Baby Boom demographics exert a twofold impetus on the new-course-on-campus movement. Post-war Americans who raised all these children and acclimated them to prosperity turned higher education into a growth industry with its own mass-market economy. Later, as they’ve aged, well-off Boomer parents have targeted college towns as retirement sites and boosted the concept of the college or university as a magnet for year-round, life-enriching experiences to be enjoyed not just by active students but by residents of all ages.

Universities “need to think of [themselves] as destination points, then they really can become great places,” says Tim Liddy, who teamed with Pete Dye on Purdue’s Kampen Course. “Working on a college golf project is a lot like a municipal work,” Liddy adds. “There are always a lot of audiences you have to deal with. Everyone has good intentions but everybody has different priorities they want to see for the land.”

Purdue has added several high-profile academic structures in recent years: an African-American and Latino cultural center, a school of management, a renovated agricultural school and labs for the college of engineering. Similar to those projects, Purdue’s golf course did not loom into view until alumni who thought highly of the idea dug into their pockets for several million dollars in funding.

That’s hurdle No. 1 for university courses, and one reason a place like Wisconsin, even with its loyal alumni and high profile, took decades to see its project through to completion. In the late 1980s, UW was one of only two Big Ten Conference members without a course. The other was Northwestern, an urban campus with not even the space for new horseshoe pits.

“This course had been talked about for 40 to 50 years,” says Mike Urben, general manager at UW’s University Ridge. The first cash contribution for a U. of Wisconsin golf course to be built somewhere in greater Madison arrived decades ago, but planners struggled for years with a standard obstacle: Large land tracts no longer available on school grounds and the price of adjacent land so high as to make the entire project cost-prohibitive. Then Midwestern idealism and the university’s 501(c)(3) status worked their magic. “Two farmers said they would donate the land,” Urben explains. Trustees jumped at the offer of 225 acres some eight miles southwest of Madison, bringing in Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Bruce Charlton as architects under the direction of the UW Foundation.

The resulting course became a treasured university asset the day it opened in July 1991. University Ridge’s first nine roams across open farmland before yielding to a second nine carved through heavily wooded acreage. It was easily worth a big-ticket green fee, but instead was priced at an unbeatable value of $15 for students and $25 for the public. At that time rounds of golf at Blackwolf Run, the best course in the state and a future U.S. Women’s Open site, were going for $62 a pop.

Such math hints at the complicated formulas that come into play when universities set about building golf courses. Raising enough money to build eliminates the need to float loans that otherwise would drive up a green fee. But the fundraising process can be a drawn-out affair—or, with great luck, a matter of one person writing one mighty big check.

That indeed was the case at Texas Tech, where the donations of alumnus Jerry Rawls helped turn more than 250 acres of flat farmland formerly used by agricultural students into a rolling Tom Doak design that opened in 2003.