It’s no secret that many college campuses are in rough shape, and on some you don’t need a maintenance worker’s eye to see the problems: outdated windows, cracking and spalling masonry, leaking roofs, and—legendary on some Northern campuses—underground heating lines that reveal their location by the steam emanating from grassy patches on the quad. That’s money literally drifting away.
In recent years, however, the problem seems to have gotten worse, according to a new report. Sightlines, a consulting company that tracks and analyzes facilities issues at more than 400 colleges, has analyzed data from its member institutions and come to the conclusion that 2009 represented the “good old days” of capital investments in existing space. With money tight now, and quite possibly remaining so well into the future, colleges will have to rethink how they rebuild and maintain their campuses, says James A. Kadamus, vice president at Sightlines and author of the report.
“You have the gap between the growing need and the capital needed to deal with this, and you start realizing that the conversation about facilities is going to change,” he says. “There is not going to be enough money to fix everything.”
Administrators will have to set priorities on which buildings need to be fixed and which might need to just go away, Mr. Kadamus says. With the rise of online learning, he adds, campuses might not need as much space as they have.
In 2009 colleges spent the most ever on existing space—$5.50 per gross square foot—before plunging down after the recession struck. But while capital investments by private colleges have ticked back up, public colleges’ spending on their physical campuses has stagnated. State budgets have been terrible in many areas, and state appropriations for capital projects have gone down. Many public colleges have also reached their debt limits and have no room to borrow for projects.
Another factor complicates this picture: A tremendous amount of construction happened on college campuses from 1960 to 1975—more square footage was built in those years than in the previous 100, Mr. Kadamus says. Many of those structures were not well built, and public colleges tend to have a lot of them. Campuses have reached a stage where buildings of that generation are reaching the end of their useful lives.
“If those buildings have not been reset, they are all coming due” for renovation or replacement at once, he says. From 2007 to 2012, the amount of space more than 50 years old and not renovated grew from 18 percent to 22 percent. To add to that, another huge wave of campus construction happened from 1995 to 2009, and those buildings also have maintenance burdens.
Can Colleges Ever Catch Up?
Mr. Kadamus says that even when statistics compiled for the report seemed to paint a brighter picture, the numbers didn’t look so great when he dug beneath the data. For example, in 2007, colleges invested 54 percent of their capital funds in mechanical systems, roofs, and other core building components, and 46 percent in space renewal—updating rooms to make them look better or perhaps work better for occupants. In 2012, Sightlines found that campuses were spending 62 percent of their capital funds in mechanical systems and other core components.
Initially, Mr. Kadamus thought that those figures meant that colleges had gotten serious about spending on the things that make the buildings durable. But after talking to institutions, he found that the increases often reflected last-minute repairs of systems that were about to fail.
With deferred maintenance piling up and money only getting tighter, how can colleges ever catch up? Mr. Kadamus says colleges are facing “an era of hard choices.” Some of those hard choices might include giving up square footage. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for example, has approved a plan to tear down obsolete, dilapidated buildings and construct new buildings—with fewer square feet of space—to replace them.
“If you go at this year after year, with a steady plan, you can knock off a lot of deferred maintenance and get ahead of the problem,” he says. “But if you wait, there is an incredible cost to waiting. We’ve waited and waited for better times, and I don’t think they are coming.”