When push comes to shove, colleges and universities aren’t all that different from one another. In the era of globalization accompanied by homogenization, it’s hard to not feel that undergraduate academic programs are largely the same wherever you end up.

Terrible professors abound, but so do great ones. Besides, the effectiveness of those lectures and office hours really rests on a student’s involvement with his or her education.

So those institutions have turned to campus life, especially dormitories, to help them break away from the pack. It helps that those buildings are more easily financed than academic properties since students are charged a semi-annual fee, essentially paying rent for their rooms.

“The student services and housing that become the next level of decision … after the academic programs,” said Christopher Hill, a principal and designer with Boston’s CBT Architects who works on dormitory projects. “When institutions build an academic building they usually get the money from a donor who then puts their name on it. [Schools] can’t do that with housing projects because nobody usually wants their names on a housing project. Most donors want to give money for something with a higher use, an academic pursuit. But for student housing, they can pay down the debt using student service and housing fees. You can’t do that with an academic building.”

And the residential halls being built today are far different than your father’s dorms, where dark rooms lined long hallways and a recreational area was stuck in dingy basements with an old couch and a ping pong table. Schools instead are charging architects with creating highly interactive spaces on all floors of a dorm where students are likely to study and socialize in groups.  

“Social areas are now on the common course of travel, near the elevators and on the way to [students] rooms to encourage more encounters,” Hill offered. “And there’s less damage because there are always people around. It’s the psychology of interactive space, and we’re designing to that psychology. If the space is used, administrators allow [dorms] to have that program. It costs more money to dedicate that space to social spaces instead of all just bedrooms,” so the space needs to be used to justify the extra cost.

And now, schools are taking even bigger steps to attract students to their campuses. Northampton’s Smith College has renovated old bathrooms into private, gender neutral bathrooms that anyone can use, male or female, and not worry about being judged. CBT’s Hill recently finished designing a dorm at Miami University of Ohio containing one gender neutral bathroom for every 30 students that accommodate transgender students who are male but feel they are female or vice versa. The bathrooms prevent transgender students from feeling singled out for their sexual orientation. How? By creating single-occupancy bathrooms with a private shower, toilet and sink that can be used by anyone in the dorm, male or female.

At Wentworth Institute of Technology, administrators have taken a different tack to attract some 305 students onto campus and out of market-rate rentals in Boston’s Mission Hill and Fenway neighborhoods with a planned 109,000-square-foot dormitory featuring apartment-style residences.

The school polled students to discover what would keep them on campus, and the students overwhelmingly answered that they wanted apartments, not traditional dorms, according to school officials. As a result, many of the apartment-dorm rooms have single rooms instead of shared. There are washers and dryers in the units, along with kitchens, a living room and granite countertops. According to school officials, they’ll cost 20 percent less than the neighborhoods’ market-rate housing.

“These are real apartments, it’s not your typical dormitory that we designed,” said Michael Coleman, a vice president with Beacon Architectural Assoc., the firm that designed the Wentworth dorm. “It’s definitely not where I lived when I went to college.”

Construction on Wentworth’s new dorm is scheduled to begin in February. The project will cost $43 million and the building will be 84 feet tall.

Email: jcronin@thewarrengroup.com