The massive white steel torch sculpture looms over the entrance to Roosevelt University’s new Schaumburg campus like a marker staking out an explorer’s new territory.
The $21 million Albert A. Robin facility signals the Chicago-based private institution’s commitment to aggressively pursuing the rapidly expanding suburban college student base by offering ambience–and convenience–along with instruction, university officials say.
Roosevelt is not alone.
Since the early 1980s in Illinois and around the country, there has been an explosion of colleges and universities bringing classes to remote sites where they can more easily be accessed by the students the educators are targeting–those older than the traditional 4-year college campus crowd, students who are juggling the demands of work and family and who need to take classes in the evenings, on weekends and usually on a part-time basis.
“Community colleges have been doing this type of thing for years,” said Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education, based in Washington, D.C. “What’s unusual about what Roosevelt is that it’s a private institution that’s doing it.”
Roosevelt’s new 27-acre Schaumburg campus, located at 1651 McConnor Pkwy., near the intersection of Golf and Meacham Roads, sits in the shadow of Woodfield Mall and its neighboring retail sprawl.
The new campus, which will be dedicated Saturday with the fall semester beginning later this month, will offer graduate and undergraduate classes to about 3,000 students. Roosevelt’s former site in Arlington Heights had just over 2,800 students, officials said. The new facility will be staffed by about 60 teachers, more than double the number who taught at the old campus.
Among its features are spacious classrooms, state-of-the-art science and computer labs and other amenities usually associated with a college setting–such as a commons area, including a billiards and TV room, a bookstore and a library.
The renovated facility formerly housed the Midwest oil operations of California-based Unocal Corp.
It is a far cry from the aged, cramped spaces at the former Forest View High School in Arlington Heights, where Roosevelt has been offering mostly graduate-level classes since 1986.
Roosevelt President Theodore L. Gross has called the new campus “a paradigm for the university for the 21st Century,” signifying that the school, which started offering off-site classes in 1978, is in the suburbs to stay.
A 1995 survey conducted by the Illinois Board of Higher Education noted there were 52,000 off-campus college courses being offered around the state. Community colleges accounted for about 80 percent of the offerings.
“In the world of the future, place doesn’t much matter,” Atwell said.
And rapid advances in technology, with e-mail and video teleconferencing, are already starting to change the way educational information is delivered, he added.
“In the world of the future, a student will be able to sit at home and get a bachelor’s degree,” Atwell said.
For now, though, the majority of college-bound students have to venture outside their homes for instruction. And studies show that they are becoming less inclined to want to travel very far.
Thus travel time is a key factor for schools when planning where to offer off-campus courses, and it was precisely that for Roosevelt, said Frank Cassell, dean of the school’s Robin Campus.
“When we were planning this campus, we had people get in their cars and drive to see how far they got in 15 to 20 minutes–that’s where our primary objectives were,” he said.
For Ann Aiello, 26, of Palatine, the ability to study for her master’s degree in business at Rosary College’s off-campus location in Northbrook, rather than having to go to the school’s main campus in River Forest, was a definite plus, since she was working full time near her home.
“It was very convenient to be able to take classes out here rather than have to go to the main campus,” she said.
Just how many colleges and universities are offering classes in the northwest suburbs alone is uncertain. As many as 35 different schools offer classes in such varied places as office buildings, hotel suites, community colleges and various local secondary school sites.
The classes and program offerings are just as varied. They range from places like Illinois Institute of Technology’s graduate and professional certification programs at its Rice Campus in Wheaton to Chicago State University’s cooperative programs with other universities as well as numerous video teleconferencing courses offered at locations throughout the city.
DePaul University of Chicago has operated a campus in Naperville for the last seven months, Loyola University Chicago leases space in Wilmette, and National-Louis University in Evanston also has campuses in Chicago, Wheaton, Wheeling and Elgin.
In 1990, Northern Illinois University in DeKalb established an off-campus center in Hoffman Estates. It has since set up another center in Rockford. And it offers classes at the College of DuPage, as part of a cooperative program with the University of Illinois.
Roosevelt envisions its new Schaumburg campus as becoming the first regional university in the northwest suburbs, a place that will become a connecting point for the communities in the area, said campus dean Cassell.
“This is a comprehensive university, not just some type of investment,” he said. “You can get all of your credits here. We think this is what distinguishes us from what others are trying to do.”
