786: How to Create Intergenerational Campus Housing - with Les Strech, Managing Principal, Varcity

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to Ed Up on the Ed Up Experience podcast where we make education your business. I'm your guest host for this episode, Bill Pepicello. I'm the host of my own podcast, Ed Up Insights and author of the book, Leadership on the Field of Play that's available on Amazon. And today I'm filling in for Dr. Joe Saluscio, who's the usual host here. Occasionally, I get to be the substitute teacher when Joe is otherwise occupied. So today, I have with me a special guest host, Dr. Tony Cruz, who's president at Miami Dade College, Kendall Campus. Tony, welcome.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: Thank you, Bill. Appreciate it. Great to be here.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Glad to have you here. And our special guest is Les Strech, who's the Managing Principal at McNair Interest, and who is the head of McNair Living, which we'll talk about today. Les, welcome to the show.

Les Strech: Appreciate it, Bill. Thank you for that. I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: OK. Well, to start, this is an interesting episode because Les has some interesting ties to higher education. And so we'll start, Les, by asking you to tell us a little bit about McNair Interests and McNair Living, what you do and how you do it.

Les Strech: Yeah, you bet. I think the connection point was Varsity. In short, we're building retail over residential environments on university campuses in partnership and full affiliation with power five universities across the country. And I think the easiest way to start is I would call myself a recovering senior living developer. There are recovering attorneys that realize they need to stop and make a change of course. And for the last decade plus I've had the opportunity to create environments for aging throughout the Southeast and mid-Atlantic. And I realized as I looked that one of the biggest things that was missing in the environments we're building is it's largely we were warehousing older adults in America, like we warehouse our self-storage things we don't need anymore, meaning they're moving slower, so we're going to out of convenience put them on the edge of town. Honestly, Bill, I realized we need to do things differently.

And again, we've done some incredible things across the country and that's kind of an industry progression within senior living. It started out as nursing homes and it kind of moved a very clinical environment into what you see today, which is a lot more residential, but there's still that separation, meaning by age and ability on the edge of town. And so I was approached because of some success that I'd had developing senior living environments across the eastern United States by a family office. And really my heart cry was to find missionally aligned capital. These are pretty expansive, you know, four, five, six, 10, 15 acre developments. And so there's a lot of capital that comes behind them to get them stood up. And a family that was wanting to do more good, the McNair family out of Houston, and they stood up a Houston NFL franchise when they saw that that was lacking 20 years ago and have had success doing that. And there was a desire to do more good with the money that they'd made.

And so the way that they've run that McNair interest is kind of focused on transformational investments, but life science, real estate is a core focus. And so they approached to say, if you had the opportunity to do something within building environments for aging, we would love to back you. And so a couple of years ago, we stood up McNair Living within a wholly owned subsidiary of McNair Interest. And our focus has been these changing American trends. And then I'll get to Varsity. You see the kind of that age of 65, 75, 85, these boomers that are aging, you're seeing it within the American dynamic.

They've changed everything they touched. They made it okay for women to leave the home and go work and build careers. It was okay to not work at the same job for 30 years. You can actually make a shift in your career if you don't like it, you didn't have to stay there. And also there's this really unique movement happening across the country with lifelong learning. And that was really the key that started about what's happening with this lifelong learning across America, meaning 40 and 50 and 60 years old, that it's a push to start advancing, that you don't fade away as you age.

So that led to some unique conversations over the last several years. And when really the birth of Varsity about what's happening on university campuses and speaking to you, Bill and you, Tony, you can speak infinitely better than I can about what's on the changing dynamic. But from the outside, looking in, a couple of things that we picked up was there was a significant push for diversity, equity and inclusion movements. And as we started conversing with some of these larger higher education institutions, we would say, what impacts have you had or what initiatives do you have going on in the DEI front? And they would say, well, we're doing this for racism and sexism. And then we would say, what about ageism? As you look on campus, how do you create age diversity on campus? And they would start and really insightful conversations about the desire to have a changing student over the years and decades to come as it's becoming more appropriate for age to diversify within the classroom and then also eventually residentially on campus.

