For more than a decade, from the mid-1990s until the start of the recession, many colleges were in expansion mode. New residence halls, student centers, science buildings, athletic facilities, technologically enhanced classroom buildings, and more, going up on a campus near you. Everyone knew they cost money—the price tag was often touted in the announcement, along with the name of a lead donor—but they signaled progress, the ambitions of a president, and fund-raising prowess.
While the new buildings got a lot of attention from students, parents, and the media, there was less attention paid to the continuing costs of those buildings, and of the buildings that went up in the previous 100 years.
These days, the leaders of many institutions are looking at their campuses through a different lens. Consider the situation in the University of Maine system: With stagnant state appropriations and a declining base of Maine high-school students, administrators have to find places to trim costs—and they think they can find those efficiencies somewhere in the system’s 9.4-million square feet of space. Forty percent of that space is in buildings more than 50 years old, and the system is burdened with $400-million in roofs, boilers, windows, and other building systems that are broken or on the verge of failure.
Growth might have been the pattern for higher education in the recent past, but costs are now pushing campuses like these to look in the other direction.
“We are struggling to keep up with the space that we have,” says Ryan Low, executive director of government and external affairs at the University of Maine, who helps chair a team devising a facilities strategy to respond to rising costs. “I think every team member recognizes that we are going to need less space.”
Antonio Calcado, vice president of facilities and capital planning at Rutgers University, says that when he and his colleagues plan a new building, they look for something else to take down. “The biggest cost savings at colleges and universities today is in reducing their footprint,” he says. “Especially at the larger colleges and universities, the footprint has just gotten so large, and it costs so much per square foot to just maintain that space.”
After Ribbon Cutting
Folks might gawk at the price tag on, say, the $119-million law-school building at the University of Baltimore or the $300-million life-sciences building now being erected by Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon State University, and Portland State University. But as facilities experts have pointed out, up-front construction costs generally represent only about a third of the total cost of the building over its life span, with operations, maintenance, utilities, renovations, and, finally, demolition sucking up the balance of nearly 70 percent.
The older the building, the more maintenance piles up and the more costly the process of catching up with that maintenance—with the 50-year mark generally being the time when a building either needs a major overhaul or the wrecking ball. Buildings on campuses across the country are reaching that age at a fast pace. At the University of Maine system in 2009, 28 percent of the buildings were more than 50 years old. Last year, it was 36 percent, and this year, 40 percent.
But other factors—like vintage elements and construction quality—can also greatly affect the continuing costs. James A. Kadamus, vice president of Sightlines, a company that tracks the condition and costs of college facilities, points out that buildings of the 1960s and 70s, put up during the postwar enrollment boom, are among the most costly and difficult to deal with. “Some people called it ‘flash construction’—get ’em up, and get ’em up fast,” he says. “There was a lot less attention to quality and efficiency.”
While the deferred-maintenance backlog on such buildings might not be as high as for the oldest campus structures, their poor construction means that each maintenance job is more complicated and more expensive to finish. At one public university, Mr. Kadamus says, work orders cost an average of $2.35 per gross square foot in buildings constructed between 1962 and 1987, while work orders in older buildings cost $2.20 per gross square foot.
Although newer buildings have fewer deferred maintenance needs and lower maintenance costs for now, Mr. Kadamus says, it’s hard to tell how they will age. Newer buildings—particularly green buildings—may have more complex mechanical systems, and require more training to maintain. This might not be as much of a problem for big universities with highly technically trained staff members, he says, but it could be an issue in the future for smaller colleges.
Size also matters. Small buildings are more costly to keep up because they don’t have the economies of scale of larger buildings when it comes to cleaning, maintenance, and heating and cooling. Labor costs for maintaining buildings from 10,000 to more than 50,000 gross square feet hover around $1 per square foot. But buildings less than 10,000 square feet can cost more than $3 per square foot, according to Sightlines research.
