The price of growth

In September, Samford University will celebrate its 60th year as part of the Homewood community.

When Howard College’s 850 students first walked on the brand-new Lakeshore campus in 1957, the grounds were muddy from new construction and only eight buildings stood on the hillside.

This fall, almost 5,500 students will, in one way or another, call Samford University home.

In the first of a four-part series, The Homewood Star is taking a look at how Samford and other college students affect the communities around them.

‘Calculated’ growth

During the past 10 years, Samford has seen an overall 22 percent increase in total enrollment, with the year-over-year rate increasing to 5 percent or more for the past two years.

“It’s been an intentional plan,” said Samford Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management Phil Kimrey. “For us, we don’t want to be the biggest, but at the same time we do know for us to continue to advance, we need to have additional students.”

Kimrey said the focus on measured growth unofficially began with University President Andrew Westmoreland’s administration, when school leaders began to look at the areas Samford needed to focus on to grow its population.

“It’s been very intentional, deliberate, calculated,” Kimrey said. “Not perfect by any means, but it’s been also very incremental.”

For eight years in a row, headlines from the university have touted record enrollment, with the last entering class of freshmen totaling more than 900.

“We’re not the small, 1,200-1,500 student institution that people may think,” Kimrey said.

Indeed, estimates from the university’s recent master planning process project the university totaling 7,500 total students by the year 2030.

But that’s just an estimate, Kimrey emphasized. “That’s just a vision or goal,” he said.

A finite footprint

While the student population — and by extension, faculty and staff populations — has grown during the past 60 years, Samford’s footprint is relatively unchanged.

Nestled in what were once the rolling, empty hills of Shades Valley, Samford is essentially landlocked.

By purchasing the former Southern Progress property on the east side of the campus in late 2014, the university exercised one of its final options as far as physical expansion goes.

The purchase and subsequent remodel of two of the three buildings on the property, in conjunction with the completion of the school’s new Cooney Hall in fall 2015, Samford has added roughly 250,000 square feet of facility space in the past five years.

Now, with limited geographical options to grow, Executive Vice President Buck Brock said the challenge becomes how to best use the space available.

“It’s all within the framework of building upon what already exists,” Brock said.

Eddie McJunkin, a Saulter Road resident of 30 years and Samford graduate, can see the university’s fraternity and sorority housing from his front yard. While McJunkin said he loves the school and has no complaints about living so near it, he has watched the campus expand east, west and south throughout the years, and he wonders if eventually the school will turn its eyes north to his and other homes to find more room. 

This fall will see the completion of a new sorority housing residence hall — a 70-bed facility being constructed on what was once Erskine Ramsay Hall before its roof collapsed in 2008 and was eventually torn down.

This will give Samford a total on-campus housing capacity of 2,400, enough for about 72 percent of the undergraduate population.

But already, some students are feeling the squeeze, even since the university has loosened its long-standing policy requiring students to live on campus until age 21.

Developing a master plan

With the desired growth in students progressing and the acquisition of the Southern Progress property, Brock said university leaders decided it was time to embark upon a comprehensive master planning process.

He said the last time the campus formulated a formal master plan was in 1955 and, obviously, a lot has changed in the meantime.

Administrators sent out a request for a proposal, and after evaluating the five or six respondents, settled on Davis Architects, which is locally headquartered, and Dober Lidsky Mathey, a national company.

Brock said the process took more than a year, required 122 different meetings and involved 600 to 700 people. Additionally, the team held about 20 public forums for students, alumni and the community to hear about the plan and provide feedback.

“It’s all within the framework of building upon what already exists, and looking at how, with our land that we have, to accommodate the things that we potentially see 10, 15, 20 years down the road,” Brock said.

The plan, approved by Samford’s board of trustees on Feb. 28, is comprised of four phases.

Phase 1 will focus on adding additional residence hall space to accommodate for recent and future growth. It will also aim to co-locate and renovate the different offices and spaces of the Howard College of Arts and Sciences, which are currently spread across the campus. Phase 1 also would relocate admissions operations and create an enhanced Student Success Center, where students would be able to seek study assistance and use other resources.

Phase 2 focuses on renovation of the University Center and existing academic spaces, as well as adding additional parking. Brock said adding parking could take many forms, one of the most likely being the continuation of the “twin” of the current north parking deck that backs up to Saulter Road and Windsor Boulevard.

Phase 3 considers expanding the space for the College of Health Sciences, housed on the former Southern Progress property. The third building, should Time, Inc. vacate it, could be renovated, and Brock said there is additional land for a fourth building.

Phase 4 could bring renovations to student recreation and activity spaces, including athletics and fitness facilities, as well as the fine arts center. Independent projects included in the fourth phase include improving ADA access across campus as well as signs and way-finding measures. 

At a community forum about the plan, Brock explained that some of Phase 4 may be done in conjunction or before other phases of the plan.

“It’s a pretty wide-ranging list,” Brock said.

But Brock emphasized that the plan as it stands now works within Samford’s current property and focuses on making improvements to what the school already has, and that there aren’t plans to expand at this time..

