SUNY Old Westbury is spending $200 million to expand its natural sciences building, adding 35,000 square feet of classroom and laboratory space, as the Nassau County school pushes ahead despite the financial turbulence shaking higher education across the country.
The university unveiled a strategic plan last November that covers artificial intelligence integration, new social services, expanded financial assistance, and facilities that wouldn’t have been out of place on a much larger campus. Phase one of the science building work is nearly done. “We’re about to complete and open phase one and add about 24,000 square feet,” President Timothy Sams said.
Sams doesn’t dress up the situation in the broader higher education market. Two schools that couldn’t stay solvent serve as his reference points. The College of St. Rose, in Albany, closed after running out of money. Limestone University, founded in Gaffney, South Carolina, in 1845 as an all-female institution, shut down after it couldn’t raise $6 million to cover deficits driven by lower enrollment. “We’re seeing more universities and colleges shuttering,” Sams said.
Old Westbury, by contrast, is building.
The 604-acre campus in Nassau County serves more than 4,600 students across more than 40 undergraduate degrees and 16 graduate programs in business, education, liberal studies, and mental health counseling. It’s a public liberal arts institution inside the SUNY system, which gives it the financial backstop that private schools like Limestone never had. That structural advantage matters more now than it did five years ago.
The science expansion is the headline project, but it’s not the only one. The school is adding a stock market laboratory, a Maker Space stocked with 3-D printers, a small clean room for chip manufacturing, microscopes, and other tools. Sams called it “a space chock full of technological resources.” The building itself is being converted to geothermal heating and cooling, with more than a dozen geothermal reservoirs sunk into the ground to cut the carbon footprint of a structure that will train the next generation of STEM students. The U.S. Department of Energy has documented the cost-reduction potential of exactly this kind of institutional geothermal shift, and Old Westbury is putting that research to practical use.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Federal pressure on higher education, post-pandemic enrollment patterns, and students squeezed by cost have combined to create what Sams describes with characteristic directness. “The winds are shifting more dramatically than ever before, and more quickly,” he said. “We’re dealing with that.”
One of those winds is cultural. A long-running argument, pushed hard in certain policy circles, holds that four-year degrees don’t justify their cost, that trades and certifications are the smarter path, that the liberal arts in particular produce debt and regret. Sams has heard it. He’s pushing back. “There has been an insidious suggestion that higher education has decreased value toward skills,” he said. “We are finding ourselves convincing people a higher education degree is important.”
That’s a strange position for a university president to be in. Twenty years ago, nobody needed convincing. Now Sams is making the case the same way a sales force makes a case, with data on outcomes, with financial aid packages designed to close the gap between sticker price and what families can actually pay, with programs that connect directly to job markets. It’s unglamorous work. It’s also necessary.
The STEM expansion is designed to do something specific. As Long Island Press reported, Sams said the $200 million project is meant to “catapult them to the front of new work in STEM.” That’s a high standard to set for a school that doesn’t get the name recognition of Stony Brook or Binghamton. But Old Westbury has something those schools don’t: a student body that skews heavily toward first-generation college students and students from Nassau County’s middle- and working-class communities. Sending those students into labs with genuine research-grade equipment changes outcomes in ways that no brochure captures.
The AI integration across the curriculum is newer and, candidly, less defined in the public materials. Every school in the country is saying something about AI right now. What Old Westbury does with it will matter more than what it says.
For now, the cranes are up, the geothermal wells are in the ground, and the strategic plan is off the shelf and in motion. Sams has 4,600 students watching to see if any of it delivers.