Vanderbilt University has been undertaking a $600 million project to add four new residential colleges by 2023.
Vanderbilt billed the initiative as its largest capital project ever.
The 205,000-square-foot E. Bronson Ingram College will open this fall with living spaces, a communal dining hall, a great room, a performing arts rehearsal studio, and four courtyards.
The next residential college will open in August 2020. Two more will follow in 2022 and 2023 and will require tearing down Carmichael Towers.
Each residential college functions as a "campus within a campus" for about 330 undergraduate students. As sophomores, juniors, and seniors, they live and learn alongside graduate students and visiting scholars with a faculty head of the house.
Vanderbilt officials said only a handful of American universities have residential colleges, including Harvard and Yale.