So kind of those four five things that we noticed from the outside, one was an awareness around creating age diversity. There's this enrollment cliff that was a lot of discussion where in 2025-26 there's a lower number of potential college students because there was a reduction in births in the United States. And universities are pushing for alumni engagement, meaning the more that the affection that they felt towards their university, they were able to get closer to the university. It led towards higher giftings and endowments, which the university desires. But the really interesting thing was this experiential learning movement on campuses as we were having conversations with universities about what it looked like to expand the living user group on campus, the opportunity for partnerships and affiliations with the different colleges, if we were to come build an environment for aging, for alumni to come back and reconnect with their university.

And so then the last point was constantly brought up. There was monetizing unused land, which we could do. And so that was really the birth point of Varsity. Our inaugural project would be up on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette University, which will be Varsity at Purdue. And then there's the subsequent groupings of things that are coming behind that. So those American trends that we noticed about boomers and aging and really a study of these blue zones that are areas of the world where people are consistently living past 100. All of the confluence of those different times to study and a backing of a missionally aligned capital partner was the birth of this Varsity concept.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Wow. Well, first of all, on behalf of the Boomers, you're welcome for us changing. Yeah. They're not going to put up with what they were dealt, that's for sure. They want to continue to push the needle. And on behalf of all of us who are 65, 75, 85, somewhere in there, I'm not going to tell you exactly where I am. Thank you. I mean, the recognition of the convergence of trends is really interesting, especially from my perspective. First of all, because it's an academic thing. I mean, you can point to all sorts of reports and studies that talk about all these convergences, but you actually did something about it, which is commendable, certainly in the McNair family.

And I don't know if you're aware, but here in Tempe, Arizona, we have a senior living establishment called Mirabella.

Les Strech: Very familiar with it, yeah.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Yeah, I mean, it's on the ASU campus. And Tony, I don't know if you know about that, ASU is very forward thinking and they had some land and they had an interest in the DEI and went in on that project and it's a very nice development. I get mail from them all the time saying, don't you want to come here? You're old. But I'm not moving. It's interesting.

Les Strech: It was interesting about that development, Bill. I don't know if you've seen in the news, there's been a couple of Wall Street Journal articles about the development and it was a significant conflict. There's a long-standing student beloved dance club, techno dance club where the club beats start banging around midnight or 1 AM and we're talking a deep bass. And so what ended up happening is as residents started moving in, surprisingly, they weren't very excited about 1 AM club beats thumping their windows and shaking. And so the benefit of having a missionally aligned capital is it allowed us the time to kind of look at the landscape over the last 30 years of any environment for aging that had an affiliation with a college and to say what has gone well and what has not gone well. And one of those things is on campus is crucial programmatic tie-ins between the living environment and the university, but proximity to all the other neighbors that may not be great neighbors. And again, if you're the students, you're thinking this is our favorite place to go. And so I think that's ongoing issues, but the heart, it was troubling from the outside. It made us sad because the students got very frustrated with the residents because they're saying turn the music down and the residents are frustrated with the students. And that's the heart of Varsity is that all ages, all abilities are able to live and learn together. So you've got to be thoughtful on where you develop on campus. Very, very thoughtful.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's, I was aware of that, that controversy and it's for your benefit, Tony, it's the, the development is like right across the street from the campus. So it's not pushed off to the edge anywhere. It's integrated. Before I throw it over to you, Tony, could you say just a word Les about what you might know about how we're incorporating lifelong learning into this kind of a relationship in some of your institutions?

