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I'm David Henson and I serve as campus CIO for Bolden Networks for Higher Education. Welcome to Control Alt Lead. There's a fundamental shift in the community college sector that most people are still misreading. We're seeing institutions built for commuters, essentially parking lot campuses, adding beds at a rate faster than many anticipated. The American association of Community Colleges AACC, analyzed IPEDS data and found that 26.6% of public community colleges had college operated on campus housing in 2022, up from 22.8% in 2010. This represents 48 additional community colleges adding housing since 2010, and 38 states now have at least one community college with on campus housing. It isn't a trend for the sake of it, it's a survival move. The reality is harsher. When you add residential capacity, you aren't just building a dorm, you're fundamentally changing the institution's DNA. That change hits the IT infrastructure first, and usually hardest. Traditional community college networks are designed for a cyclical load. Students show up, hit the WI fi in the library or the classroom, and then they leave. The demand is predictable. Residential life, however, upends that paradigm. When students live on campus, connectivity is oxygen. It's constant. Usage doesn't taper off at 4pm it spikes when the sun goes down. We're talking about a massive sustained load across five or six devices per student, streaming, gaming, and 2am Zoom calls. A classroom is an easy engineering problem. A residence hall, however, is a high density battlefield. If you treat residential WI fi as an extension of your academic network, you'll fail. The drivers aren't mysterious. First, there's the enrollment war. Community colleges are now competing with regional four year schools, and if students can't offer a place to live, they lose the student. Second, there's the basic needs crisis. For many students, home isn't a stable place to study. Housing on campus isn't a luxury. It's often the only way they stay in the program. Finally, there's the regional vacuum. As smaller private colleges continue to shutter, community colleges are stepping in to fill the void, taking on a broader residential role that they could never have anticipated 20 years ago. Students don't distinguish between academic and residential networks. To them, it's just the Internet. If they can't get into their portal from their room, they aren't just inconvenienced, they're failing their course. When connectivity fails in a classroom, a professor works around it. When it fails in a residence hall, it's a 247 support nightmare. We have to stop treating residential tech like it's just an amenity, when in reality it's foundational academic infrastructure. The problem is, most institutions plan the building, the financing and the furniture first. They treat the network as only an afterthought, something to be layered in right before the ribbon cutting. That's a recipe for a help desk meltdown on day one. There are, however, schools leading the way and preemptively making moves to provide seamless connectivity experiences their students demand. For example, the Alabama Community College System has put a framework in place under a joint purchase agreement to support consistent, high quality deployments across the state, facilitating access to high density 24. 7 support and reliable coverage. Coastal Alabama Community College, part of the Alabama system, recognized years ago that they couldn't manage this in house. Being early adopters, they partnered with Bolden Networks almost 10 years ago and moved to a managed residential network model, ensuring their halls in Baymannette and Bruton stayed ahead of the bandwidth curve. Marion Military Institute and Richard Bland, who've been in the residential game for years, know that a network isn't an add on, it's the price of admission. They're also covered under the Alabama System joint purchase agreement. Lake Tahoe Community College successfully opened its first ever on campus housing this past fall. By baking the infrastructure into the blueprints from the start, they've turned a mountaintown housing crisis into a competitive advantage. California is one of the few states that publishes a formal annual housing progress report. As of 2024, there were 16 California community colleges operating on campus housing. These projects house just under 4,000 students. California's system is often cited nationally as a model for community college housing expansion tied to affordability and retention. Community colleges aren't sitting on massive endowments. They can't always write a check for a multi million dollar capex refresh every three years. That's why as a service, models are winning. Spreading the cost over time, including the design, monitoring and lifecycle management, makes these projects viable. It offloads the burden from a tech team that's already stretched thin and doesn't require them to troubleshoot a gaming console at 11pm but even with the money in place, you have to actually buy the stuff. Procurement is where good ideas go to die. That's why we're seeing a shift toward cooperative purchasing frameworks. The Alabama Community College system did precisely that with their joint purchase agreement or jpa. By using a pre vetted competitively bid framework, their colleges get preferred pricing and a faster path from planning to deployment. If you aren't leveraging those kinds of frameworks. You're only slowing yourself down. So let me leave you with this. If you're going to be in the housing business, you're really in the always on business. The network is the experience. If it works, it's invisible. And if it doesn't, well, then nothing else you do in those buildings matter. Thanks for listening. I'll see you soon. This week's episode uses an AI voice clone trained upon hours of my natural speaking voice. While the voice you hear today is cloned, the words, thoughts and ideas here are 100% my own.