Carl Sandburg College is entering its 60th year with enrollment climbing and a shovel about to go in the ground on the biggest addition to its Galesburg campus in decades.
President Seamus Reilly told Galesburg’s Morning News the college is up about 7% in both headcount and credit hours heading into the fall semester, which begins Aug. 24. Sandburg holds a ceremonial groundbreaking for its new Charger Center at 4 p.m. Aug. 27 on the Galesburg campus.
Listen to the full interview below.
What’s going in the building
The Charger Center is a 70,204-square-foot athletic and conference facility designed by Legat Architects, with an anticipated opening in late 2027. It will include two wood-floor gymnasiums and a third gym with multi-purpose flooring, along with fitness and training areas, a golf simulator room and an esports arena. Outside, the college is adding turf fields for baseball, softball and soccer.
It replaces a gym that has been the Chargers’ home since 1978 and a fitness center that opened in the early 1990s.
Reilly said the building is designed to hold more than 3,500 people at once, which opens the door to regional conferences, job fairs and agriculture expos, along with the college’s own commencement ceremonies. The fitness and training space is also meant to support emerging academic programs such as physical therapy and kinesiology.
How it’s being paid for
The project is funded through a bond issuance, which Reilly said carries no cost to local taxpayers.
“It keeps our tax rate exactly the same,” Reilly said. “It allows us to use the existing debt that we have, so there’s no impact to the taxpayer.”
The college will pay it back over 30 years. It’s the latest phase of a campus master plan that produced the Science & Technology Center in 2024 and a renovated Student Center in 2025.
Growth as the goal
Reilly said the enrollment increase reflects strong retention along with new efforts to reach adult students. Asked whether the college always wants to grow, he was blunt.
“My philosophy is if you don’t grow, you die,” he said.
Sandburg’s district covers about 108,000 people, and Reilly said his target is for the college to touch 10% of them in a given year, whether that’s a class, a ballgame or an art gallery show.
He pointed to the district’s education gap as the reason it matters. Roughly nine out of 10 Sandburg graduates finish without student loan debt, he said, and 93% stay in the district after they’re done.
Reilly discussed several other initiatives in the full interview, including the college’s Charge Forward program for adult students, a new grant that pays returning students up to $4,000, and the 518 Collective agriculture technology incubator coming to downtown Galesburg.