Les Strech: Yeah, you bet. That's the exciting thing is, you know, the idea. I just had my birthday yesterday at 45 years old, would say that I would like to crescendo through the rest of my life. And so I'm definitely old, very, very old when I teach on university campuses, they're asking me if I need to bring a walker, because I'm so old. But I've spent my career around older adults. And if you create moments, and that's what's beautiful about real estate, to allow community, you can't force friendship and you can't force relationship, but you can force the real estate, the instances for it through proximity for relationships to blossom. So if older adults and alumni were on the edge of town, there's no way they would ever interact with students. And so these initiatives that popped up all over the country of Osher Lifelong Learning is one of the top lifelong learning institutes. And oftentimes when we meet with universities, they already have those up and running. There's a Big 10 university that has a top 10 OSHER that we've been in discussions with and moving before the Board of Regents for approval right now. But the process is that they would move that OSHER learning, we build space for it to move inside so they have class space that they're operating out of. And the goal is to serve different demographics, not just locals, it's locals and alum that are moving back to campus. And then also put on intergenerational learning events for students to come and potentially use alumni as mentors. And so there's this cross lifelong learning Institute where it's lifelong learning can often become, that's where old people go take classes. And so our heart is to advance the movement of lifelong learning into more intergenerational learning. We believe that's kind of the next step over the next decade. Branding always matters in business and it definitely always matters on campuses. So yeah, most of our conversations is that the universities are desiring for that to move, to have dedicated purpose-built space for their lifelong learning initiatives within our development.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Well, first, let me say happy birthday.

Les Strech: Thanks.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: For the record, my kids are older than you, so that'll give you...

Les Strech: That's great. Well, that makes me feel great and young. I don't know about my joints, thanks.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Now, Tony, I'm going to throw this to you because you live someplace where there's lots of old people. At least that's what they say.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: So it's a perception. Florida, Florida, I mean, Florida, would say in general, yes, has a lot of seniors, but older people. But Miami is a little bit different. I mean, there is obviously a segment of population that's... You know, I have a question for Les. Is that, you know, so these are... are they public-private partnerships for the most part? Is that what you're doing? Most of you said Purdue...

Les Strech: Yeah, they take a couple of different forms. So, yes, public-private partnerships on some fronts mean we're coming on the private side with the university on the public. Oftentimes, universities don't have the ability to sell land. And so we work through a long-term land lease.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: That's exactly right. All right. That makes sense because I think that's, you know, as time has gone down here with, especially with public universities, you know, funding, I mean, nationally has not been where it was years ago. And so we're always looking for opportunities to enter these into these types of partnerships with private firms that are looking to do different things. Right. In this case, you're looking at building, you know, housing and living areas and common areas, things like that, and provide these opportunities for senior citizens. What's... you mentioned Purdue? Are you looking mostly working with institutions that are in less populated areas or more, or are you also looking at more like metropolitan or urban areas?

Les Strech: Yeah, we, over the last couple of years have put an algorithm together that kind of ranks on a variety of things. If you look at, we will use Purdue as an example, West Lafayette's not necessarily a mega primary market. However, Purdue has almost 600,000 living alumni and is constantly thought as a forefront of a learning institution in the United States. And so as you look at all of these different connection points, one of the things is we had the chance to sit and think and audit and what's been successful in these in the past. One of the key connection points was a traditional environment for aging that's built. Residents are moving from within kind of a 15 mile drive radius. Typically inside of these environments that are built in connection with the university, 43% of the residents come from outside of 50 miles. And you kind of narrow down to, they either have a strong affection for their university as an alum, they have a strong affection for the university because they are a friend of the university. And it's been interesting talking to university presidents and chancellors, Board of Regents, that they're saying some of our largest contributors, both financially and from an engagement perspective are people who never had the opportunity to go to the university. But over time, whether it's through the reputation, they have really strong affection towards the university. So the beautiful thing about Varsity, it allows them to actually have a residential and a learning connection later in life. Rather, they didn't have the opportunity, couldn't afford it, whatever the reason might be early in their life. And now this offers a second opportunity to come back and it feels that those are all sticking points. So back to your point, which markets are we targeting? It's really ones that have a strong connection locally, primary markets that they may already be built in. Then it's a variety of factors, I would say, rather than kind of listing them all out, but it works well within our algorithm.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: I mean, I think that... You brought up a great point, I think multiple times about that engagement they have with the university. And we've seen it even here and other institutions where I've worked that really the people that give the most a lot of times are people that weren't even, they're not even alumni. There are people that see, you know, there's... they formed over time have formed some type of connection to the institution. And now if you're using that...

