Episode 96: Lora Strigens on Connecting Campus Spaces to Institutional Strategy
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How can campus spaces advance institutional strategy? How can better data and better stakeholder engagement help you make better decisions about where, how, and when to invest in campus facilities and their operations? How can your campus create more meaningful, memorable experiences? We discuss these questions with Lora Strigens, Vice President for Planning and Strategy at Marquette University who brings a unique perspective leading both capital planning and strategic planning.
In the evolving landscape of higher education, the physical campus is often viewed merely as a backdrop—a collection of brick and mortar where learning happens to take place. However, for forward-thinking leaders, university facilities are much more than overhead; they are strategic assets that can be intentionally designed to foster belonging, equity, and academic achievement.
To explore this, Elliot Felix, author of The Connected College, sat down with Lora, an expert in university facilities planning and design. Together, they unpacked how the built environment acts as a silent partner in the student journey and why "meaning" is the new metric for campus success.
Defining Student Success Beyond the Graduation Rate
For many years, the industry relied on "generic" metrics to measure success: first-year retention and six-year graduation rates. While these numbers matter, Lora suggests they are the floor, not the ceiling. True student success is deeply personal and institution-specific.
When a university defines success in alignment with its unique mission, it becomes a differentiator. Success isn't just about the credential; it’s about wellbeing, the ability to build relationships, and the sense of community a student feels. At its core, student success is the intersection of what all students need (safety, food, and housing security) and what a specific institution is uniquely positioned to provide.
The Physical Campus as a Tool for Equity and Belonging
If a campus is a "home away from home," facilities must meet the most basic human needs before they can facilitate higher-level learning. This includes accessible health services, secure housing, and inclusive dining options.
However, the impact of facilities extends beyond the buildings themselves. Lora highlights the "human side" of facilities—the custodians, grounds crews, and dining professionals who have more impromptu daily interactions with students than almost anyone else on campus. When these staff members see their role not just as maintaining floors, but as "helping students succeed," the entire campus culture shifts. A sense of belonging is fostered in the hallway just as much as in the lecture hall.
The Future of Campus Planning: Efficiency and Meaning
The "spaces of tomorrow" are already taking shape through two major trends: the consolidation of services and the activation of "in-between" spaces.
The Rise of One-Stop Success Hubs
Colleges are increasingly moving away from siloed offices. By transforming traditional spaces like libraries into Student Success Centers, institutions can house career services, tutoring, peer mentoring, and diversity programming under one roof. This "one-stop shop" model reduces the friction students face when seeking help, ensuring they spend less time navigating bureaucracy and more time engaging with resources.
Meaning Over Multi-Purpose
While "multi-purpose" has been a buzzword for decades, Lora argues for a higher bar: Meaning. An example of this is the transformation of a simple campus green space into a cultural landmark. By adding murals that reflect the diversity of the student body and using the space for land acknowledgments and podcasts, a physical area becomes a "memorable" environment. Meaningful spaces are those where memories are made and where students feel their identity is reflected in the campus fabric.
Strategic Advice for Higher Ed Leaders
Navigating the future of facilities requires a shift from a "scarcity mindset" to one of "abundance and potential." For those planning the next decade of campus life, three strategies are essential:
Be an Advocate: See every conversation about the built environment as an opportunity to advance student success.
Be a Dot Connector: Use the broad perspective of facilities to connect people, programs, and culture with physical interventions.
Design with Intent: High-stakes investments require confidence. While you can't predict the future, you can ensure every decision is anchored in the institution's core mission.
Student success does not happen by accident; it happens by design. By treating campus facilities as an active participant in the educational mission, colleges can create environments where every student has the opportunity to thrive.
Episode 96 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers. Welcome Laura, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in university facilities, planning, design, construction, operations.
Lora: Thanks for talking with me today, Elliot. I'm passionate about how people experience the physical environment and how decisions that we make about that environment can impact every aspect of people's lives. And that's why I really can't separate my architecture background from my urban planning background. Spaces take on a deeper level of meaning as people activate and interact with it. And that's where my interest and passion comes from. I spent time in consulting for many years, mostly working with clients who are trying to connect a big vision or a strategy for their future into a physical design response. I've been fortunate to be in many fascinating conversations with different types of organizations about what the physical environment means relative to what their goals are and what they're trying to achieve, and coming from a creative field. My approach to planning is one that relies a lot on engagement meaningful listening, lots of curiosity, and the ability to have some of those challenging conversations. And then I ultimately found my way into higher education. In part because of the complexity of the organization and the unique culture in higher ed. I also wholeheartedly believe in the impact that the physical campus has on the student experience. So if I could be part of making that a positive impact and more meaningful for a campus that sounded like meaningful and positive work for me to be involved in.
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Elliot Felix: That is awesome. That's one of the most insightful and inspiring minutes about higher ed and the role that space can play that I've heard in a long time. I love it. It's about the people. It's about how the decisions about space affect people. It's about how you occupy and use space and activate it and operate it. You can tell I've had to write about this a lot lately. Given our conversation is about the role that facilities can play in student success, I'd love to hear your definition of student success. How do you define it? How do you measure it? How do you know that you are enabling, facilitating, making it happen?
Lora: So there's so much out there right now on student success and a lot of people are talking about and writing about. It seems every day there's a new link I'm getting to something talking about student success, but I think where it really becomes activated is when the definition of student success connects to the institution's mission. Because student success isn't just a single element or one thing. It's not just about degree completion or student engagement activities, but it also involves their wellbeing, their sense of community, how they build relationships, and how they do that within the specific context of the institution that they're at. So I think that it's institution specific. It needs to be really strongly connected to what the mission and the vision of the institution is. And then to carry that out a step further, it's what is the institution doing to meet that mission of student success and how are they helping students define and play an active role in shaping what student success looks like for them as individuals?
