CEO Dean Wolf explains how this unique educational campus is looking to private sponsors for help with its most pressing need: space.

Squeezed onto 126 acres of prime downtown Denver real estate, the Auraria Higher Education Center (AHEC) is no stranger to the challenges of operating lean.

The Denver Urban Renewal Authority created the AHEC campus during the early 1970s around the concept of shared facilities for three institutions: Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the University of Colorado at Denver/ Health Sciences Center Downtown Denver Campus. In the process, blighted land historically known as the Town of Auraria was transformed into one of the largest urban higher education campuses in the nation.

Dean Wolf, CEO

Creating efficiencies
Since the combined Auraria campus was built in 1976, the student population has more than doubled to 39,000, but the campus itself has only grown by a fraction. Said Wolf, “We have three institutions with very specific and very different missions. By appealing to different audiences in the community, we have achieved a tremendous utilization rate on our classroom space.” Indeed, classes begin at 7 a.m. and run through 10:30 p.m., with classrooms more than 92% occupied during that time.

Efficiencies were also realized by having AHEC become the operational backbone of the three schools, providing consolidated non-academic services, such as facilities management, student union, bookstore, and campus police. On a single-institution campus, non-academic services typically consume up 12% to 15% of an organization’s operating budget. Under the AHEC model, the cost is under 8%. “As we like to say, it’s the greatest deal for the taxpayer in the state of Colorado,” Wolf said.

Although AHEC has done a great job creating efficiencies to handle student growth, very real space issues loom. In fact, national guidelines suggest that AHEC currently has only 65% of the occupied space it needs to serve its existing population.

AHEC has already tried many of the traditional methods of space utilization, making great use of online teaching and even contracting with surrounding community colleges to offer degree programs on their campuses. Yet even with modest growth, AHEC anticipates growing by 1,000 students a year.

So Wolf and his team have embarked on an ambitious master plan to expand and change the campus. The plan has identified approximately 15 contiguous acres of the campus as a potential site for public/private partnerships, including a 200- to 250-room hotel/conference facility and market-rate housing for students and faculty. Key to the plan is a mix of commercial office and retail space (bookstores, movie theaters, fresh food markets, cafes and restaurants) and service retail. The eventual build-out could reach 1.9 million square feet.

“Knowing that we’re not going to get funding from the state to address our growth needs, the easy answer was to lay it all on the backs of students,” said Wolf. “But we’ve seen how commercial development offers a means for the institutions to monetize their real estate assets and use these resources to invest in core academic programs. We see this as a way to help offset AHEC’s initial investment in capital construction as well as fund our growth down the road.”

Wolf is quick to note that such a plan requires a careful balancing act. “The goal is to leverage campus assets without blatantly commercializing them,” he said. To that end, AHEC consultants have been analyzing sponsorship marketing opportunities that would not interfere with the educational process.

For example, Wolf outlines how a hotel on campus could serve as real-world training grounds for students seeking careers in the hospitality industry. Likewise, locating a local business on campus creates a win-win: AHEC enjoys office and classroom space while the business enjoys ready access to student labor and the intellectual capital of faculty as consultants. There could even be a small-business incubator concept tied into the college of business.

AHEC also wants to create distinct neighborhoods on campus. Under the neighborhood concept, each of AHEC’s institutions will be able to carve out its own space—a central area for its administration and admissions offices. “They’ll have some license with architecture and landscaping to create their own identity,” Wolf said. “They each have their own brand, but they have not been able to do much branding.”

Faced with scarce financial resources and the need to work within a bureaucratic system that sometimes constrains innovation and flexibility, universities across the country have turned to similar public/private partnerships to address their space needs. Wolf points to successful efforts at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, and Georgia Tech, noting that AHEC would like to begin implementation in the next three years, with full implementation taking some 10 years.

Ultimately, the AHEC story is a great story of efficiency, Wolf noted. “The quality of education here is undisputed. Our challenge now is to ensure that great tradition continues.”

Steffen Smith is an Atlanta-based writer and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it