Les Strech: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen that.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: I've seen that. I've seen that some of the biggest donors to the college here are people who are not... or people who have, they're in the community, you know, they're people that are well invested in the community, very, you know, very successful business owners and entrepreneurs. But over time they've seen, hey, you know what, I'm really connected to this institution based on my connection to the community. They somehow get more involved with the college and then end up, you know, giving very large gifts. And so, it doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen. And I can see where if you have this connection, you're building, you know, living right next to the university and those individuals are participating in cultural and, you know, cultural events on campus, learn other, like you said, lifelong learning opportunities that, that will, I think will definitely help those universities in their, in their fundraising campaigns.

Les Strech: Are you kidding me? No, I'm... Yeah, it's interesting when we talk about this, when we meet with a university for the first few times and they say, we walk us through your process and how you've seen it be most effective. One of the look back periods over the last 30 years, there's been about 70 of these and the industry kind of referenced them as university-based retirement communities. So there's been about 70 of various levels of closeness. University of Texas in Austin is Longhorn Village is about 20 miles from campus. Oak Hammock is University of Florida, just several miles off of campus. And so we spent time looking at what were the key things that caused long-term success. And we would view long-term success as consistently full, some sort of programmatic connection to the university. And within the kind of real estate or development industry or housing aging environments. Those phrases were UBRC, which is university-based retirement community, ULRC, which is university-linked retirement community, and then UARC, university-affiliated retirement community. And if you were to Google any of those terms, you'll see all kinds of level of either loose or close affiliation with the school. And I think really, if we were just to summarize, could you tell me what those were? It's basically people, and I'll make an overarching statement.

No one that I know in the history of mankind has written down a life goal to say, one day I want to move into senior living. It's where you go because you have to. It's where you go because you have to, not because you want to. And so my reflection when I say a recovering senior living developer is what is the core reasons that people don't want to move into these places? And at the end of the day, it reminds them of the end of their life. And so to be able to pull back and reflect to say, how do we build environments that are appropriate for all age through the end of your life, but are actively allowing for humans to crescendo? How do we create that?

And so these UBRC, ULRC, what was interesting was they basically picked up a traditional senior living environment, which no one would necessarily want to live in unless they had to, and they moved it next to campus. So they created proximity. And so basically over the last call it 10 to 30 years, the ones that had been built are better than everything else that was available, if that makes sense. What we've said at the time, we outlined what we've in the process of kind of trademarking a standard that we would share with others of what we're calling them collegiate intergenerational centers of excellence, CIS, collegiate intergenerational centers of excellence. And it kind of outlines 10 of the standards that we would say looking back at what's been successful, how do we make these new collegiate environments for alumni to come back, knowing that Boomers have a different expectation, how do we create an environment they would want to move to, not have to move to, right?

And so one of those is it's gotta be on campus. And so we're going before the Board of Regents over the next eight weeks with a large SEC school that's got a nationwide reputation, a Big 10 school that's got a real strong long-standing nationwide reputation. And part of that is they said, we want you to be on campus for the alumni and friends of the university to be able to move back. And then we walk through a formal affiliation where the brand is on the building. It shows to the public that we are jointly tied at the hip. And then under that affiliation, we work through individual colleges within the university to create affiliations of things that we commit to do with the School of Health and Human Services, to the things that we commit to do with the School of Architecture and Design.

And as a quick snapshot of that, the very first initiative we did, which made my heart sing, was we're in the process of designing the building. It's a 14 and a half acre campus on the west side of Purdue. And as we were going through the design, the School of Interior Design, they had capstone project for their students. These are seniors, class of 2024. And so we said, hey, who can we partner with now? Well, we can't come back after it's opening and redesign the building. And so one of the professors there, the leads, the interior design program named Janelle Abini reached out and she said, I would love for our students to have an experiential learning event to design your community alongside your very seasoned internationally known architects. And so we had a series of, as they were designing it throughout their senior semester, we were designing it with our architects and we would show up with our architects and comment and gently critique about what worked. And the beautiful thing is they're able to say, hey, let us show you what we're actually doing. So it really, it's the tip of the iceberg for that experiential learning component.

