 Grad
student village to help UCLA compete
BY JACQUELINE TASCH AND CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today
A village within Westwood Village rising on the southwest edge
of the campus will soon bring together a vibrant community of graduate
students drawn from the entire campus and the world.
Taking shape along Veteran Avenue on both sides of Weyburn Avenue
are seven building clusters, none higher than four stories and all
being built around interior courtyards. Come fall, nearly 1,400
students will make their home in Weyburn Terrace, “one of
the best facilities for single graduate students in the country,”
according to UCLA Director of Housing Michael Foraker.
At a time when UCLA is struggling to compete with better-funded,
private universities for the best graduate students and the governor’s
proposal to hike graduate student fees 40% is causing consternation,
Weyburn Terrace represents an amenity that may help sway the decisions
of top graduate students to come to UCLA. That’s the fervent
hope of UCLA’s academic deans and Graduate Division administrators.
“This is a grand experiment that we’re embarking on
to create a permanent graduate student community,” said Glen
Winans, assistant dean of the Graduate Division.
Winans is part of a committee of faculty and graduate students
who devised a plan to allocate housing in the new village in a way
that gives academic deans a recruitment tool and leaves other spaces
to be filled by lottery.
For the first year, deans will have at their discretion 725 spaces
in the new community that can be rented with a two-year guarantee
by their top new graduate students. The remaining 650 spaces will
be available for rent for one year through a general lottery open
to new and continuing graduate students. “Since Mira Hershey
Hall closed in 1998, UCLA hasn’t had any housing dedicated
specifically for single graduate students,” Winans said. Single
graduate students make up about two-thirds of those arriving each
year.
So chances are good that quality housing, affordable rents that
are comparable to market rates in Westwood, parking, campus shuttles
and the convenience of being close to campus will be key recruiting
factors.
“Weyburn Terrace should be a big draw. It’s new, it’s
based on student needs and it’s intimately linked to the campus
it serves,” Foraker said.
Based on the preferences of graduate students who were surveyed
extensively before construction began, the seven tile-roofed buildings
will contain 399 two-bedroom, two-bath units, 293 studios and 148
two-bedroom, two-bath townhouses. While all will have dishwashers,
microwaves, garbage disposals, stoves, carpeting and blinds, they
will otherwise be unfurnished. Rents for the two-bedroom, two-bath
units will be $850 per month per student; the studios and townhouses
will rent for $875 per month per student (based on rental rate surveys
in the area). Rents will include all utilities, cable TV and high-speed
Internet access.
In its Student Housing Master Plan for 2000-2010, UCLA made a
commitment to guarantee new graduate and professional students access
to university housing for their first two years.
To accomplish that, about 2,000 beds will be needed, Foraker said.
So more units will be built at Weyburn Terrace after services and
functions at neighboring Warren Hall are relocated.
The apartment complex will offer grad students more than housing.
Graduate education tends to isolate students within a department,
administrators said. They typically have limited opportunities to
meet people outside their discipline or even in the same program.
But with the opening of Weyburn Terrace, said Professor William
H. Worger, chair of the Graduate Student Housing Policy Committee,
“We anticipate that such a community will contribute greatly
to the development of graduate life and to the growth of interdisciplinary
study.”
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