Watch the Full Conversation (13 min)
When Nico Hohman presented at Tradeline's 2026 conference in Scottsdale, the data he brought reframed how a room full of campus planners thought about graduate enrollment. The 20-year shift he's been studying isn't just a demographic footnote — it's a higher ed space planning challenge hiding in plain sight. The fastest-growing graduate cohort isn't the experienced professional returning for an MBA. It's the student who graduated undergrad last spring and enrolled in grad school that fall. In this episode, Hohman — Executive Director of Operations at Georgetown University Capitol Campus — walks through what that shift means for facilities planning, housing, and how institutions need to rethink what a graduate student actually looks like today.
→ National enrollment data spanning 2003 to 2025 shows the grad student cohort aged 24 and under nearly doubled its share of total graduate enrollment — from 20% to 30%
→ Institutions built for the once-a-week evening student are leaving daytime capacity unused and leaving younger graduate students underserved in housing, dining, and wellness
→ Georgetown's Capitol Campus integrates law, medicine, policy, and business students in a 24/7 downtown location — a real-world example of planning for the multi-cohort graduate student body
→ The behavioral gap is the planning risk: a graduate student who treats school as a full-time job has fundamentally different space, food service, and wellness needs than one who commutes in once a week
→ Before any capital project for graduate programs, segment enrollment by cohort and program — the single enrollment headcount doesn't tell you which student is there, or when
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Veena Vadgama: Welcome, Nico Hohman, to Bow Tie Tuesday today. Thank you so much for being here.
Nico Hohman: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Veena: Of course. For our audience, Nico Hohman is the Executive Director of Operations for the Georgetown University Capitol Campus, and he's going to be talking to us today about the graduate student work and analysis he's been doing. I'm going to start off with the fact that I got to meet you at the Tradeline conference in Scottsdale a few weeks back. You just presented on what you're calling the grad student age shift. For a campus planner who's been working off the same grad space assumptions for 20 years, what has actually changed?
Nico: What we have noticed over the last 20 years — and this is both at Georgetown and a nationwide trend — is that graduate students are getting younger. It's not just a little shift. We're talking significant movement over two decades. If we break down the age cohorts into three major groups: 24 and under, 25 to 29, and 30 and over — across different racial and ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses, just looking at ages — what we see is that the share of those 30 and older going to grad school has gone down. The 25 to 29 cohort has stayed flat or declined slightly. The only growth has been in that 24 and under cohort. It's gone from about a 20% share in 2003 to a 30% share in fall 2025. That is a massive shift.
Veena: You built this graduate youth index on 20 years of national data. What's the single most counterintuitive finding — the one thing a facilities leader would not have predicted?
Nico: The counterintuitive part is that it's not just that they're getting younger. We had this model in campus planning that a graduate student typically gets their undergraduate degree, goes out and gets a job — maybe several jobs, gets married, has kids, settles down — and then comes back to earn a graduate degree. What we're seeing is that the biggest shift is students going right from undergraduate directly into graduate school. They're at a completely different stage in life than what we've assumed. It's not just that graduate students are younger. It's all the different ways they interact with and use campus — their lifestyle is fundamentally different. They're not just a younger graduate student. They're almost a completely new cohort that graduate schools need to serve.
Veena: When you see younger grad students spending longer hours on campus, looking for wellness and social space, what does that mean for how you plan a building? And where do you think CFOs and planners might be getting it wrong?
Nico: When we realize this data represents a new and growing segment, the question becomes: if the student body you're serving looks and acts differently than previous cohorts, your physical systems need to change. A typical graduate student in the past was probably a working professional — working a day job and coming to class in the evening, maybe once or twice a week, for a multi-hour lecture. Whereas today, if you're going right from undergraduate to graduate school, you're more likely taking classes full-time. You may take an 11 AM class on a Tuesday. These younger graduate students treat grad school as their full-time job. They take Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes, or Tuesday/Thursday — hour and a half each — rather than one Wednesday night from 6 to 9 PM.
If your students are on campus more often, they're utilizing more resources. If I'm a CFO planning space for older graduate students who only come once a week, I don't need to offer housing or robust food services. But now, looking at younger graduate students interacting more like undergrads, housing, dining, and wellness are all on the table.
Veena: You're running the Capitol Campus at Georgetown — one of the most visible newer campuses in higher ed. What have you had to operationally adjust since opening, because the way grad students actually use the space maybe didn't match how it was designed?
Nico: Georgetown has two campuses inside the District of Columbia. Our traditional Hilltop campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood — Healy Hall, the historic buildings. But over the last 10 years, the university has more than doubled its footprint in downtown DC. Our law school has been there for over 50 years, and we've grown significantly in buildings and square footage. We serve a wide swath: undergraduates, law school students, traditional graduate students, and continuing and professional education students — all on one campus. That makes it as close to a 24/7 downtown hub as you can get.
One thing we focus on is that the campus is part of the community as much as the community is part of the campus. At the Hilltop, students get food on campus. Here, we want to offer food services, but we also want students to experience the neighborhood — the retail, the restaurants. We want our spaces to be open and connected.
Veena: Are you able to give examples of how you achieve that symbiosis between campus and neighborhood?
Nico: There's a lot of coordination. We have the DC city government, federal government partners, and local neighborhood partners — business improvement districts, restaurant associations, hotel associations. If we treat the university as a business in this neighborhood, what connections do we want to make? We meet regularly with business improvement districts and chambers of commerce. Georgetown is dedicated to DC. We want the district to grow and the university to grow. Whether it's focusing on placemaking and economic revitalization, or working with DC on transportation — a university is as close to a city as you can get. We ask: how can we, as one small city, work with the other partners within this big city?
Veena: You wrote after Tradeline that institutions need to treat space as a financial and operational resource and use data to challenge assumptions. For a facilities leader with a grad program expansion on their five-year plan, what's the one thing you tell them to measure before they break ground?
Nico: A lot of institutions focus on enrollment growth and projections, which is right. But within enrollment there are different categories. We need to segment those numbers, because being labeled a graduate student doesn't mean your experience matches every other graduate student's. It's different if you're in medical research versus law versus humanities versus engineering. And it's different if you're a seasoned professional in your mid-thirties coming back for your MBA versus someone who just graduated undergrad. So: focus on enrollment, but within enrollment, how are you segmenting? How are you ensuring a diverse range of graduate students, and how are you servicing each cohort? Segment as much as you possibly can.
Veena: So the takeaway is: don't just label them graduate students. Double-click on what program they're in — and that builds the cohorts that let you align their experience with what they're actually studying.
Nico: Correct. And that's one of the great things about the Capitol Campus — we're integrating programs with real overlap. Programs in our medical school and law school overlap on health insurance reform. You need to understand both medicine and law and policy. Our law school, business school, and public policy school can collaborate on international trade. The Capitol Campus brings together programs that can work together.
Veena: It was wonderful to talk to you today. I was so impressed with your presentation at Tradeline. Thank you for taking the time and educating folks on how the grad student profile is changing and how institutions need to match that new generation of graduate students.
Nico: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.