The other component which is identifying
and taking their occupancy down from
potentially quads
to doubles, or doubles to singles, or
taking every other room offline and
trying to address some of the
social businessing guidelines that have
been recommended.
Welcome to Focus! A podcast dedicated to
the business of higher education.
I'm your host Heather Richmond and we
will be exploring the challenges and
opportunities
facing today's higher learning
institutions. Today I'm joined by Jason
Gross and Michael Fogerty from
Adirondack
as we discuss what housing and
residential halls look like in the
post-COVID world
and how campuses can move forward from
here. Thanks for joining us today Jason
and Michael!
Thank you for having us. We're excited to
be here. Great.
Well, Jason, for those who may not be
familiar with Adirondack, can you give us
a little overview of how schools use
your solution?
Sure, and very happy to be here with
you today as well.
Adirondack Solutions provides end-to-end
solutions
for the student housing marketplace, is
the best way to think about it. And when
I say end-to-end,
I mean our solutions are designed to
facilitate
the students selecting the room,
applying for housing, searching for
roommates, and
the components that we provide to our
clients,
there's an administrative tool where the
housing and professional office can
go ahead and facilitate all of those
online processes that
they want their students to participate
in. And then there's a self-service
environment for the students where they
can
apply for housing, search for housing,
search for roommates,
and all of the other kind of things that
kind of go along with,
you know, on-campus housing and whatnot.
And there's a whole myriad of other kind
of solutions that go along with that, but
those are the two primary elements.
And we hook into the students - I'm sorry -
the university's
main administrative system, whether it's
Ellucian, Oracle, whoever that might be,
to facilitate this process then the flow
of data moves back and forth between our
solution and the university's
student information system. That's great,
thank you for that overview. And
it's really interesting because you both
actually came from schools before
joining Adirondack. So
how about you give us a little
background on your experience on campus.
Michael, let's start with you on that.
Sure, yeah I came up through higher ed
ranks,
first starting off as a live-in
professional
at a couple different small schools in
upstate New York.
Residence director or resident area
coordinator - those kind of
titles, you know. Escalating
responsibilities from there to the point
where I
was in a position in Siena College in
upstate New York as their assistant
director and associate director of
residential life
with a focus on operations. So mainly
working with the students to put the
put them in the residence hall rooms, and
find them roommates, and then managing
the processes from there. While I was at
Siena,
we were a paper-based product, and I
certainly recognized that we wanted to
enhance the
services and create some efficiencies
for us, so
we looked into housing management
softwares,
did a couple bids, wound up choosing
Adirondack,
and that was my first introduction to
entering solutions as a user.
And I implemented the program and then
was the primary user for a couple of
years.
And as so many
recovering res life professionals can
attest to at certain points,
you know, you arrive where there
are just certain...
it's a time for a change. And there
was the opportunity to join Adirondack
they happened coincidentally to be
looking for a new staff member, and so
fate would have it that I went over to
the dark side of technology
and began to work with
other clients, new users, on onboarding
the program. So taking what I had done
as a user and onboarding it and
recreating my business processes in
Adirondack.
Now I was on the other side teaching
others how to do that and
some of the experiences that I went
through, lessons learned, that type of
thing.
So I then joined Adirondack in 2015
as an implementation specialist and have
done that for a few years and then just
recently have moved into
more of a project management role with
some of our internal development
with next versions, new products, and
various integrations with third parties.
Well it really gives you a lot of,
you know, great insight and unique
perspective working with schools
since you were in their shoes. But also,
you know, from a software perspective
knowing,
what are some of the things that you
really need, some of those manual process
that you talked about
and, you know, really being able to
convert that into an automated process
throughout your solution. So that's,
that's a great background.
That's really what as Jason indicated.
That's a lot of what our focus is
is
how we can, you know, I always say our
sweet spot as a company is
helping schools develop those
efficiencies, and
enhance their services for their
students with our product.
Because it just offers so much more
robustness to
meeting where students are at, versus a
paper process, or some other process.
