Just past the guard gates at Gwynedd Mercy University, about an hour northeast of Philadelphia, is a pale yellow, two-story Colonial. It looks like any other suburban house — red shutters, front and back porches, garbage and recycling cans in the back.
Inside, the house appears similarly mundane. There’s a fully stocked kitchen, furnished bedrooms, working bathrooms and an office. A car is parked on a small gravel pad next to the house.
But for Gwynedd Mercy’s criminal justice students, the house is far from ordinary. Before entering, they must put on protective boots and gloves. In each room, they’re monitored closely by their professors through a camera feed in the basement. Their goal: To use clues scattered throughout the house to solve crimes.
Once home to the Catholic university’s Sisters of Mercy, the building now is the campus’ new Crime Scene House. Designed to mimic a variety of crime scenarios, the Crime Scene House is a place for students to prepare for the workforce and gain practical skills beyond what they learn in a lecture hall.
“We really wanted to give all of the students a hands-on environment where they could learn, front to back, what it was like to be an investigator or a police officer,” says Patrick McGrain, the director of GMercyU’s criminal justice program.
With an enrollment of about 2,700 students, GMercyU is one of several colleges across the country embracing experiential learning as a way to draw students in and prepare them for the workforce.
Whether it’s study-abroad opportunities, internships or work simulations, experiential learning is the best way to prepare students to work for companies that are focused more on skills than degrees, its advocates say. Experiential learning also helps colleges improve retention and stand out in a highly competitive sector. As students increasingly question the value of a college degree, institutions can offer experiential learning opportunities as a way to prove their worth.
Preparation and Training
Every part of the Crime Scene House is fair game for the 60 or so students in the criminal justice program. The kitchenware may have fingerprints on it, a victim could have been tied to the bedposts in the bedroom, the bathroom sink may have been used to wash out blood. Even the car outside is set up to simulate a drug-transport vehicle.
McGrain and his colleagues have made the house look as realistic as possible with fake blood, and room-appropriate furniture, including a table with small ridges that “cocaine” could seep into. McGrain even placed his son’s old Xbox in a room staged to look like a teenager’s bedroom.
The entire house can be one continuous crime scene or each room could hold a new one. Since crimes can happen anywhere, McGrain wanted to give students a taste of the different environments they encounter as professionals. Students can practice identifying patterns in blood spatter or improve their interviewing skills in the interrogation room.
Classes typically begin with a discussion before going over to the house, where students may solve a crime together or work individually in separate rooms. Instructors, many of whom are former police officers or detectives, monitor and record students as they work through the crime scene and review the footage later as a class.
With feedback from their peers and industry professionals, students gain valuable insights into real-world work situations.
“You could be on a mock trial team all you want, but until you actually have 12 people in a jury box, you have no idea what it’s like to be in a courtroom,” McGrain says. “We can teach the students theoretically in a classroom all we want, but the closer we can get to showing them what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it,” the more prepared they’ll be.
Jerome Mathew, a third-year criminal justice student at GMercyU, plans to go into state or federal law enforcement when he graduates. He’s learned about crime-scene analysis and worked with a small crime-scene kit, but he hasn’t experienced anything like the Crime Scene House. Mathew hopes that environment will help him prepare mentally for the intensity of his future career.
The Crime Scene House also will help Mathew feel more prepared for the police academy, an essential step in entering law enforcement. He’ll have already completed crime-scene training with critiques and support from instructors who’ve been through the academy or work with officers in training.
“It makes [me] a lot more confident, a lot more comfortable knowing that I’ll have an idea of what to expect, whether it’s [at the] academy or even further into my career,” Mathew says.
To experiential education advocates, providing students with skill-building opportunities like the Crime Scene House is essential to finding a job in today’s workforce and narrowing the perceived skills gap in many industries.
In the past 20 years, companies have shifted focus to skills rather than degrees, says Andrew Potter, director of the Office of University Experiential Learning at the University of Georgia. They’re looking for students who are ready to begin working, and don’t need to spend as much time training, he says.
“The bubble of higher education and the bubble of industry — those two bubbles need to come together,” Potter says. “The closer those two bubbles are, the better it will be for all sides, especially for the students and their futures, and the values that they can drive not just for themselves, but for their communities, their state, their nation, their world.”
Staying Competitive
Environments like the Crime Scene House are helping colleges stand out in a progressively competitive landscape, says Jay Roberts, provost and dean of the faculty at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
Many colleges require students to complete experiential learning opportunities, even in fields that aren’t as easy to simulate. Vivienne Felix, director of the Center for Professional Pathways at Washington and Jefferson College, points to opportunities for history students to complete museum apprenticeships or music students to learn the process of putting together their own performance, from arranging the music to booking a venue.
The opportunities give students professional polish, Felix says. They develop important skills like critical thinking or leadership, gain significant experience and build professional networks that stand out to employers.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, experiential learning has become even more relevant, Roberts adds. AI can help with reading or writing, but it can’t replace a study-abroad experience or an internship.
“Colleges are looking to differentiate and to suggest that the way they are approaching the teaching and learning environment is distinctive and powerful,” he says.
Experiential learning encourages students to stay. When students find a field they’re excited about, they feel a stronger sense of belonging, says Edwin Blanton, assistant vice provost of corporate initiatives and business development at the University of Texas San Antonio.
“We know when students feel connected, when they feel like, ‘yep, I’m on the right path, this is what I need to be doing,’ they’re likely to stay there and get through to graduation,” he says.
And there is intrinsic worth even in a disappointing experience. If a student learns through an experiential program that a field of study isn’t a good fit, it’s better to find that out in college than after they’re set up in a job they don’t like.
“Being able to have multiple other experiences — whether that’s job shadowing, internships, what have you — as you move through that help to solidify, ‘yes, this is the field I definitely wanna go into,’ or ‘this is not what I want to go into,’ is extremely valuable,” Blanton says.
While some experiential learning opportunities can be costly to set up, colleges often prioritize the benefits they provide, including career-readiness and retention, and find a way to fund them, says Felix at Washington and Jefferson.
GMercyU avoided any budgeting difficulty by working with resources it already had. McGrain first considered a Crime Scene House about eight years ago, but the pandemic cut his plans short. This year, an architect working at the college suggested using the Sisters of Mercy house, which had been abandoned for two years.
Criminal justice students will start collecting evidence at the house in the spring semester; McGrain and his instructors still have some finishing touches to do, including adding peel-and-stick wallpaper to create different patterns in a dedicated blood-spatter room. In the meantime, students practice taking photos of crime scenes and role-play interviewing “suspects” in the interrogation room.
McGrain hopes that eventually the Crime Scene House can do double-duty as a resource for students in a forensic science minor that the college is developing. He also wants to open it up to local law enforcement for training and practice.