When you think about school of pharmacy, school of kinesiology, school of occupational therapy, speech therapy, business and marketing students... Purdue has one of the top hospitality schools, White Lodging, Dr. Kirtwin King. She is incredible and made, which is the Marriott families donated a great deal of money to stand up an incredible hospitality. But think about the students leading the concierge experience, having real experiential learning. That's just the tip of the iceberg. And so going back to what I said about UBRC, ULRC, UARC, great things for the last 30 years. We wanted to look and say, how do we make these better for the decades to come? And that's what we believe is these standards called CIE that I kind of walked through. There's 10 of those.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Wow. Well, let me give you the senior perspective on all this again, and especially a senior perspective from... Tell us, Bill, we want to know.

Les Strech: That's right.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: You know, as I am now, someday you will be. But this is incredibly well thought out. I mean, I'm just, I'm blown away by what you're saying here, because the, for me, the essence of this is that you create environments with someone in mind. And in particular, you're talking about the boomers, mostly now, whereas in a lot of real estate and in a lot of similar kinds of situations to yours, you just throw up a building and say, okay, if you want to live here, come on in. And I think that is really the key difference in what you're describing.

Les Strech: Well said.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: And let me shift a little bit because then I have something that I want to talk to both of you about. You know, clearly, if you look internal to what you're doing, you're having a social impact. And the social impact is not just on the residents of the places you're building, but also on the students. But if we take that externally, I mean, you've got an education community. How do you take that out to the broader community? What's your plan for community impact?

Les Strech: Yeah, that's great. I don't know if you've seen the recent Netflix series about these blue zones, Dan Buettner, and these are places in America where, I'm sorry, places in the world, that Dan went kind of on a lifelong journey. I got exposed to that book about seven, eight, nine years ago, and it was remarkable. My wife and I had an autoimmune disease that I was on medications for for a long time, and through food and movement have been able to get to zero medications now. So it was already a heart cry for me that there's different ways than just through medication to solve. And part of it is you have to get out of the American ecosystem of medicine, not that there's a knock on the American ecosystem of medicine, but for many, many years in Asia and you kind of look around the world, there's been impactful types of medicine that have been used. And sometimes it just has to do with getting up and moving.

And so the simple summary is I think the docu-series did a great job outlining these blue zones, which are areas where people are typically living past 100. So a core component in our development thesis on the real estate side is how do we take those power nine principles that are evidenced in these blue zones and start to incorporate them into the built environment and also into the programmatic educational ongoing environment. Those kind of became pillars within how do we approach nutrition? How do we approach sleep? How do we approach movement?

And so all of those things, for instance, we've built this interesting, I'm gonna call it a pedestrian spine through the 14 and a half acres. If you outline and start studying nudge theory, nudge theory says that it's terrible. If you look back at some of the votes that have been done in the past and it's in society. It's nudging you to want to make a decision that whoever is asking for the decision would deem that it's better for you. And so there's been votes that have been shamed, meaning the box for yes and the box for no. The yes was bigger than the box for no. So the environment's pushing you to nudge. So through nudge theory, we've outlined our residents are more inclined to walk because it's faster to get there than to get in a car or a golf cart. And so we're using low powered vehicles. You were going back to your sustainability question. Low powered vehicles to allow our residents to move around campus, but it's easier and faster to do it through walking, which is how we're developing using this nudge theory. Out their back door, back to a main building, back to campus, creating simple pedestrian spines to walk.

Went on a couple of different points there from blue zones to programmatic to nudge theory. So happy to follow whichever direction you want to take on one of those.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: I'm going to throw it over to Tony because, you know, as someone who's, you know, up to your eyeballs and community based education, must have some perspectives and questions on this.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: I mean, I think it's... first of all, unless you're passionate around this is extraordinary.

Les Strech: Thank you for saying that. I've been accused of a lot of things, a lot of things in life, but very few times I've been accused of not having passion. There's a lot of passion in this, which is really important.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: Yeah, I think that one of the things that we're constantly trying to do is reach the community, reach and engage the community. This seems to be a great way to bring the community to the campus, right? And to engage them and to make them a bigger part of the greater community. It becomes very difficult. And sometimes like we're trying to do as much as we can to get out there because a lot of times people will drive by our campus and we're a relatively large campus in the middle of now it's still suburban, but Miami, but it's congested here. So people will drive by, we're on like 250 acres in the middle of, you know, we're residential area, but people drive by and kind of drive by and drive by not know exactly what's going on in there. A lot of times we try our best to get out there, but I think this is a great way to get people to not only those people that are living on the say on the campus, but I think that also turns into people having those conversations with people, other people in the community as they engage them, right? Those older individuals that are on the campus are now turning around and telling their friends that are somewhere else in the community about the great things that are happening on campus.

