Scholarship on factors that promote or hinder academic success of college students abounds, much of it focusing on learning gains and institutional retention of first-year students (Reason, Terenzini, and Domingo, 2006; Terenzini and Reason, 2005; Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005; Braxton, 2000; Astin, 1993; Tinto, 1987). More recently, survey-based studies are examining the interaction between student and faculty engagement, in part to overcome lack of access to data that tie students to faculty on an individual basis (Kuh and others, 2006; Carini, Kuh, and Klein, 2006) and to center the analyses on what happens in the classroom. Yet little is known about the influence of physical attributes of the classroom environment on student learning and retention. The paucity of insight into the possible role the physical setting may play in student learning and persistence is likely due to inadequate data available to institutional researchers. Typically, information on classroom features and related infrastructural aspects is collected by, and kept with, facility management offices. Such data are rarely integrated with the student information used by institutional researchers, though development of central data repositories at many institutions may render such data more easily accessible. The discussion here exemplifies how data from the facilities planning office were used to further enrich institutional research efforts to better understand factors that may influence first-year student success and persistence at a medium-size, moderately selective public university. (Contains 8 tables.)