All Are Welcome
Editor’s Note: During 2025, The Bulletin is continuing its State of the College Union series of articles that analyze the most current and affecting issues facing the Association’s members. Earlier this year a team of authors examined “The Student Union as a Space for Activism and Protest,” and in this edition our co-authors share how the student union has been, and continues to be, a place where “All Are Welcome.”
James Bryant Conant, Harvard University President, 1933–1953
“The most important single factor in a modern liberal education is education which students receive from one another. The college union, being the focus of all student activities, is thus, the most important laboratory on the campus.”
The student union has a long history of meeting the needs of a dynamic and diverse range of students, constantly adapting, evolving, and changing over time within the landscape of higher education. What began in the early 1800s as debate societies for the young, white, and privileged evolved by the mid-1900s into centers for recreation and education, expanding even more after passage of the GI Bill in both number and purpose to address student needs, social issues, and even higher education policy.
Today, as campuses reckon with an enrollment cliff resulting from a birth rate decline associated with the 2007–09 Great Recession, providing a welcoming environment for a broad student demographic has never been more important. There are already 2.7 million fewer college students this decade than there were in the previous one, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. At the same time, analysts with the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce note that a shortage of some 6 million workers predicted by 2032 will include over 2.5 million jobs that require at least a bachelor’s degree.