Elliot Felix: It's like top down and bottom up. You're understanding and supporting students, whether it's the credential, the engagement, the wellbeing, the community, the relationships. But then you're tying that to like the larger institutional vision and culture. That makes a lot of sense. So if I carry that forward, it would mean that student success at each institution might look a little different.
Lora: I believe so. It should be at that intersection of the things that all students care about, but then the things that your students care about and the thing that your institution is in the world to do and the impact you're trying to create.
Elliot Felix: I think as institutions are trying to define their own unique value proposition to students as we're trying to recruit and attract and retain and ultimately launch these students into the world, that's where that unique definition of student success is really meaningful because it is the differentiator. Every institution has a different way of articulating and carrying that out for a student. If you're going with the generic, like student success equals first year retention and six year graduation rate, you're losing the opportunity to differentiate yourself and to think about what's unique about your institution in how you recruit and retain people.
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Elliot Felix: Yeah. And it's not just what you do, right? What the metric is, but also how you do it and who you do it with. And what role do you see university, college and university facilities playing in enabling student success?
Lora: So the cool thing in my view of student success is that every aspect of the university's programs, operations, people contribute to student success. And facilities are no different. When it comes to the built environment, we have to ask ourselves, how are the decisions that we're making about the physical campus and space, how are they acting in support of our students' ability to be successful on their journey on our specific campus? So at a residential institution such as the one I'm at, a campus is a student's home for a number of years, and if you think about the most basic needs that you have around that definition of home—safety, food and housing security, access to health and wellness services—all of those have a connection to the design of the built environment and therefore it's incumbent on universities to think about how we can create stability and meet those needs for students in their home away from home. The other thing I'd say is probably a less mentioned perspective on this is that the reality is that facilities and auxiliary units on campuses employ a very large number of people—custodians, grounds crew, dining professionals—and those individuals often have impromptu interactions that lead to relationships with our students. And if we value belonging and community as integral to student success, everyone from a custodian in a residence hall to the top level administrator has the ability to impact that experience for students. It's the story of the custodian at the Johnson Space Center; somebody asked them what he does, and he doesn't say "I mop the floors." He says, "I put people on the moon." It's a way, especially if you're having that direct interaction with students, to see the everyday as part of that bigger mission and vision.
Elliot Felix: Hopefully it's a good motivator for people that work throughout the institution, right? Because we're always talking about how you find your own personal connection as a staff member or a faculty member to the university's strategy or to the university's vision. If you see it through that lens of enhancing student success or enabling that student experience to be something really special, it's a lot easier to find yourself in that strategy and that vision.
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Elliot Felix: I think there's increased pressure to demonstrate that space is being used effectively and efficiently on campuses, and so that's just a very practical challenge that's influencing how planning happens. There also needs to be greater attention to things like deferred maintenance and operational strategies because we have, as many campuses do, aging infrastructure and aging buildings. What about the facilities themselves, like what are the spaces of tomorrow that are gonna look very different or work very differently than they did in the past?
Lora: Again, I think the exciting thing is that any space on campus has the ability to have an impact on student success. But, thinking high level, I think things like obviously student success centers that bring together multiple types of support services that help students from their first day that they set foot on campus to their first destination post-graduation. Thinking about that whole spectrum of what a student needs to be successful—academically, socially—those types of spaces I think have changed a lot and will continue to evolve. Beyond that, looking at facilities that support student wellbeing and student sense of belonging and community, I think are pretty central to student success. We know that students are here not just for their academic programs, but also for the experience they have outside of the classroom, how they build relationships with other students, faculty, staff and people in the community.
Elliot Felix: Do you have an example that comes to mind of a space that's better facilitating student success?
Lora: An example that I give that might be a little bit non-traditional is an outdoor space on campus that we created. It was identified in our campus master plan. It was outside of our union and between a number of buildings; we created this large green space. It provided space for students to interact and engage, and was an oasis within this urban environment. But what we've seen happen in the subsequent years is we've put up a mural that faces out to that common space that reflects the diversity of our campus community. It was a student-inspired project that spawned a podcast and a number of different things that enhance the sense of student belonging. We used that green space to house our land and water acknowledgement for campus. We've really continued to leverage that space into something with greater meaning.
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Elliot Felix: In our last five minutes or so here, what advice do you have for other folks that are in your shoes that are planning, designing, building, operating university facilities so that they can enable student success?
Lora: Three things that I'd probably point to. The first is to be an advocate—to see every planning activity or every conversation about the built environment as an opportunity to advance the conversation about enhancing student success. The second is to bring focus—to consider what's most important for the student experience and for the specific campus you're at, and to spend time and energy on those things that are gonna make the biggest difference. And then finally, I think planners have the opportunity to be a dot connector—to help bring that broad perspective around how the actions around people and programs and culture can work hand in hand with interventions in the physical environment.
Elliot Felix: What's your advice on making good decisions about facilities?
Lora: You can never be a hundred percent certain of the outcome. My hope is that we build confidence around the investment and the decisions that we're making. The more that institutions can tie back the decisions they're making to the vision and the strategy for the institution, the better. If you use those as guideposts, it gives you a lot more confidence that you're headed in the right direction. Even if you can't be certain of the outcome, you can be certain that you acted with the mission in mind.
Elliot Felix: I would love to end just unpacking—what do you think makes a space meaningful for people?
Lora: Meaning I think is somewhat connected to memorable. The spaces I think about that are meaningful to me are ones that have created memories for me. They've been opportunities where I've met somebody or I've had a great conversation, or I've experienced something that has made me remember what it's like to be in that space and understand how the environment impacted how I understood what was going on in the world around me at the time.
Elliot Felix: Lora, thank you so much. I really appreciate your insights.