So I think it's going both ways. It's obviously bringing people closer, a whole group of individuals and bettering their lives. But also I think the connections that they make then, those informal connections that they're having with, or informal interactions and having friends and kind of talking about, talking up not only the community that you built, but also talking up, I think the university or the college and what they're doing. So I think that's a win-win all around for everyone.

I did see that Netflix special or whatever on the Blue Zones. It's interesting. We don't have a lot of Blue Zones in this country because it seems like...

Les Strech: It's Loma Linda, California is the one that was documented.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: Right? One Blue Zone. So, you know, there's definitely opportunities to build more communities that have that intentionality. And I think that this, what you're talking about, definitely does that.

Have you, so yeah, I just like to see how this could work. You know, I'm just interested in seeing, and I know that you said that you have a way of figuring out where it would work the best, even in an area like where we are in Miami, which is pretty congested, pretty, you know, there's a lot of traffic, there's a lot of stuff going on. People are trying to kind of get away from that, but they can't because they have, you know, a lot of them want to live near their relatives, their children, you know, their grandchildren and things like that. But at the same time, I think, I don't know, it could work. It could work even in a densely populated area. It's just a whole different way of thinking about it where I've seen it. And for years I've seen this in other communities, like very large universities that have, like you said, that base that people follow, go back to, or whatever the case may be. But then there's institutions like ours here that already in that major metropolitan area, we have a lot of people who are reaching those 65 and older and want to stay close to family, but give them another opportunity to live in an environment that's much more suited for them, but yet keeps them very active and very engaged with the university or college community.

Les Strech: I think there's so much good about what you said, Tony. As you look at where to build and how that works, I think one of the things that I've admired as I've engaged in people that I've looked up to for a long time, is there's an endless curiosity about their life, meaning they may have all the wild success in the marketplace or maybe even personally, but there's this endless curiosity. And so we've adopted that same endless curiosity in a key component. One, Florida State and Florida, if we were to use them as an example, or Michigan and Ohio State probably don't have the same affection towards things. There's bitter lifelong documented rivalries, right? And so for us to come in and say, when we go to a university, this is what we do. That would be suicide. Because as soon as they heard that their, you know, bitter rival for a century is doing it, they'd say, we don't want it even if it's good for us, right? Because those emotions that we love to connect with end up being, it's bad.

So what we always start our engagement with, once we execute an affiliation, and identify land and we kicked off the relationship, we start by investing tens of thousands of dollars in focus groups. So this was a crucial component. So those focus groups, if you would have used the word senior living, which we already identified, no one in the history of mankind ever set a life goal to move to one of those places. If we're built, we call these intergenerational living environments. So if we were gonna build that, we need to go listen to the consumer base. The consumer base for senior living development is the older adult that is in need of clinical or physical help of some sort. Our user base of our varsity developments is alumni, the local community, professors and faculty and students.

So we hold separate focus groups and we engage a group that does this focus groups for Red Bull, Facebook. I mean, it's their large national focus group, which was interesting, many of those places shut down during COVID, because no one wanted to do focus groups. But we've engaged one of the top nationally, and the feedback is tremendous. Students consistently, there's themes that start to come out, and the students, as we've for these focus groups to be done, they'd say, we want natural light. We want strong Wi-Fi. We want limitations of ambient noise, but we want pretty spaces. And these are thematic things that a student, well, if you think about it, they're studying in a library.

