NEW YORK — Hilton is bullish on the future of its newly launched Undergraduate brand and has laid out an ambitious growth path for the flag, company executives and leaders shared during the NYU International Hospitality Investment Forum this week.
Undergraduate by Hilton, an upper midscale brand that officially launched on Monday, furthers Hilton’s presence in college and university markets following its acquisition of Graduate Hotels in 2024. With the launch, Hilton is primarily aiming to provide an accessible stay that embraces the energy and spirit of college life, according to company executives.
During a private May 2 event held with company executives, leaders and journalists, Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta shared Undergraduate’s origin story and how the brand is meant to serve as a complement to Graduate.
‘Why not Lewisburg’
While visiting his daughter, a student at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Nassetta noted a lack of creative lifestyle accommodations for families — something Graduate offers in larger university markets. Outside of a nearby state penitentiary, Nassetta joked, and a Hampton Inn, there weren’t many lodging options for visitors, and certainly not any that were creative.
“As I was visiting her, I was thinking, ‘Why not [bring a college-focused brand] to Lewisburg?’” he said. “Why not every one of these little college towns, where you have to do something a little bit different?”
According to Nassetta, this question resulted in Undergraduate, Hilton’s 28th brand, which he expects will grow to 400 to 500 hotels “pretty easily over the next decade or two.”
The brand is an extension of Graduate Hotels, founded by Ben Weprin of AJ Capital Partners. Before Hilton acquired the lifestyle brand in 2024, Graduate Hotels had notably tripled in size during the pandemic, Kevin Osterhaus, Hilton’s president of global lifestyle brands noted at the event. Currently, Hilton has about 60 Graduate hotels at various stages of development.
“It was evident that there was a 2.0 we needed to do — if we were going to grow into markets that couldn’t necessarily sustain the scope of Graduate, how do we do that?” Osterhaus said during a conference panel.
Hilton brings Graduate 2.0
Over the last year or so, Hilton has been working on the formation of Undergraduate, which has some key differences from Graduate, according to Osterhaus.
Graduate exists as a design-forward concept to “tell the story of the dynamic markets” they exist in through various Easter eggs and layers of meaning, he explained. “But you might not have the ability to do that in every market — there might be a cap.”
In other words, while Graduate tells the college-town story in an immersive way through a fully bespoke layout and design, Undergraduate is meant to channel these messages on a limited scale, in markets that are also smaller.
“They are linked at the hip — this is something that I think gives us the ability to really celebrate the spirit of university and college markets,” Osterhaus said.
Undergraduate is also a conversion-friendly model, with a prototypical approach to design that gives owners more flexibility, he added.
Jenna Hackett, senior vice president and global leader of lifestyle brand management at Hilton, reiterated to Hotel Dive that Undergraduate is intended to be a much more scalable version of Graduate.
“Undergraduate allows for the accessibility in the other markets, and allows Graduate to stay in that full-service, experiential space,” Hackett said. “We’re not trying to change it.”
She added that the launch of Undergraduate protects the Graduate brand as it stands today.