Right, now Jason, you are also in housing
on campus, too, right?
Yeah and my experience goes all the way
back to the 90s, so I'm kind of dating
myself a little bit. But I started as,
you know, a resident advisor back in the
day that was 1993, and then
kind of like Michael, I moved up through
the ranks to, you know,
undergraduate resident director,
ultimately moved into graduate studies,
doing the same thing, and then
postgrad, you know, got my first job at a
small school up in the midwest
as a director of housing. And then, you
know, kind of like the,
you know, the profession really, you know,
requires you to move around a little bit
if you want to advance.
So I worked in both, you know, small
schools,
private, and large public institutions
kind of around the midwest
and ultimately, as Michael kind of
alluded to,
I think everybody kind of reaches a
point in their career where they want to
do something different.
And the vendor community that's
associated with higher education is
really a small world - there's a lot of
people in it but it's a very small world.
And I got to know a lot of the
vendors and,
you know, these people hire, you know, from
within the higher ed community because
we know
kind of the ins and outs of the business
practices. So
I first started out working with a
competitor that we shall not name,
and ultimately our mutual contact,
you know
Bill Gunger - Wild Bill as we call him -
he got tired of me
chasing him around and nipping at his
heels. So
Bill made a point to hire me away
and I've been with adirondack since,
you know, oh my goodness it's going back
to February of 2012,
and started out as a the director of
their sales and marketing and now
I'm the vice president of sales and
marketing. And something that Michael
alluded to
is that you know I think it's kind of
neat with our company -
half of our company are former student
affairs professionals, student housing
professionals, so
we have a very good understanding of the
world,
you know, that we're servicing. And, you
know, the other half of our company are
the tech professionals,
and, you know, between those two groups of
people we kind of drive each other crazy
at times,
but it's a good crazy because it's all
for the advancement of what our clients
need.
Absolutely. Well I know that, again,
you have that insight as well and being
able to go out, like you said, the vendor
community coupled with the
higher ed community, that's the beauty of
being in higher ed is that sense of
community. Everyone wanting to share ideas, I
think that's really cool.
Well things are looking
pretty different now as students head
back to some campuses - certainly
different than
when you guys were on campus. So can
you share any insights that from schools
on changes that
they're making with their residents in
housing?
Yeah, it's certainly
the world looks very different from a
higher ed
residential operations perspective right
now.
You know, from everything from the
calendar
that clients typically follow, things are
very regimented,
and you know you get into a little
bit of a cycle and a little bit of a
a pattern with, you know, room selection
for returning students
in March/April/May, and then new students
apply
maybe May/June/July, and then you place
new students in July
and start prepping for the fall semester
in August. That's just the regular
routine,
year in and year out. This year obviously
that's been thrown
for a complete loop. And, you know,
we have
clients who are running room selection
processes
for fall for returning students now,
because they now have gone through the
other component which is de-densifying
and taking their occupancy down from
potentially quads
to doubles, or doubles to singles, or
taking every other room offline and
trying to
address some of the social distancing
guidelines that have been
recommended by various health
agencies and various governmental
groups to help control
and put students in the most
safe and healthiest environment possible.
So that's on the operation side in a lot
of what they've done is just adjusting
their calendar,
and then adjusting the space and the
occupancy that
they offer their students to live in.
Some of the other things, you know,
our clients tend to fall in in two
camps:
there's the operations camp, and then
there's the residential programming
piece. And so they also are looking at
where there's communal space in
residence halls - how can they
control that space and access to that
space? Maybe
taking it offline or removing
certain furniture so that there's
less occupancy or less volume that can
be
present in there. So it's just looking at
their operations from top down and
adjusting it in ways that I'm sure no
one ever imagined.
Yeah, and Jason, have you had a chance to
talk to some schools? 
It's funny that you
mentioned that.
I actually was on a call this morning
with a client here in the triangle, and
it was, as michael kind of said, you
mean
these schools are very regimented in how
they do things.
