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 Focus! Don't forget to subscribe so you can stay up-to-date on the business of higher education. For more information check us out at touchnet.com.