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Senior living and university pairings are nothing new, but in 2025, the model is evolving and accelerating into its next form.
This week, Varcity – a company that builds residential retirement villages on the campuses of U.S. colleges – announced its newest project, a community undertaken in partnership with Texas A&M University. The community, planned for the university’s campus in College Station, Texas, is slated to include villas, townhomes and concierge apartments, with amenities such as a food truck, spaces for co-working and a 3D printing space with a tech help desk.
Varcity’s strategy is to develop intergenerational communities on or very near the campuses of well-known universities. The company is unique in that it is seeking to secure university logo and naming rights, not just a plot of unused land on or adjacent to campus.
Senior Housing News has spilled plenty of digital ink over the years writing about the trend of senior living operators partnering with universities and opening communities on campus. The timelines for senior living development projects are already longer now than they were in the past, and that is especially true for university projects, which are usually subject to lengthy reviews and approval processes.
But for as long as these projects take, I have seen them slowly evolve over the last eight years. Where it was more common to see these projects on the campuses of smaller or liberal arts schools, the model is starting to be embraced by the likes of Texas A&M and Purdue.
Varcity, as part of this trend, is offering a new spin on the model that could better appeal to older adults – and even more crucially, to universities themselves. More than that, universities now see older adults not just as alumni but as “new customers.”
In this members-only SHN+ update, I analyze this and other projects along with recent reporting and offer the following takeaways:
- How Varcity’s model represents a new form of university-based senior living
- The growing number of university-based retirement communities
- Other new projects that indicate how universities and senior living providers are collaborating in 2025
Catering to residents and universities alike
University-senior living models have long appealed to a certain type of resident. But these projects haven’t always appealed to universities themselves.
Some university-senior living projects came to a halt during the early days of Covid, while others never got off the ground to begin with. I recall a conversation I had a few years ago with Ryan Haller, who was one of the original founders of the Varcity brand (he has since stepped away from the organization).
In 2022, Haller said that some universities just didn’t want to cater to older adults on campus and instead were focusing on growing the typical college student demographic of people between the ages of 18 and 22.
In 2025, that sentiment is changing. A recent Marketplace article chronicled a pilot project at Goucher College near Baltimore to combine university life and senior living from operator Edenwald – and according to residents and the university alike, it is bearing fruit.
But it wasn’t the project that necessarily caught my attention. What caught my eye was instead a quote from Goucher College President Kent Devereaux, who called older adults “our new customers.”
“By 2034, there’s going to be more Americans over 65 than there are under 20. This is the growth market for higher education in the future,” Devereaux told Marketplace.
Senior living operators have long seen the potential for university and senior living partnerships. But I think it’s notable that Devereaux and Goucher see older adults as a new group to target as they face a “demographic cliff” ahead in the form of fewer younger students.
I believe that shifting sentiment is reflected in the growing number of university-based retirement communities. Andrew Carle, an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University who has held a variety of senior living leadership positions over the years, has long seen the potential for senior living and university projects.
Carle is behind UniversityRetirementCommunities.com, a site that tracks and certifies retirement communities associated with a university or college. In April, he told me that academic institutions are “seeing a strategic opportunity” in senior living-university partnerships, and he has tracked close to 90 such projects in the U.S. as of this month.
“[University retirement communities] continue to present a significant strategic opportunity, exceeding industry benchmarks for both pre-opening lease up and post-opening occupancy,” Carle told me. “I am currently in communication or working directly with more than 10 universities and colleges ranging from initial assessment to formal RFPs.”
In the Marketplace article, Carle warned that not every university is well-suited for senior living, especially those that lack big sports facilities or curb appeal. And I think that’s partially why there have only been dozens of these projects over the years, despite the clear opportunities.
Varcity, on the other hand, is targeting bigger fish in the form of large universities like Purdue and Texas A&M. In the past, I have heard that these kinds of schools have been hesitant to bring senior living on campus and have preferred to develop unused land for other purposes.
Instead of simply asking for space on which to build a senior living community, Varcity is undertaking these projects in tandem with the universities themselves, with name and logo rights and a slate of programming and perks integrating residents into college life. Varcity CEO Les Strech sees that as a key factor for the brand differentiating it from more traditional senior housing on campus.
“Varcity builds intergenerational communities older adults want to move to. They are lifelong learning campuses integrated into the university ecosystem in a public-private partnership alongside the university,” Strech told SHN earlier this week. “This line of thinking has led to three large universities in the last six months reaching out.”
As Varcity’s projects come online, I think they will serve as a model for similar projects at other universities. I share Strech’s belief that these models could serve the boomer generation well, but only if they actually walk the walk and truly integrate into the fabric of university living.
To that end, such projects could become increasingly successful as baby boomers and then Gen X become senior living residents. In the past, senior living affiliations with universities have hit complications because of contrasting lifestyle preferences of younger students and older adults. A legal battle between Mirabella at ASU, a senior living community near Arizona State University, and a neighboring music venue grabbed headlines just a few years ago, and even led to a protest outside the senior living community.
That is not to say that incoming senior living residents will be eager to live next to a loud electronic dance music hotspot, but a generation that is flocking to Latitude Margaritaville communities has expectations that might align more naturally with campus life.
University-based senior living still evolving
In 2022, Senior Housing News wrote that university-based senior living projects were on the cusp of a new chapter. Three years later, I still believe that is true, even if progress is slow. Already, I see some new projects that indicate where the trend is headed next.
One such project is an expansion underway at Lasell Village, a community that shares a campus with its namesake, Lasell University. The community is expanding with 42 new independent living units and boomer-centric amenities such as a restaurant with street access, fitness center, performance space, library, clubhouse and a wellness center.
The project also includes a second-floor pedestrian bridge to connect the community to an existing town hall space.
Earlier this year, Southern Oregon University began exploring senior living on the site of a defunct dormitory, with SOU President Rick Bailey noting the project is meant to help “reimagine the fiscal model of the institution” to “help us transition from being solely dependent on state dollars and tuition for our revenue sources.”
The community is geared toward “a growing contingent of previously underserved nontraditional students: Retirees,” according to its January request for proposals at the site.
At the end of the day, I think this trend will continue to slowly grow and evolve. While these projects represent unique challenges, they also contain unique opportunities for those that undertake them. And I would not be surprised if Varcity and other companies significantly upsized the number of such projects in the years to come given the new alignment of goals between universities and senior living.
That said, universities and senior living also share a common challenge: Ballooning costs for consumers. As higher education and senior living increasingly find ways of partnering, I hope that they also hit on creative solutions for making senior living financially attainable for a wider swath of people. I’m envisioning work-study jobs that help staff a community at a reasonable wage rate, or efficiencies of scale in dining or environmental maintenance. Whatever the approach, such innovation could be key to not only appealing to the “new customers” but actually delivering a product that they can buy.
