How Sierra College will build a $98.3M dorm for students with help from a state housing grant

Even as a California budget battle brews over funding for affordable student housing, Sierra College broke ground at its Rocklin campus Tuesday on a $98.3 million dormitory that will house about 350 students at rents that are half the market rate.

Using current rental rates, that would mean most students would pay $450 a month to live in the dorm, said Sierra College President Willy Duncan, but several students won’t pay anything because of some generous donors.

“This is just a huge opportunity for Sierra College to really step up the way we serve our students and to ensure that any student ... in need of a place to live is going to be able to find it at Sierra College,” Duncan said, “and it’s going to be hugely affordable for them and really be a big part of that student’s success.”

Duncan said his team had looked at adding a dorm to the campus some time ago but gave up because it was cost-prohibitive. Now, he said, Sierra College will be able to build this new residence hall with a contribution of roughly $16 million.

The state of California will pay $82 million as part of an initiative to expand the amount of affordable housing available to students throughout the state. That initiative, however, is facing some headwinds as Gov. Gavin Newsom looks for places to make cutbacks in the face of a projected $22.5 billion budget shortfall.

Sierra College already has begun receiving funding to build its dormitory as part of this year’s budget, Duncan said, and Los Rios Community Colleges spokesman Gabe Ross said its colleges also have received funding they were promised for both an apartment complex near Cosumnes River College and grants to study future dorm construction at CRC and American River, Folsom Lake and Sacramento City colleges.

Duncan said he feels for other college leaders who face potential deferral of their dreams of adding dorm rooms or perhaps building one for the first time. Research has shown that hundreds of thousands of California college students are housing insecure: about 5% of undergraduates at the University of California, 10% at California State University and 20% at California Community Colleges.

In 2021-22, state leaders earmarked $2 billion in grants to build affordable student housing over three years. While Sierra College and other institutions have received funding this year, Newsom proposed delaying grants by one year the grants scheduled to be paid in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 fiscal years. Instead, the state would make a $650 million payment in 2024-25 and a $1.15 billion payment in 2025-26.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office has recommended that the Legislature fund only dorm projects for four-year universities, saying that universities have more experience with constructing campus housing and have met deadlines with project proposals.

Duncan said this recommendation unfairly penalizes community colleges for not having major donors or charging student fees to construct student housing in the past, and it ignores that community colleges serve the largest population of historically underserved students.

About 10 of 116 California community colleges have student dorms now, Duncan said, so in a very short time, leaders of California Community Colleges had to create a process to review potential projects and prioritize them. While it’s true that community colleges haven’t built a lot of dorms, Duncan said, community college leaders have plenty of experience with major construction projects.

Sierra College built its one and only dorm on the Rocklin campus back in the 1960s. Duncan didn’t know why the school had built campus housing. Typically, he said, colleges wanted to house athletes who moved long distances to play for a team or to accommodate students who hailed from far-flung regions of rural districts. There just wasn’t always enough housing for those students in the surrounding community, he said.

The new dorm at Sierra College is planned at the heart of the Rocklin campus to ensure that students can bike or walk to food services, classrooms and other campus destinations, Duncan said, minimizing transportation expenses. As he and other staff and faculty were brainstorming what else was needed to make housing affordable, he said, they began to realize that they had students for whom even “affordable” was out of reach.

The Sierra College Foundation spearheads such fundraising campaigns on behalf of the college, Duncan said, but it also committed to start by committing to endow a bed. So far, both Sutter Health and the Mikuni Charitable Organizations also have committed to the project.

“We know that housing and transportation are significant insecurities for many people, including college students, and with this endowment to Sierra College, one student for a year will not have to have worry about where they’re going to be able to sleep and the food they eat,” said Dr. Peter Hull, interim chief executive officer and chief medical executive of Sutter Roseville Medical Center.

“When my father and I decided to open a restaurant together, I went to Sierra College and took an English as a second language class, and the teacher there told me it’s never too late to learn,” said chef Taro Arai, the chief dreaming officer at Mikuni Charitable Organization. “That teacher at Sierra College was right, and since then we’ve been growing and remembering to give back to our community.”

In a news release issued about the groundbreaking, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis said: “California’s Community Colleges pave the pathway for millions of Californians to achieve the California dream, but a lack of access to affordable student housing leaves too many students behind. Thanks to projects like this one at Sierra College, more California students will be able to focus on their education and not worry about where they are going to sleep at night. I’m deeply proud of our state’s historic commitment to supporting the total cost of college attendance for students and ensuring every Californian has a shot at achieving the California dream.”

The Sierra Joint Community College District draws students from a geographic region that covers 3,200 square miles, Duncan said, in Placer County, Nevada County and the wider Sacramento area.

In the new dorm, three students will live in a suite with three bedrooms and a common living room, kitchen area and two bathrooms, Duncan said. The dorm will also have a tutoring center, an office offering student support services, studying spaces, gaming rooms, and other gathering places. It’s scheduled for completion in summer 2025.