A Seattle apartment developing company has donated what the company hopes will be enough money to get Ball State's residential property management degree nationwide recognition.
Weidner Apartment Homes gifted the RPM program $1 million based purely on the high quality of interns and employees Weidner has recruited from Ball State over the past three years.
Marie Virgilio, director of recruiting at Weidner, said she saw the program might be struggling and sought help to make sure the program continues to grow.
"We wanted to make sure it continued to develop and grow and increase the student body in it," she said. "We wanted to make sure the students got scholarships and also while making the program more stable going forward should there even be more budget cuts."
Ball State currently has about 90 students that are majoring, minoring or graduate students in the RPM program, Howard Campbell, assistant professor of family and consumer sciences, said.
Students in the program learn about all aspects of apartment and housing management through an array of experiences in the program, Virgilio said. Students are in hands-on classes that deal directly with local businesses in many cases, and students majoring in the RPM program also have to complete internships as a part of their degree.
Casey Rusk, RPM graduate student, said students also leave the program with a national apartment leasing professional designation and a certified apartment manager designation, which helps make those students appealing to employers.
"Lots of times it costs the employer a couple thousand dollars for their employees to get that, so they are hiring entry level people that already have those designations," he said.
Some students, such as senior RPM major Megan Bloom, have a job before even leaving college. Bloom interned with a Weidner branch in Arizona, and she has been working for Silver Tree Apartments since before she was a sophomore, she said.
"I learn about everything in the classroom, and then I go to work and I can practice everything I learned in the classroom," Bloom said.
Weidner has only given large donations to one other university. Weidner gifted $1 million to University of Alaska in Anchorage about five years ago to start a RPM program there and has since donated more to keep the program growing.
The money received at Ball State will be used for scholarships, a center for the RPM program named after Weidner and to ensure growth in the program.
Virgilio said she was impressed to see how well Ball State's RPM program stands to similar programs at other universities.
"There aren't a lot of residential property management programs out there," she said. "The ones that are starting to come out aren't as developed as this program. This program is really well developed."
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