And colleges have them in droves: It’s the Victorian mansion on the edge of campus that houses an environmental center; it’s the college radio station; it’s all those little ag-school buildings. And they are often coveted structures.
“It’s part of the charm of the college, but there is a price to be paid,” Mr. Kadamus says. “As one administrator said to me, no matter how bad of shape a small building is in, there is always someone who wants to occupy it, because they want their own building.”
‘Dollars Are Scarce’
A number of campuses are looking more critically at their buildings and costs, and in some cases, making tough decisions to eliminate or consolidate space.
Rutgers, for example, has a plan to demolish houses, trailers, and other small structures around campus that constitute about 120,000 square feet of space. The university will relocate the language departments and other programs currently in those buildings to a 175,000-square-foot building that will also include new classrooms. Administrators estimate that the move will save $1.6-million a year in maintenance, custodial services, and energy costs.
Persuading departments to give up or make better use of space can be a tough conversation for any facilities manager or administrator. But “dollars are scarce, and where do you want to put your dollars?” Mr. Calcado says. “Do you want to put them into just additional space, or do you want to put your dollars into the academic program?” College reputations are built on academics, not square feet, he says.
“Every time there is a hike in tuition, the conversation is elevated,” he says.
Nine years ago, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst began tackling a deferred-maintenance backlog of $1.9-billion, bringing it down to $1.6-billion. The university faces unusual challenges in the age of its physical plant: 40 percent of the buildings are more than 50 years old, and 42 percent are between 25 and 50 years old, the 1960s and 70s vintage.
“That means that 82 percent we have real problems with,” says Juanita Holler, the university’s associate vice chancellor of facilities services. So the university has assessed and categorized the 330 buildings on campus: Some are historical “heritage buildings” that the university will work to preserve and renovate; others are getting minimal attention, awaiting demolition.
Editing Space
In some cases, UMass at Amherst will combine two buildings into one to save on renovation costs—Ms. Holler calls it the “buddy building” concept. For example, Bartlett Hall is a 1960s building in poor condition. “This was really shoddy construction,” Ms. Holler says, noting that Bartlett currently has bandages in the form of steel straps holding up the façade. “We had to spend quite a bit of money just to make sure that it doesn’t fall down.”
Instead of simply tearing down Bartlett and putting another building in its place, planners are pairing its demolition with a renovation of South College, a solid 1880s building. UMass will, in a sense, replace Bartlett by building an addition to South College. That addition will help architects and builders meet new codes and disability requirements, which would have been difficult and expensive if South College had merely been renovated on its own. In the end, South College and its addition might take up less space than two stand-alone buildings.
For a small, private institution like Smith College, administrators have found that keeping up with repairs and holding down costs means owning less space to maintain. After the 2008 recession hit, Smith saw its endowment wilt and students’ financial-aid needs rise, and administrators devised a plan to trim expenses. They wanted to spend less on utilities, and they wanted to start setting aside money to cover renovations in the future. They settled on putting aside 2 percent of the replacement value of the buildings on campus—or about $20-million—every year. That’s 10 percent of the college’s annual operating budget.
That number would be easier to hit if the college owned fewer buildings, so administrators set a goal of reducing Smith’s square footage by 5 percent.
“When we went into this, we recognized that Smith had more square footage per student on average than most of its peers,” says Ruth Constantine, vice president for finance and administration. Over the year, Smith, located in the center of Northampton, Mass., has grown in part by acquiring houses and other little buildings in town. Smith has already begun a process of demolishing or selling off some of them. “If we were a campus of big massive buildings, or with all the buildings centered in the middle, surrounded by acres of open land, you wouldn’t be able to pursue this strategy.”
But Ms. Constantine is careful to point out that Smith is not reducing academic space, nor is the college done building. In fact, the college has plans to tear down an antique infirmary, built during the 1918 influenza pandemic, and replace it with a smaller health and wellness center.
“Smith will continue to build,” she says. “We will just try to stay attentive to the space that we need and the space we don’t need.”