Building School Rivalry

After decades in which business school classrooms were almost interchangeable, university leaders throughout the United States are scrambling to erect spectacular, high-tech buildings they say are necessary to attract top students.

Thanks to the communications revolution, university administrators say, business students expect their university classrooms today to be wired for computers, to offer Internet access and to accommodate the current and future technological advances students are likely to encounter in the working world.

Nowhere is the competition for the biggest and best buildings more intense than in Southern California. USC is building $25-million Popovich Hall, scheduled for completion this summer. Claremont Graduate University last spring dedicated its $10-million Ron W. Burkle Family Building, which houses the university’s Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management. UCLA completed its $75-million, seven-building Anderson School in 1995. Chapman University in Orange in 1997 dedicated its Arnold and Mabel Beckman Business and Technology Hall.

The Southern California university projects are part of a national business school building boom, according to the American Assn. of Collegiate Schools of Business, which lists 40 new or renovated university business school structures that have been completed in the last three years.

The building boom arises both from a basic need to modernize business school facilities and from an increasingly intense competition to attract the most desirable students and teachers. While dramatically designed, technologically up-to-date buildings will not by themselves attract the best and brightest, administrators say, quality buildings are an important factor in national business school rankings that are published yearly by a number of journals and are taken seriously by students and administrators.

While business school enrollment in general is up--from 2,668 applications in 1993 to 4,366 in 1998 at UCLA, for example--administrators say the competition is not just for quantity but for the top students. The universities, in this competition, often claim their buildings are the latest and greatest in technology and school design.

“I’m not sure there’s a competition to have the biggest and best building, but there is at least a competition about not being left behind,” said John Crowe, senior associate dean of the Marshall School of Business at USC. “The competition for business students is indeed intense. You don’t want to be seen as an institution with nothing but 1965 facilities.”

“It’s a bit of a ‘Field of Dreams’ approach,” said Eric Pollard, a Claremont Graduate University spokesman. “I believe we have students who are here because of our new building. It wasn’t the only factor in their decision, but I’m sure some of them chose to come here rather than other places because the building represents to them that we’re committed to the business school.”

The building competition is of very recent vintage, according to Crowe, who explained that only recently has cutting-edge technology become a factor for students evaluating business school facilities. “We have a building that was brought on line in the late 1960s and two that were brought on line in the late 1920s, and architects sort of consider those to be of the same generation,” he said.

Pollard pointed out how quickly the demand for the latest technology has arisen. “A year ago, half of the people in our executive management program did not have e-mail addresses. Now they all do,” he said.

According to John W. Mamer, interim dean of the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, at least two and possibly three trends are driving the boom.

First, “Business schools have been fairly successful, so they’ve been growing,” Mamer said. Second, he said, “The competition among business schools has been intensifying greatly, and building new schools is one element of this competition.”

Mamer and Crowe both said a third reason for the boom may be that business schools attract more private donations than other college disciplines because their graduates tend to be the ones who go on to make fortunes and are therefore in a better position to donate large sums. Whether that’s in fact true is difficult to determine because accurate, comprehensive figures comparing business school donations with others are hard to come by, Mamer said.

While Mamer said the new Anderson complex has had a big impact in helping the university continue to attract top candidates, he believes savvy students look beyond the bricks and mortar.

“I think our students are sophisticated enough to know that it’s the ideas and the faculty that make the difference, not the quality of the flooring. The quality of the curriculum, the quality of the ideas, the quality of the faculty and the quality of the research that the faculty does are most important because those factors are going to determine management practice in the next generation,” Mamer said.

To fund these new facilities, institutions are turning to the business community, to donors like Kris and Jane Popovich, who contributed $5 million toward Popovich Hall at USC. At Claremont, grocery magnate Ron Burkle contributed $2 million toward his family’s namesake building.

Jane Popovich said she and husband Kris, both USC business school graduates, made their gift because of her family’s long association with the university and their belief that USC must maintain top facilities to remain among top business schools.

The university’s H. Leslie Hoffman Hall is named after Jane Popovich’s late father, a 17-year member of the USC board of trustees who contributed $2.5 million to the university’s master plan campaign during the 1960s. Her mother, Elaine Stevely Hoffman, was a longtime supporter of the university and its USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Jane Popovich is a member of the USC board of trustees.

The Popoviches said, however, that their gift was motivated more by the university’s need for a separate facility for graduate students than the desire to compete with a technologically more advanced building.

“USC was simply running out of space, and the university wanted a building for the graduate students that was separate from the building for the undergraduate students,” Kris Popovich said. “I think the new facilities will enable us to continue to attract an outstanding faculty and high-caliber students, but technology was not the overriding motivation.”

According to principal Bob Murrin of A.C. Martin Partners in Los Angeles, the architectural and engineering firm for Popovich Hall, it often makes more financial sense for universities to build something new than to try to retrofit existing structures, but not just because of changes in technology. Buildings also must be adapted to meet requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act and California earthquake safety guidelines, Murrin said. The need for new construction has been a boon to his firm, which now derives about a third of its work from university projects--up from 10% five years ago.

Murrin said universities also want a different design in classrooms today. Gone in many instances is the standard lecture hall, replaced by “case rooms” where students sit stadium-style in a horseshoe-shaped seating arrangement designed to invite discussion.

University officials say the new buildings are important not just for their nuts-and-bolts practicality but for the messages they send to students about their schools’ commitments to the business education programs.

“A building signals, in some sense, the importance the institution places on the business school. At UCLA, the university gave us a site right in the middle of the campus. That speaks volumes about how important the university considers a first-rate business school,” Mamer said.

The building boom is driving ever more ambitious fund-raising efforts by the universities, resulting in ever-bigger donations from businesspeople. According to an American Assn. of Collegiate Schools of Business list of the largest business school contributions from individual donors, the biggest gift was $50 million from Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s Walton family last year for the Sam M. Walton College of Business Administration at the University of Arkansas. Second was a $40-million gift to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania from John M. Huntsman, chairman of Huntsman Corp., a chemical company. Third on the list was the $35 million in 1997 from Gordon S. Marshall, chairman of Marshall Industries and a member of USC’s class of 1946, for USC’s Marshall School.

Crowe said universities are tapping these sources for more funds because “university buildings are expensive.”

“They’re not tilt-ups. It costs a lot to build and maintain university buildings, so we need a lot of support from donors,” Crowe said. The $25-million price tag for Popovich Hall, for example, includes more than $12 million for construction, more than $4 million to furnish and equip the building, and the remainder in endowment funds set aside to provide the $600,000 or more in annual operating costs.