Utah Colleges Look for Room to Expand

The Salt Lake Tribune reports on the space crunch faced by a number of colleges in Utah, with a memorable anecdote a few paragraphs down:

At Snow College, a small but growing community college in Ephraim, space is so tight that students study in a room where cadavers are stored.

“For a school with a terrific reputation for pre-med and pre-engineering, this is embarrassing,” Snow President Scott Wyatt said.

The Tribune story mainly discusses a plan at Utah Valley University to acquire 100 acres once taken up by a World War II-era steel mill, two miles north of the campus. The property is now slated for redevelopment. If the $5-million purchase is completed, the cleaned-up land would provide space for intramural-sports fields and student-life facilities. The deal joins a trend of redevelopment projects among higher-education institutions.

The newspaper says Utah Valley has seen a growth of 6,000 students in the past three years and could have added 300 to 400 more this year just did not have the capacity. Enrollment, now around 26,000, is expected to exceed 40,000 by 2020.