Everyone arguing here just needs to come visit Austin, Texas in 2025… You will see several hundreds if not a thousand students every day walking, going to local shops, stores, bars, restaurants, riding scooters, biking, hiking, and socializing the UT campus area… small house neighborhoods explicitly built for students, which give rise to giant pockets and villages for students.
Last year the vibe around UT was genuinely magical when formula 1 and the Georgia Bulldogs were in town.
If I were attending UH in 2025, I’d be walking directly to my car as soon as class was over
I can speak from personal experience that when a group of investors want to rezone an area in the city of Austin, the city of Austin pulls out a giant rubber stamp
That is probably the biggest difference. There is a weird love affair in so many cities to keep the most run down areas from being rezoned and improved
Why can’t we do both. We need more K-12 students on campus. There used to be “field trips” to see museums, plays, music at the Wortham. High school graduations and band camps and cheer camps and playoff football can get local students on campus. I grew up in inner Houston and did not know where the University of Houston was. The 100 year celebration should bring some recognition to the university and the upward trend should continue.
There are a lot of reasons that people go to UT over UH, foremost among them being that it’s a damn good school. Look at the list of employers that attend UT’s career fairs as opposed to the ones at UH. Look at the curricula for their Econ and Psych departments as opposed to ours. Look at the number of award winners and NSF fellows they have, as opposed to us. They beat the absolute brakes off us as a school, which is why their alums feel compelled to give back. Their alumni association has active chapters everywhere.
Truth be told every time I’ve visited UT the vibe has seemed kind of depressing as compared to proper college towns like Auburn and Athens and State College. Outside of game days (where their “tailgating” scene is one of the most unique I’ve seen) everyone kinda seems sad and angry all the time.
I 100% support being the commuter FRIENDLY university we’ve always been.
However, my ‘out of touch’ comment comes between what the admin thinks they’re doing vs how the students are actually feeling about being here and what goes on. TF mentioning he hasn’t heard the term ‘commuter school’ in 10 years (so in this case 2012-2022) when it still very much was the case. Especially with expanding enrollment but much less parking, campus culture, and classroom space.
Again: coming from discussions with Middle Eastern parents who force their kids to commute. UH has dorms, has sports, has things to do, but it still doesn’t have a ‘campus’… I’m including the word still, because these same parents were also alums of UH that commuted themselves (with the exception of one, who lived in Moody and went into town to party).
The CS department’s career fairs have been exploding recently. I’m still peeved that NSM took it over to make it a COLLEGE career fair (lasts four hours for 6k students) and named it NSM + Computer Science since nobody would have shown up if “Computer Science” wasn’t in it.
But in the past few years, we went from having local companies show to now having Google, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Pinterest, and Electronic Arts show up. The CS leadership and student orgs are doing a damn good job at raising the school’s profile.
When you raise the academic requirements to get in as UT has, your faculty is topnotch with tons of research, employers naturally flock to those career days. Keeping academic standards high will benefit UH. We used to give full rides to NMS.
So, we want the school to be a commuter school but then complain that there is nothing on campus and that they are building buildings and adding dorms. People complain about attendance at UH games and all of the same things over and over and wonder why it’s always the same, yet want everything at UH to stay the same. (Sigh)
The real story is that the PUF basically prints money, so they have basically the best of everything money can buy which creates a whole lot of demand from students. If UT (and A&M!) didn’t have that, they wouldn’t be nearly as good of schools as they are today.
I would say, probably most of the commuters want to get home. Which is why encouraging them to a system school could work for them, while having students who want to be there, ,there.
I’ve never personally met a commuter that wanted to get back into Houston traffic ASAP. Just from a logistical perspective, most commuters I knew in school were in the habit of showing up an hour or more earlier than their classes started because parking was otherwise impossible, and few if any were particularly eager to sit in traffic going home. Most of the folks who get back in their car right after class are doing so because they’re either going to work or because the campus is dead and there’s nothing to do. One of those things is fixable.
