This site in five sentences. Your campus probably has one building or one piece of land that could earn money without changing what your college is. We find it, match it to something your region needs, and identify who would pay to build it — usually a government program, an employer, or a development partner, not you. The first step is a free report built from public records. The second is a free two-week study of your specific campus. You can stop at any step, and if we find nothing worth doing, we’ll say so.
What’s free, and what you’re paying for when you pay.
Free, forever
The report on your region and campus, built from public records. The sample report. The two-week One-Pathway Scan, ending in one recommendation. Free because software and public data do that work, and because you shouldn’t pay to find out whether there’s anything here.
What costs money
The part no software can do. Helping you understand what the data means for your specific campus and turning it into a plan you can act on. Building relationships with the health system, the workforce board, the developer who would fund your project. Deep research into your bylaws, your delegation policy, and the specific grant programs that fit. Communication strategy for your board, your faculty, and your community. Writing the proposal a funder says yes to — and then executing alongside your team through the first signature and beyond. Strategy, relationships, and partnership, scoped and priced before you commit to a dollar.
The reason most transformation proposals go nowhere is not that boards disagree with them. It is that saying yes costs more than saying nothing. A single-pathway project is built the other way around.
Most boards have already delegated lease, license, and grant-application authority to the president or CFO — it’s in your signature policy. A single-pathway project is designed to fit inside that existing delegation, so that what eventually reaches your board isn’t a blank question but a working proposal with the risk already taken out. Boards get better decisions when the first version arrives de-risked. We’ll read your bylaws and delegation policy and tell you exactly which side of the line your project falls on.
Sale or lease of real property is not a substantive change under federal rules, and is not a reportable category for SACSCOC, HLC, or MSCHE. New England institutions accredited by NECHE do carry a filing on significant leases and asset dispositions. We will say so up front rather than let you find out later.
That is the one thing we will not ask you to touch. A substantial change to an institution’s mission requires accreditor approval, and reopening the mission statement starts a board fight on top of it. Every pathway on this site is designed to work with your mission exactly as written.
In every model below, somebody else funded the building — a developer, a state workforce grant, a federal rural facilities program, a health system, a community foundation, an employer. Your contribution is the site.
This is general information, not legal or financial advice. Decisions about debt, accreditation, and property belong with your counsel and advisors — we work alongside them, not in place of them.
Not turnaround stories. Not closure stories. Colleges that stayed colleges and found money somewhere other than tuition.
Cheyney University
Pennsylvania
Had close to 400,000 square feet of building space sitting unoccupied or underused, and opened it to private tenants. Eight companies are on campus now — agribusiness, cancer research, solar manufacturing, additive manufacturing — alongside stadium and auditorium rentals.
A $7.4M deficit became a $2.1M surplus. First balanced budget in eight years.
Purchase College, SUNY
New York
Ground-leased 40 acres to a life-plan senior living community, financed with public bonds. No college capital at risk at any point.
$2 million a year in rent, directed by statute to student scholarships and new faculty lines.
Warren Wilson College
North Carolina
Sold 191 of its 1,100 acres to a land conservancy — with a cooperative management agreement that keeps the college grazing the pasture and teaching in the forest.
$4.7 million, against a $5.5 million deficit. They sold the asset without losing the use of it.
Goucher College
Maryland
Ground-leased three acres out of 287 to a neighboring senior living operator for 127 independent-living apartments.
Zero construction capital from the college. Three acres is a proposal a president can carry into a room.
D'Youville University
New York
Built a health professions building in which a regional health system staffs and operates a community clinic, alongside student simulation space and workforce retraining.
The health system raised $5.07 million toward the project. It is the tenant and the operator.
Lackawanna College
Pennsylvania
A $10 million technology center in a former factory, funded by state money, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and a private energy company. Separately, employers pay tuition directly for their own staff.
The college built it without spending its own capital.
Dakota Wesleyan University
South Dakota
A regional health system funds nursing students’ junior and senior years in exchange for a three-year work commitment after graduation.
$20,000 per student, employer-funded. The health system asked for it.
Alvernia University
Pennsylvania
Bought and repurposed downtown buildings instead of expanding the campus — a community health center with a local provider, an incubator, a YMCA partnership, ground-floor retail.
$43 million invested, $18.5 million of it in secured redevelopment resources including state capital grants.
Some pathways make money. Some make students. Several do both. Employer-sponsored training seats become degree pipelines — at Dakota Wesleyan, a health system pays $20,000 per nursing student who commits to work there after graduation. A health-system partnership brings clinical placements that recruit for you. New revenue isn’t a rival to enrollment; done right, it’s a feeder — and it means your enrollment target stops being the only thing holding up the budget.
We don’t hand your school a binder and a bill. We make the calls, knock on the doors, find the money, and sit in the rooms until something gets signed.
A 25-year professor turned builder. AI tools deployed in multiple countries. The one on the phone.
An associate academic dean at a major research university. Sees the whole board: what a faculty will accept, what a president can carry, what a plan needs to survive a meeting.
A former superintendent who ran a $137M school system and oversaw 108 schools. Knows how to move a large, proud, worried institution.
A founder and builder who started his own company and built one of the largest academic programs on a college campus from scratch.
A Peace Corps veteran who delivered projects for global development firms in places where nothing is easy. Process, follow-through, and the calls that get returned.