And it's, you know, they have these,
you know, operations and these processes
down to a science. And it's
funny that the school that I was talking
to typically their move-in
occurs over, you know,
a long weekend, you know 
first-year students start arriving
on a Friday and
continue to Saturday, then most you know
returning students
show up on Sunday or the following week,
whenever they choose to come back.
And now, instead of like a multi-day
process, they're trying to facilitate
these things over a multi-week process
because they're trying to, you know,
control the flow
of students onto campus. So what was once
a two-day process is now a two-week
process.
And you know, just having to wrap your
head around how to,
you know, manage the volume of people and
the space that you
have within the time frame that matches
up to the university's calendar
is kind of overwhelming. And then so you
know,
what we're seeing is a lot of our
clients they're concentrating on
how to properly get the students back
onto campus right now.
And then the next step is really going
to be what to do once they're there.
What are the contingency plans if they
happen to have a positive
COVID test, you know, thrust upon them. And
that's kind of one of the neat things
about our software is that, you know,
it can account for those spaces that
have been designated as quarantine
spaces.
It can designate students as being under
quarantine, and then
obviously, you know, once that person or
once that room is flagged
that data can be shared with other
offices on campus to facilitate
whether, you know, it could be, you know,
the delivery of food
to the student, it could be the delivery
of course material to the student.
Whatever that happens to be,
it's kind of one of the neat things
about our software, is that it can kind
of ebb and flow
with whatever the needs of the
institution happens to be at that moment,
at that time.
Yeah that's great, we were actually just
talking to a school that's exactly what
they have set up, is that when they have
their designated quarantine dorm rooms
and they, you know, again trigger dining
to go and have delivery services, and
like you said have programs to
deliver to them, so that's great that you
are able to trigger that to other
spots around campus. Great.
Now we're talking about moving in and
housing right now, but I know that there
was a lot of work to do
back at the beginning when COVID first
hit, where people had to leave
the dorms and a lot of refunds that
had to happen for those students. So
are there any changes now with how
housing is being billed or refunded
based upon that experience?
I wouldn't say that the changes are in
how they're billed.
You know. typically schools still
develop rates on either a daily or a
term-based
cost. You know, $4,500 for a double for
the semester, that type of
thing. What
they had to develop on the fly, in many
ways,
is taking all students in their
residence halls
and applying a cancellation
middle of the term in mass, which has
really never been done before. 
Think about it, take a residential
capacity
let's say 1,200 students on campus.
How many times has there ever you
know been a situation where all 1,200
needed to be
cancelled and refunded in the middle of
a term?
Yeah, probably never! Probably never, right?
And so,
that, you know, created very unique
challenges and,
you know, the schools wrestled with what
dates
do they cancel on, and how do they
determine the correct prorations,
In our system we've
mirrored kind of the normal practice,
which is you would have one,
two, or a handful of students who would
cancel at various points during the term
for medical reasons or 
maybe they, you know, they had to take a
medical leave, or a conduct dismissal or
any number of
factors that would lead them to separate
from the university early.
So what we did, is we heard from our
clients and recognized that this was
a need for them, and so we developed a
mechanism
in the software to be able to take all
students in a report
and cancel them on a certain date, and
prorate them
to that date, and issue that refund to
their student account. So
instead of having to do it manually
one-on-one, you could run that proverbial
1,200 person report
and apply a consistent cancellation to
them
in a matter of minutes. So it
it was really fascinating to kind of
hear, you know, we had one client who
kind of gave us feedback that it, you
know, they did
a multi-million dollar refund of
students
in 10 minutes. And
it was like, you just had to wrap
your mind around
that volume. And
you know, something that we never
would have imagined to occur, but
certainly was was necessary. Yeah I can't
imagine, I mean, 
if they would have had to do that one-by-
one manually, but again it's some of
those, and I think,
you know, probably a lot of processes now,
schools are paying attention a bit more
to - is what do they
do more of a one-on-one that they may
need to do in mass in the future? Because
you just never know.