Alex Wyatt, the Homewood City Council’s new formal liaison to Samford, said he thinks the plan addresses some of the common concerns residents have.

“I think that there is and always will be the concern of Samford expanding their footprint,” Wyatt said of residents, especially those immediately adjacent to campus.

“From the city’s standpoint, we’re obviously going to keep a close eye on that,” he said, “and I think Samford would tell you, ‘We understand why the city is keeping a close eye on that.’”

Doing more with more

A side effect of increased enrollment is obviously increased revenue, Kimrey said.

“It provides us more financial opportunities to make Samford a better place,” Kimrey said. “So, having more — more is not always better — but having more allows us to do more, for the most part.”

During the past 13 years, tuition for undergraduates has increased an average of 6 percent, with the most recent years hovering just below a 4 percent increase year to year. That translates to a change from $13,944 in annual tuition in 2004 to an annual rate of $28,552 for the most recent year, both before additional student fees.

Reports from the university state that student tuition covers 70 percent of operating expenses, with the remainder and all scholarship funds coming from the university’s endowment.

Kimrey said the increased revenue from additional students allows the university to not only focus on the needs initiated by the master plan, but also allows the school to provide ways for students to give back to the community.

“It provides us more financial opportunities to make Samford a better place,” he said. “It provides us an opportunity to invest with what our students do with community service and outreach to our communities.”

No regrets

Senior marketing major Grace Bowes, who hails from Roswell, Georgia, said she originally didn’t plan on coming to Samford, but the community feel, ability to concentrate in her desired field of sports and the direct attention from faculty eventually swayed her away from other schools.

Bowes is pursuing a sports marketing concentration, something that wasn’t offered at other schools she looked at.

“The one big selling point was this concentration that they have,” she said. “But it was because [of] the professors — I’m not a number, I’m a name — and I have a relationship with them. They’re there for me in all different situations.”

And Bowes said she sees the potential for that dynamic to change if Samford isn’t careful about its growth.

“I think that’s just something really unique that Samford has to offer, and it would be a shame to lose that,” she said.

Fellow senior Kay Caldwell, a finance and management double major, said she has similar concerns and is glad to see the school going through the master planning process to address the growth.

“I think it’s about time,” she said, laughing, but emphasizing she was serious. “Samford encourages growth, and we have these incoming freshman classes that are just huge, but I think we get a little bit ahead of ourselves.”

Caldwell said she thinks growth is a good thing but hopes the university is paying attention to the conditions on campus — such as housing, academic space and ability to maintain Samford’s culture — so that the things that brought current students to the university are not lost.

Mitigating growing pains

Kimrey said the university recognizes that there can be issues with growth.

“Obviously there are challenges, because anytime you grow, then you’re changing,” he said. “And there are people in all places, and at Samford, who really like it the way it is. And so to have more students and to have more employees, or to have more buildings, it’s different than the way it was five years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago.”

Kimrey and Brock said they are especially attuned to the feelings and concerns of their closest neighbors.

Throughout the process, officials have been asking: “What does [growth] do to the neighborhoods around, or the communities that we see across the street?” Kimrey said.

Compared to Samford’s roughly 5 percent annual growth, Homewood itself is growing about 2 percent annually, with the largest population growth seen in adults younger than 30.

Kimrey said he thinks Samford is behind part of that growth. “We find that many of our students, once they graduate, they tend to stay here,” he said. They may not stay for 10 years, he added, but they stay for three to five years, contributing to the community as citizens and in a financial aspect.

In the seven-county metropolitan area of Birmingham, the school estimates its local impact at an overall economic boost of $319 million, with $4.3 million in local yearly sales tax revenue.

And as the school grows, that number only climbs, and officials see the growth as a good thing for both Samford and the surrounding area. “Our growth will be a positive economic effect on Homewood and the Birmingham area,” Brock said.

Wyatt said that for the most part, he gets the impression that residents see the mutual benefit of Samford being part of Homewood, and that their relationship with the school as a positive one.

“By and large, I hear very little negative [comments],” said Homewood council member Barry Smith. She said there are always questions “especially when they undertake projects,” but the houses that Samford owns in the community have become less of an issue, particularly since the university agreed to a seven-year moratorium on purchasing new properties in 2011.

Windsor Boulevard resident Susan Baum, a 30-year resident, said Samford seems to make more of an effort through community meetings and other outlets to inform neighbors of campus changes than it did in the past. Her view of the university wasn’t negative, but watchful.

“We always feel like we need to keep an eye on what they do up there,” Baum said.

The Homewood Star will look more at resident interaction with the university in part two of this series.

Wyatt said “For the most part, I hear good things” — something he attributes to Samford’s attentiveness to being located so close to residential neighborhoods.

“Issues are going to come up among neighbors — there’s no way to avoid that — and I think that the residents feel like Samford is responsive and is trying to address issues,” he said.“ 

“I think Samford has really tried, probably more than ever before, to include Homewood and the residents of Homewood, not just the folks on campus, in the conversation,” Smith added.

– Sydney Cromwell and Jesse Chambers contributed to this report.