In another facet of the arts race, college museums often seek a big name, a “starchitect,” so the building competes with some of the world’s premier cultural centers—and is as much a work of art as the items inside. In Waterville, Maine, Colby College boasts a collection of nearly 900 works by the acclaimed figurative painter Alex Katz, who’s currently showcased in the year-long Alex Katz at the Met exhibit. Colby has a dedicated Katz curator (whose position is endowed by the artist) and a permanent wing featuring his work that was designed by the prominent gallery architect Max Gordon. VCU’s Institute for Contemporary Art was designed by acclaimed museum architect, Steven Holl, and the newly integrated Harvard Museums by Renzo Piano (known for the Whitney and Centre Pompidou). While Piano’s renovation received mixed reviews, Harvard now enjoys a collection of 250,000 objects under one roof. And staggering campus art is hardly contained to museum construction and gallery exhibitions.

Schools are increasingly commissioning site-specific work from edgier artists, too, for campus libraries, quads and buildings not associated with art education. Take UC San Diego’s “Fallen Star”—a blue house on the edge of a roof—by the sculptor Do Ho Suh, a work financed by private donations and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. One of 19 pieces in the campus’s Stuart Collection, “Fallen Star” teeters atop the main engineering building—a technical feat that easily makes it one of the most riveting sculptures in southern California.

And encapsulating both aspects of the current art climate in higher education: Bard College’s Hessel Museum in Duchess County, New York, commissioned “The Parliament of Reality”—a 135-foot art pond with an island in the middle—beside the school’s Frank Ghery-designed Center for Performing Arts. The artist, Olafur Eliasson, is known for critically acclaimed work that temporarily resided at the Tate Modern and the Palace of Versailles, but Bard students get to experience daily his first public, permanent installation in the U.S.

Indeed, colleges are becoming art-tourist destinations. Last fall, the University of Texas broke ground on Ellsworth Kelly’s kaleidoscopic chapel, “Austin,” the overall design plans for which the legendary painter gifted the school’s Blanton Museum of Art just before his death. Scheduled to open in early 2018, “Austin”—and by extension, the Blanton—is destined to attract art connoisseurs from all over the world: No doubt contemporary-art buffs will make special trips to the campus just to see this structure. From the renderings, it appears the University of Texas and its donors are creating a place of grand, artistic novelty and personal reflection in the tradition of Mattise’s “Chapelle du Rosaire” in southern France and the “Rothko Chapel” in Houston.

For some critics, though, this overall approach to art feels too art-worldy for universities. Indeed, educators have accused colleges of catering to art critics and wealthy patrons at the expense of the academic community. A recent New York Times fine-arts section, for example, had an ad for the Yale Art Gallery’s Rhode Island Furniture exhibit, as well as a Botticelli show at the College of William and Mary.