Well you mentioned working with local
hotels. Is there something that schools
should be thinking about to
help make these decisions, and how do
they use your solution to really
designate these certain spaces
if they do need to do some quarantine. et
cetera, you talked about?
Well that's one of the one of the neat
things about our products
is that the institution does have the
flexibility
to incorporate any spaces, whether
they're temporary spaces such as a hotel,
or permanent fixtures on campus, like the
residential facilities, or even
any space on campus for that matter. They
can go ahead and insert those spaces
into the system for the purposes of just
being able to track that spacE, all the
amenities that are in that space, and
everything that is essentially tied into
that space. We like to think we're in the
space management business, really.
So that's kind of one of the neat
things that our software can do, is that
it does allow them to, if they do
need to
incorporate additional, off-campus spaces,
whether it be a hotel,
or an apartment that they leased from a
provider, whatever the case might be,
is those spaces can be added very easily
into our system
based upon the term that it coincides
with.
So if they do need to expand to
incorporate those other spaces
in there, they can certainly do that. And
they can appropriately tag those spaces
as well,
whether it be, you know, like I said, it
could be a quarantine space, it could be
an overflow space,
and again once those spaces are in our
system,
the nice thing is that the data can then
be reflected in their analytics - their
reports that they run. So,
you know, I think you've probably
heard the statement before: good data in
means good business process output. So as
long as we're getting good
good data from the provider, we have the
ability to provide them
very detailed analytics on their data. Oh
that's great.
So are there schools that are doing this
now and kind of allocating these
different spaces for other purposes?
Yeah, we have a school in northern New
Jersey
that they were set up
back, you know, certainly at the height
in that area,
back in March and April where they were
going to utilize their residence halls
to house
FEMA personnel. And some of the surge
capacity that was entering into the
region
to help manage, kind of the
health care needs at the time. We have
heard from other clients that
are also making arrangements with
regional hotels in their area to
house students,
whether it be, you know, I'm in
in upstate New York right now, and
we have certain states that are on that
list of where if you come into this area
you have to quarantine for two weeks.
How many of our 
client's students are from
out of state? Very common and may fall
into one of those designations. And so
some of our clients are utilizing local
hotels for that two week quarantine
to be able to to satisfy that that
requirement, so we
would definitely have a variety of
schools who are utilizing that
that model. Okay, so some of that was over
the summer, but it sounds like that this
is really
potentially going to be ongoing from in
the fall and beyond.
Yeah I really do believe that I think,
you know, if the university chooses not
to bring students back
to an on-campus setting - meaning that
they go completely on online and virtual -
you know, obviously they have those
residence halls that are fixed costs on
their campus, so
they might use those for alternative
purposes as Michael kind of alluded to.
For FEMA housing, you know, or
anything
associated with, you know, the previous
surge, or hopefully
no future surges that we have to deal
with.
I think the neat thing about our
solution is that it does have the
flexibility
to be quickly changed to meet
whatever those, you know,
demands happen to be. So I think a lot of
them
are, you know, developing models of
occupancy,
you know, for the next two or three, you
know, business years, to be honest with
you. Just to,
you know, trying to determine, you know,
how much can we reasonably
generate in revenue off of spaces. And I
imagine they'll be using those
analytics to
make their, you know, budgetary decisions
moving forward.
So you talk about these different models
of occupancy and I've heard that from
several campuses, too, that there are lots
of models being talked about. Can you
expand
on maybe what you've heard and some of
those models that they're going to be
doing for bringing
students back on campus? Sure, so in
addition to
the de-densifying of the occupancy,
they are kind of addressing the
population
that comes in. Meaning that
some may be bringing their first year
students. That's pretty typical because
of the
developmental theories and the ability
to kind of integrate them into the
campus
community early and help get
them adjusted to what it means to be
part of their campus culture and the
campus life. 
So pretty much first year students are
are always in the mix, but they may
then adjust and say, okay juniors come
back,
or sophomores and juniors are remote, and
seniors come back. Because their
requirements for graduation may be more
specialized. So
I have seen where different populations
are being brought back
in order to not only
have different types of housing, but less
people
in housing when they are on campus.
