Shady Grove campus getting new building

Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005

A third building at the Universities at Shady Grove will triple the number of students the Rockville campus serves and expand the state university system’s capacity to meet the growing demands for higher education.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) and County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) will join state education officials today in Rockville for the groundbreaking of the 192,000-square-foot, five-story building.

The new building will feature 29 classrooms, a library, two computer labs, 81 faculty offices and five conference rooms, as well as student lounges and a bookstore. When the $51.9 million building opens in fall 2007, the fast-growing regional center will be able to serve 6,000 students in programs offered by universities from around Maryland.

The expansion will help Maryland meet what state education officials are calling an unprecedented demand for higher education.

‘‘We project at least a 20 percent increase in our enrollment demand over this decade,” William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, wrote in Nov. 16 Gazette. ‘‘USG will play a key role in helping our institutions meet this demand.”

The 5-year-old Shady Grove center comprises seven institutions that grant more than 30 degrees: Bowie State University; Towson University; the University of Baltimore; and the University of Maryland at Baltimore, at College Park, at the Eastern Shore and University College.

The university system’s other regional center opened in Hagerstown in fall 2004. It serves about 400 students.

In 2003, a state task force estimated that Maryland’s public colleges were 2.6 million square feet short of the space they needed and that the need could rise to almost 3.2 million square feet by 2013.

To learn more *For more on the Universities at Shady Grove’s Building III go to their Web site. *For a copy of the joint task force report on capacity issues at Maryland colleges, click here and click on ‘‘At Risk: Access to Higher Education.”

‘‘If we’re successful in the K-12 sector, which is what everybody is focused on right now ... and more of those folks want to go on to college, we’re foolish if we don’t provide them with that capacity,” said Stewart L. Edelstein, executive director of USG.

The Rockville center is striving to increase its undergraduate offerings, which are available to transfer students in their junior and senior years.

Science and technology, business, teaching and nursing are the courses most in demand by students and by employers, Edelstein said.

To that end, USG has created partnerships with business.

Last month, for example, Chevy Chase Bank announced a $2 million donation to provide 25 scholarships for students transferring to the University of Maryland, College Park.

Two-thirds of the scholarship recipients each year will attend classes offered at Shady Grove by the university’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, which has no room to expand at College Park.

‘‘We allow the high-demand programs to grow,” Edelstein said.

The partnership, he said, demonstrates the center’s goal ‘‘to expand capacity in our public university system in a way that meets the needs in the region of students and the business community.”