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Universities at Shady Grove to get new building

Friday, Nov. 25, 2005

Click here to enlarge this photo Photo credit Officials turned out to celebrate the start of construction on a third building at the Universities at Shady Grove. Back row, from left: Douglas M. Duncan, Montgomery County executive; William E. Kirwan, chancellor USM, and Steven J. O’Connor, chair, USG board of advisors. Front, from left: Stewart L. Edelstein, executive director, USG; Patricia Florestano, board of regents, USM; Nancy Kopp; Patrick J. Hogan, (D-Dist. 39); Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.; Gene Counihan, board of advisers.

The 192,000-square-foot, five-story 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.

‘‘It meets the needs in very real terms of a very real student body in Maryland today,” said Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R).

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

‘‘The most overused saying at these groundbreakings is, ‘Build it and they will come,’” said Sen. Patrick J. Hogan (D-Dist. 39) of Montgomery Village, a member of the center’s board of advisers. ‘‘The students are already here. They’ve been here. And they’ll keep coming.”

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.

‘‘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 an op-ed piece Nov. 16 in The Gazette. ‘‘USG will play a key role in helping our institutions meet this demand.”

*For more on the Universities at Shady Grove’s Building III go to www.shadygrove.umd.edu⁄about⁄SGIII⁄floor-plans-gallery.cfm. *For a copy of the joint task force report on capacity issues at Maryland colleges, go to www.montgomerycollege.edu⁄Departments⁄inplrsh⁄capacity_report.htm and click on ‘‘At Risk: Access to Higher Education.”

The demand comes from students like Foday Sackor, a junior from Boyds who attends the University of Maryland, College Park’s Robert H. Smith School of Business at the Shady Grove campus.

‘‘One of the things I’ve learned in the Robert H. Smith School of Business is an asset creates value,” Sackor told the audience at Tuesday’s groundbreaking. ‘‘The students of Shady Grove are the future leaders. We are the state of Maryland’s greatest asset.”

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.

‘‘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.

The institutions represented at Shady Grove are forging partnerships with businesses around the state, Edelstein said.

One partnership uses specialists at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital as clinical faculty for nursing classes offered at Shady Grove by the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Another is a transfer scholarship program funded by Chevy Chase Bank that is bringing University of Maryland, College Park undergraduate business students to Shady Grove.

The partnerships demonstrate 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.”

Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D), a member of the center’s board of advisers, talked about USG’s importance to the Interstate 270 technology corridor, dubbed ‘‘DNA Alley” because of the number of biotech firms along it. The I-270 corridor is the only technology center not centered around a major research university, making the programs offered at Shady Grove all the more important, he said.

The campus’ location in the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center, which also includes Johns Hopkins University, the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology and research firms such as Human Genome Sciences, puts it ‘‘right into the technology corridor, which really is the future of the state,” Duncan said.