So as we start building, what we build really matters. And so knowing that it's on campus, but it's a residential over retail environment. So our entire ground floor feels like a progressive upscale class A condo or multifamily development that the students now are, building what they said, if you build this, we'll come there. I still remember one recent focus group, students were saying, if I go to Five Guys down the street, it's $15 to eat there. I can't afford that. If I go to Chipotle, it's $16 if I want a burrito with guacamole and a Coke. If you have chef, you know, nice food at a decent price, we'd be over there all the time. So at Purdue, we're putting in a food court because we talked with a couple of food trucks where they can come up and park and we're offsetting some of the costs that's there to allow to have more affordable price and then students get a discount inside.

So what is that doing? It's engaging with our larger vision, which is how do we create opportunities for people that wouldn't have been in community otherwise start to form community. And like the rest of life, it happens around food. And so these end groups, so we listen to the locals through these focus groups about what amenities are built and then we build that into our base area of our building. And so that's a couple of points, the way we feel confident that the larger community starts being involved and desiring to go to our community is it's known as a hub of things that were absent, craft coffee shop, artisan pizza grill, kind of all of those things, gelato shop that has been asked for. And those are easy because they're already in our program for our residents.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Wow. You know, I've got to say, I wondered what the heck this conversation was going to be like. And I've got to tell you, you two surprised the heck out of me. And Tony, that goes for you as well as Les. I appreciate that. I've learned so much from this, but unfortunately, we're going to have to wrap it up. And I have to tell you, this is one of the quickest passing episodes that I've ever hosted. But we always ended up, Les, with asking two questions of our guests. The first is, is there anything we didn't ask you that you want to say about what you do? And the second is, how do you see your impact on the future of higher education?

Les Strech: Anything that we cover, I would go macro in my response to that and say, I think as a society, we've moved. So if I talked about society and then contrasted that with an environment's raising, aging, there's been a movement in society over the last, you know, hundreds of years from, we'll call it exclusion to segregation to this third point of integration to this fourth phase of full inclusion, right? So exclusion and segregation. So exclusion is if you come over here, I'll kill you with my club. I'll beat you to death. And so then segregation said we can live in the same city, but we're not gonna cross this line or drink from the same water fountain. And then integration is you can come to my school, but you gotta ride a different bus than me. And you got to go to the same building, but you got to go to that different class. And you're seeing across society is they're moving towards creating all people, all ages, all ability, being able to live in community together. And really senior living is built out of this more segregated environment. We said, how do we construct something that's moved like society towards a more inclusive environment, all ages, all abilities. And we believe that we're onto something. And I don't believe, I think someone will come up with something even better than this. Our end goal is not to be a landmark movement. It's really to spur thinking, to question core beliefs about why in Asia or Latin America when people get older is white hair respected and admired. And in America, it's really you're old and slow. We're gonna put you off to the side. And so I don't, hopefully in 40 years, my kids and other people that love me won't want to do that. We just fundamentally think that's not okay. And we wanted to do something about it.

So, and I don't remember your last question, you're spurring me with that.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: How do you see your role in the future of higher education? Where are we going?

Les Strech: Yeah, I think, yeah. I was sitting with a SEC president in his home just a couple of weeks ago and he was talking about the challenges that they're facing. NIL and there's so much changing, right? And the students move into virtual learning, kind of enrollment changes and there's just a large change that's happening across the university push. And so I think our role will get universities, faculty and administration to start considering that the student of the future is not the same as the student of the past. And where I've really enjoyed is, because of my background interacting with older adults across the country, I'm able to usher in to say, your user group may not be a student who's 18 looking to live off their parents. They actually may be an established former business person that's saying, I don't like my career. I've made my marks. I'd like to make a change. And they're coming, willing to pay to say, I'd like to educate myself in a field I've never been in. I think the dynamic, the conversation and the impact is to advance the conversation on a different user group of students going forward to the future.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Terrific. Well, on the way out, let me first thank my guest co-host for today, Dr. Tony Cruz, who's the president at Miami Dade College, the Kendall campus. Tony, thanks a lot.

Dr. Anthony Cruz: Thank you, Bill. It was a pleasure.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Thank you, Tony. Thank you. And a special thanks to Les Strech, who is the managing principal at McNair Interests and Overseas McNair Living. I think we learned a lot today, Les, so thank you very much.

Les Strech: Yeah, I appreciate you guys very much and appreciate what you're doing for higher education.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: So ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-upped.