be a blend of commuter students and get our on campus pop up like they are trying to do. UH really only has to build a critical mass on campus and nearby and from what I gather by 2027, we prob have 10k on campus and maybe 2 or 3 k nearby which is building towards that critical mass . We can be both and be vibrant bc UH is a large school.If we compare us to a miss st or ole miss or kentucky, we may be on par with them once all done bc they have less overall enrollment. We’re getting there. I don’t care if we have commuters bc we need them but I’d focus on what is the magic number of critical mass on campus and nearby to make UH vibrant. We can achieve both without cutting off commuters and have the best of both worlds. However the critical mass is important bc you need a certain amount of kids that feel fully engage to continue to support UH after they graduate which creates Tillman’s etc . They don’t have to necessarily attend sports but give back in other ways or worse case promote UH even in regular conversations and have pride in the school. The con of too many commuters is that they treat UH as a degree factory , getting their degree then never again associating with UH again which is a problem so again a certain critical mass over comes that simply bc UH is a large school. I always believe We/UH is and was a great academic school but we lack the support of traditional p4 schools. So it’s what we have to work on and the 100 yr plan etc with that new freshmen dorm helps and Khator gets it. Ex. If kentucky has an enrollment of 28k of which 20k are highly engaged, we only need close to that amount since we’re 47k or so. Our sheer numbers allow us to have more commuters if we get a certain amount to really care.

So the focus is get a critical mass of students that care and the rest can be commuters. We have commuters that care and give back but the slam dunk is having them live on campus. We then can be a perfect blend.

60

I will say this.

This would easily be fixed if they had weekly campus events or a nightlife on campus. By nightlife i dont just mean a club (but yes more than 1) i mean a movie outside, a photo worthy landmark on campus, good restaurants, competitive games or team competitions at L.E park. Those things drive campus life.

You know we didnt even hear about Frontier Fiesta this year. Thats just bad all the way around and hurts campus life.

1 Like