The University of Colorado at Denver’s student affairs office is becoming more like a concierge operation lately.
Recruiters are pitching downtown Denver – art museum exhibits, Rockies games, opera and ballet performances – as they brag about the Auraria campus tucked between Lower Downtown and Invesco Field at Mile High.
The push is part of a vision among university leaders to transform the campus from one mainly for commuters to one that attracts more students from the far reaches of Colorado and other states and countries.
“We’re just leveraging what’s already here,” CU-Denver provost Mark Heckler said.
Three privately run apartment complexes for Auraria students, including the new CU Real Estate Foundation-funded Campus Village, are open this fall. The high-rise apartments, with views of the mountains and within walking distance to LoDo pubs, made it easier for students who didn’t grow up in the area to move to the city, Heckler said.
Already, campus demographics are changing.
CU-Denver received applications this year from rural Colorado counties where students never had applied before. The average age of undergraduate students has dropped from 27 to 24 in the past 10 years on its way to 22, administrators predict.
The number of out-of-state freshmen grew from 44 last fall to 65 this fall, and the number of international freshmen tripled – from four last year to 13 this year.
CU-Denver shares the 40,000-student Auraria campus with Metropolitan State College and the Community College of Denver, but CU was the only school to require freshmen to live in Campus Village.
Metro State president Stephen Jordan did not consider making dorm living a requirement because Metro is still very much a commuter school – 97 percent of the student body lives in the seven-county metro area.
Campus Village – with bright blue walls and a center courtyard – is 75 percent full with 417 students from CU, 131 from Metro State and 23 from CCD.
Two-thirds of CU-Denver’s freshmen were exempt from the dorm requirement, either because they live with their parents, are married, have children or are older than 21.
Tiffany Middendorf, an 18- year-old Metro State student from McLeansboro, Ill., shares a suite with three other girls. She came because she’s a “city girl” who wanted to snowboard on weekends.
Chris Palen, a CU-Denver junior from Fort Collins, lived in an apartment in Capitol Hill his freshman year, got a “stomach- full of downtown life,” then moved to a “boring” place in Littleton last year. Now he’s at Campus Village, with posters of Beavis and Butt-Head and a fire-spitting dragon in his room.
“I’ve had more happen to me in the last month than happened to me in the last year,” said Palen, who spends some evenings soaking up the “energy and ambience” at 16th Street Mall or chatting with dorm dwellers from the Middle East and Asia.
He just has to get used to the screams coming from the Elitch Gardens roller coaster out his living room window.
The Inn at Auraria, a student- housing project that opened this fall, is about half full with more than 200 people. It opened through a corporation set up by the Auraria Foundation.
The third dorm building is The Regency, which opened last fall with 300 beds and added 400 more this fall. It is 80 percent full, a spokeswoman said.
CU-Denver leaders got serious about student housing a few years ago after a survey showing that only two of nation’s 32 major urban research universities did not have near-campus housing – University of Massachusetts-Boston and CU-Denver.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
