Most higher education capital plans for facilities are little more than politically correct prioritizations of departmental wish lists.  Funding opportunism has long trumped budgetary discipline.  Four cycles of facilities expansion have left most institutions in an unsustainable position – more space than they need and more than they can afford to operate and maintain.  Just now digital transformation is bringing this into focus.  How did it come to this?

Cycle 1 – The rapid increase of enrollments beginning in 1946 led to large class sizes and scaling of faculty-to-student ratios through use of graduate students.  The demand for facilities more than doubled the building area of most institutions.

Cycle 2 – The arrival of the baby boom and increasing college attendance led to another doubling of building area.  These buildings are now about 50 years old.  Most are in need of significant renovation, removal or replacement.  Many are underutilized, but with the power, heating and air conditioning on.

Cycle 3 – In the latter decades of the 20^th century economic and technological change made some facilities obsolete and unnecessary.  New more technologically advanced facilities were added, but the obsolete facilities were rarely removed.  At best, as institutional missions expanded, these buildings were ‘re-purposed.’  Usually they were subject to benign neglect and the facilities inventory grew.

Cycle 4 – In the 1990s most institutions began to realize they were in a series of competitions.  Competition for students, faculty, research funding, and sports prestige began to drive decision-making.  Comparisons to the facilities wealth of aspirational peers became a common practice.  Facilities needs were justified by comparing the size and quality of facilities (usually on the basis of square-feet-per-student) to those institutions ahead of you in the ranking.  This process of ‘benchmarking’ is now a standard part of most campus master planning efforts.

The ‘peer benchmarking’ approach to facilities needs assessment can only produce a rationale for more and more space.  No institution aspires to be average, much less below average.  Each strives to exceed the competition.  As a result the averages move up in a continuing cycle of ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’  In this world, competitiveness is defined as a strategic goal and cost effectiveness is secondary.  These dynamics alone are not the causes of rising costs, but they are contributing influences.

The digital transformation of higher education is requiring different capabilities, not more facilities.  As perhaps more than one-third of course content moves into the digital domain the building blocks of facilities demand are becoming less certain.  In addition, decreasing public funding compromises institutional business models.

Both traditional and non-traditional academic programs are responding to these dynamics by reliance on adjunct faculty.  For good or ill, this work force can be easily modulated to respond to fluctuations in demand.  Facility responses are not so flexible.

It takes about six to ten years from defining a facilities need to being able to move in. Sometimes a year can be shaved off the design and construction process.  Sometimes funding is more quickly arranged.  Still the process usually results in delivering a building to a different cast of faculty than those that began the process.  This is not a problem when pedagogical change is glacial, but the digital transformation of higher education requires a much more strategic response.

Two of the best thinkers on these issues are Harvey Kaiser and Eva Klein.  Their recent APPA publication Strategic Capital Development:  The New Model for Campus Investment lays out a comprehensive approach to facilities planning that integrates strategic goals with resource constraints.

As long as facilities planning methods are stuck in a traditional frame of continued expansion, the fiscal and environmental burden to the institution will rise.  Changing the trajectory will require a different way of thinking about facilities. Instead of boasting more area per student, institutions need to focus on effectiveness.  A step in the right direction will be to use less energy per credit hour.

We are at the trailing edge of six decades of campus facilities expansion.  The resulting mix of assets can be a rich foundation on which to rebuild and right-size sustainable institutions, or part of an unsustainable burden that helps to sink the rest.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.