Yhe other thing that is pretty common
are individuals have adjusted dates.
So regardless of who is coming back, and
regardless of what rooms they are going
into, they're coming back at different
times.
A lot of them are arriving earlier
in August and then ending around
Thanksgiving
with the belief that it's going to be
more likely that once
students travel home for the
Thanksgiving break and they
scatter across their respective
geographical areas,
they're going to have more of a
likelihood of bringing, potentially,
the virus back to campus. And so to help
mitigate that
send them home at Thanksgiving, keep them
home, and then do either a combination of
remote learning, or
do all of what needs to be done for the
semester learning
between August and Thanksgiving and end
the semester early. So
I think we've seen a lot of that
as kind of the "date" model, so to speak. So
there's the occupancy model, the
population model, and a date model.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So is
there anything in your system
that they have to do differently to help
with these different kinds of models?
Not really. Not differently, per se, but they
just need to make the the necessary
adjustments,
and we offer them a variety of
ways that that can happen.
The one thing we did do
is we developed- we used to have uh what
i shouldn't say used to
but- we had a
feature, a module, where individuals could
do
checkouts. Because that's typically when
we would have the most volume of
students,
you know, checking out at once, or
checking out in
in groups. With check-in it had been
a more regimented, students weren't
necessarily
allowed to select the time. They were
given a time and they would all show up,
you know, think of that
first year student move-in where you had
the
army of returning students who would
pick up your bags and
walk them up the stairs for you, right?
Well
that's not feasible right now
under these conditions. So
we did enhance our
process to allow students to select the
check-in time.
So they could go into our self-service
component, which is our web portal,
and the school had configured
set blocks, based upon the variety of
eligibility criteria,
and they could tap how many people could
sign up for that particular block. So
let's,
you know, 8 a.m to 10 a.m on a certain
date 50 people could sign up,
and 11 a.m to 1 p.m on that same date
the next 50. And once, you know,
that block was filled, then it was no
longer available.
So we did enhance that opportunity
for individuals to
select the time and I have to say that's
been extremely well-received
and popular. We rolled that out
probably
two and a half, three weeks ago, and
the
response has just been overwhelmingly
positive with our clients because it
offered them
one less thing they had to worry about.
They didn't have to manage a Google form,
they didn't have to
try and come up with something on the
fly, they would just
kind of modify an existing process
under these new parameters and and roll
it out, and
you know, it worked out well for them.
Yeah I think that's great. And again all
of this we're talking about, it's really,
you know, retooling of student life, and
retooling some of the
solutions that you already have in place.
So can you share from your experience
or some of your customers in terms of
how are they retooling from a physical
environment or even some of the the
changes they've made with their tools
they're using?
Yeah I think the the biggest thing that,
you know, we've seen amongst our clients
as it relates to this,
to getting the students back, is the
dependency on the technology of
scheduling them. And
as Michael kind of alluded to, 
they've been used to
for so long like these droves of people
just showing up on campus,
and you know, routing people to the
correct building, and then students would
come out and help them move
into their facilities. So I think
moving forward it's very much
going to be almost kind of like a
self-guided, you know,
tour as it relates to bringing students
back. And that
you know, you're going to have
people out there directing people but
the firsthand assistance
is, you know, you're not going to be able
to do that because of the the social
distancing
rules and whatnot. I think that,
you know, our folks, our clients, and just
the whole higher ed community
is, you know, they're in this business
because they love working with students.
But now you have to throw the,
you know, personal protective equipment
and,
you know, social distancing, and all of
those things on top of this process
which I think has made it, you know, kind
of it is a physical barrier, but
what we know about our clients, and what
we just know about the industry in
general
is that these people are there to serve
their students. And whether it's through
a sheet of plexiglas,
or whether it's from behind, you know, a
mask that they have to wear,
they're going to be there to help serve
you know their students.