More than a group of academic executives: a team that’s run the institutions, built the programs, and knows the people. The deal work — leases, bonds, land — happens with specialized higher-ed counsel and development partners we bring to your side of the table.
Almost everything written about small colleges is written about the ones already in trouble. This is for the ones still working — enrolling students, making payroll, doing it on a thinner margin every year — that would rather add a revenue line now than have the other conversation later.
A college with three good years left has options a college with three good months does not. It can negotiate a lease instead of accepting an offer, choose a partner instead of taking the only one, and move on its own calendar.
You do not need eight. You need one. Each is tagged by what it actually asks of you, because the right first move is almost always the one requiring the fewest signatures.
Unused classroom, lab, or office space to private tenants. Officer-level signature in most delegation policies.
Stadium, gym, auditorium, commercial kitchen, conference and summer use. Revenue from assets you already heat.
Child care, health clinic, county services, workforce center. Often the thing the region is most visibly short of.
Employers fund seats or full tuition for their own workforce. Apprenticeships and custom contracts.
A hospital operates clinical or training space on campus and brings its own capital and staffing.
Senior living, workforce housing, or dorm conversion. A developer builds it; you contribute the site.
Long-term lease of unused land. Larger and slower, and usually a scheduled board item.
Selling land you no longer use, sometimes while keeping the right to use it. Full board, every time.
New revenue from buildings and land buys time. But if the academic model stays the same, the clock is still ticking. The colleges that survive the next decade will be the ones that redesign how learning works — not just who pays for the buildings.
Individualized learning — the Hampshire model, scaled with AI
Hampshire College proved fifty years ago that student-designed curricula, competency-based assessment, and mentorship-driven learning produce extraordinary outcomes. What it couldn’t do was scale. AI changes that. An AI system can extract every skill from a syllabus, build a personalized learning map for each student, identify gaps in understanding, and coach through them — freeing faculty to do what they were trained to do: mentor, challenge, and inspire. We’ve built this technology. It’s called Transform Learning, and it’s being used by students on four continents right now.
Lower costs without cutting quality
The cost crisis in higher ed is an instructional delivery problem, not a staffing problem. When one professor lectures to 200 students and another grades 60 papers by hand, the model is expensive because it’s inefficient, not because faculty are overpaid. AI handles the repetitive work — skill assessment, gap identification, practice drills, progress tracking — while faculty focus on the high-value interactions that no machine can replace. The result: better learning outcomes at significantly lower cost per student. Not by replacing professors, but by giving them tools that multiply their impact.
Extend the audience — degrees are one product, not the only product
The 18-year-old seeking a bachelor’s degree is a shrinking market. The growing markets are everywhere else: working adults who need certifications and authenticated skills. Employers who need customized workforce training. Career changers who need six months, not four years. Retirees who want to learn for the joy of it. High school students earning early credit. Local startups that need research partnerships and talent pipelines. A campus that serves all of these audiences has six revenue streams instead of one — and when enrollment dips, the other five keep the lights on.
Intersect with the local economy — startups, research, small business
A college campus has labs, equipment, expertise, meeting space, and young talent. The businesses around it have problems to solve, products to test, workers to train, and money to spend. The intersection creates new revenue for the campus and new capacity for the region — incubators, applied research partnerships, shared facilities, apprenticeships, and consulting arrangements that generate income while giving students real-world experience. This isn’t theory. It’s happening at Alvernia, at Lackawanna, at Cheyney. The campuses that connect to their local economies don’t just survive — they become indispensable.
Buildings and curriculum are not separate problems. A campus that leases space to a health system but still teaches nursing the way it did in 1995 has bought time, not a future. A campus that redesigns its academic model but can’t pay the heating bill won’t survive long enough to prove it works. Campus Transformation works both sides — the buildings and the learning — because that’s what an actual transformation requires.
Free, confidential, and narrow on purpose.
Tell us which building or parcel is least used. That is the entire intake.
We spend two weeks on the public record — what your region is short of, what federal and state money already flows there, what your zoning permits, and who at your institution can sign what.
You get one recommendation. Not eight. One, with the funding program named and the approval path mapped.
No presentation to your board. No engagement letter. No obligation of any kind. One conversation and one document, and if the answer is that nothing here fits your campus, we will tell you that instead.
A serious proposal names its risks, so here are ours. A partner can walk — which is why we structure first commitments as leases and MOUs you can unwind, not conveyances you can’t. A tenant can underperform or default — which is why the lease, not a revenue projection, defines your downside, and why we never publish projected revenue for your campus. A town can resist — which is why community benefit leads every proposal we write, and why we check zoning before you spend anything. A grant can fall through — which is why we prefer programs with rolling deadlines and name a second funding path in every proposal. And the whole idea can simply be wrong for your campus — which is why the Scan is free, and why “nothing here is worth doing” is an answer we actually give.
The first conversation looks different depending on who is having it.
If the college in your community is struggling — or already gone — the campus is still your problem and still your opportunity. You don’t need the college’s permission to plan.
A campus reuse feasibility study is the fastest, cheapest first step a municipality can take: Ashland, Wisconsin commissioned one for $7,500 after Northland College closed. The Village of Cazenovia commissioned one for its closed college campus and then won a $10 million state revitalization award on the strength of it. Public buyers, public budgets, no confidentiality friction.
We conduct these studies — one campus, one report, the realistic uses ranked, the funding programs named. And if the college is still open, a town-initiated conversation is often the least threatening way for its board to start one.
Talk to us about your campus