And to make that experience for their
students
as tough as they can and what is
very, you know, in a very uncertain kind
of, you know,
environment, I guess you could say. Yeah
that's really key at the end of the day
they're still there to serve, they're
just maybe using technology a little bit
differently to do that. enhance that
experience.
Yeah well, so speaking of
technology, from Adirondack's perspective,
you know, what's really changed on your
roadmap or
the next year for 2021 or beyond, and
what's going to be the same or what's
going to be enhanced
a little bit there? Well I think for us
we've certainly recognized that the
mobile platform
and
being less tied to our computers and
being less tied to our offices
is certainly the realities of the world
right now.
Individuals are needing to do more
in either a remote location, whether that
be the home office,
or they may need to be
in a in a residence hall help kind of
managing
a particular situation on the fly.
Whether that be, you know,
again, check-in, contactless check-in or
or check out,
or whatnot. So we've really strove
over the last year or so to really
developing a solution
that clients can utilize from whatever
platform, whatever device,
they have handy right now.
We've rolled that out
about a year ago now to clients where
they can interact with the software,
whether it be on a
tablet, a phone, a desktop. The
functionality that's available to them,
whatever platform, is going to be
basically the same.
So that's been a very key piece and
we're
adjusting that to some of our other
software pieces as well.
Our parking management software, and our
conference host
that Jason you know alluded to, as well.
And then we've always kind of been
at the forefront, I think, of providing
a superior
experience to students through our
self-service portal.
And I think that is that refinement
is going to continue
where we offer them more and more
opportunities
to kind of manage their residential
process, or their residential experience
online from signing up for check-in time,
to
selecting a roommate, selecting their
room. We did this past year also -
very exciting - we created the
opportunity for them to have a visual
floor plan
so we could
kind of like you kind of offer you the
same experience as if you were
signing up for a room at hilton.com.
Where you can, you know, pick I want that
corner room with the window
and whatnot. So we've given them
that opportunity, so I think you'll see
that's where we're going is we just
recognize that everything is remote,
everything is is based on
being engaged with a variety of devices,
and so we
want to make sure that the experience is
consistent regardless of the device, and
regardless of where you are
at. Yeah I think that's key, and like
you said, not just from the
administrative side, so
you know talking about the dependency
and technology to help corral
students differently and then have them
sign up, but also from the student
experience side
that there's this whole different level
of engagement based upon
being remote and how we have to always
be on on that.
So what's the biggest change that you've
seen that you believe will be
transformational going forward?
Well I think at this point
technology is here to stay. So
if an institution - and I worked
at institutions like this that valued
the in-person,
you know, interaction with the student
through the, you know, the selection of
rooms. So,
you know, queuing up in a big auditorium,
looking at an overhead, you know there's
still a lot of
institutions out there that are doing - I
don't want to call it "old school" but
it's a very nostalgic way that, you
know, I went through and selected my room
back in the day.
And I think, nowadays, you know,
it's almost an expectation, it's almost
like,
what you're doing is we're transforming
the student housing experience, kind of
like the way amazon
transitioned people from
shopping in person to shopping online.
No one nowadays really wants to go to
that big box store
and stand in line and do all of those
things. They want to be able to do
everything from
the comfort, and in some cases the
safety,
of their cell phone. So I think
technology is here to stay,
I think those institutions that have
kind of held off in doing that for
whatever reason, whether it be financial,
whether it be
just their their preference, I think
everybody's gonna have to
kind of get on board with
technology. Because I think it's
an expectation today in modern
commerce, and I think it's,
nowadays especially, it's an
expectation to be able to facilitate
your processes
in a very safe and secure environment
that doesn't put, you know, your
constituents at risk, or doesn't put your
staff members at risk,
and still provides that you know
valuable data
that you need. So that's the
big thing as I think adoption rates of
technology are going to go through the
roof.
Absolutely, I do too. Well thanks so much
for your insight today,
Jason and Michael! Oh it was a pleasure.
Thank you for having us.
Absolutely, well certainly housing has
certainly changed and will continue to
change
to accommodate this new contactless
campus.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of
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