Wilson College learned its lesson about deferring maintenance the hard way: Four years ago, steam leaks in the walls and floors of its 1925 library grew so bad that they forced the college to close the building. Librarians set up a temporary facility in what had been a student coffeehouse.
“Deferred maintenance that you let go will make itself its own emergency,” says Wilson’s president, Barbara K. Mistick, who took office just a few months before the library had to be closed. “The library is a poster child for what happens if you don’t have a plan.”
After years of enrollment declines and tight budgets, the library wasn’t the small college’s only deferred-maintenance problem, either. The campus electrical system was inadequate — “in one of the residence halls, you couldn’t plug in the clothes dryers and the air-conditioners at the same time,” Ms. Mistick says — and upgrades have set the college back some $600,000.
Wilson’s situation is far from unusual. But the enrollment and financial worries that nearly shuttered Sweet Briar College this year have focused new attention on small colleges’ vulnerabilities, and deferred maintenance is regularly mentioned as a major problem — as it was at Sweet Briar — even if it is not always widely understood.
Typically, deferred maintenance includes a range of needs, some of them more obvious than others. Leaking roofs and peeling paint are included, but so is replacing a heating or telecommunications system that appears to be working fine but has outlived what experts say is the life span it was designed for. Also included is bringing older structures into compliance with current building codes and accessibility guidelines.
Small colleges and big universities alike defer maintenance “forever,” says David Kadamus, founder of the facilities-consulting firm Sightlines. Nationally, colleges that have worked with Sightlines “are deferring issues faster than they’re repairing them,” spending only 20 percent to 30 percent of what it would cost to maintain their campuses at the highest level, he says. Some spend as little as 7 percent. Deferring maintenance can be a particular problem for small colleges, he says, because “it’s a lot easier to manage one big building than 10 smaller ones” — and small colleges typically have a lot of small buildings.
What Wilson concluded, though, was that it was never going to recover enrollment, which dropped below 700 a few years ago, if it kept skimping on maintenance. “On some level, families select institutions based on how much you care about yourself,” President Mistick says. “And how much you care about yourself is evident when you come onto campus.”
In 2013, Wilson’s Board of Trustees committed to spending $1 million annually on campus improvements — and that’s aside from major undertakings like the $12-million library renovation and expansion, which is due to be completed next month. “What we did was say infrastructure improvements have to be part of making the college sustainable,” Ms. Mistick says.
The college and Sodexo, the company to which it outsources facilities management, have a list of projects with a total price tag of more than $13 million. Health and safety issues have top priority, then code compliance and accessibility, then general modernization, says Brian Ecker, vice president for finance and administration.
But in selecting each year’s projects, administrators also keep in mind what will help attract and retain students, and they try to spread improvements around so that no constituency feels neglected.
A downside is that many high-priority projects are, as Ms. Mistick puts it, “very unsexy” in terms of their appeal to donors. A library overhaul or athletics upgrades will attract gifts — Wilson’s library project is being paid for entirely with donations, she says — but boiler replacements, sidewalk repairs, and bathroom overhauls? Not so much. “We could spend a fortune on roads,” she says wistfully.
‘The Roof President’
Scott Bierman, president of Beloit College, has learned to explain the deferred-maintenance problem in straightforward terms.
“We have a plant that has a value of somewhere around $140 million. The laws of physics promise that the structures will deteriorate at a rate of about 2 percent a year, so that’s $2.8 million,” he says. “Right now we budget about a million a year for maintenance. So absent a big infusion from a donor, we’re going to have a deficit.”
Eventually, he says, some of that deficit will be covered by big capital campaigns. In the meantime, he says, “I’m gonna go down in Beloit history as the roof president — we’re replacing roofs at a rate of about $250,000 a year. We’re a college proudly founded in 1846, so we’ve got a lot of old roofs.”
Even small colleges that aren’t so old have deferred-maintenance problems, says Andrew R. Dorantes, vice president for administration and finance at Harvey Mudd College, which dates to 1955. Its original buildings have reached an age that Mr. Dorantes, an avid mountain biker, describes their maintenance needs in this way: “We are at the beginning of the mountain and starting to climb straight up — we’re at the point where we’re about to go vertical.”
Anticipating that, five years ago the college’s Board of Trustees adopted the Renewal and Replacement Reserve program, which currently spends about $1.2 million a year but is expected to reach $2.7 million in 15 years. And Mr. Dorantes keeps a close eye on the ever-changing list of projects. “The buildings can’t speak,” he says. “I want to be their voice.”
“When you have constraints, sometimes you have to kick the can down the road,” he adds. “I always tell my staff they have to tell me when the can can’t be kicked down the road anymore.”
Deferred-maintenance problems at a small college can seem “overwhelming” and leave a leader wondering, “Where am I going to start?” says Ms. Mistick, the Wilson president. The trick, she says, is to evaluate each item by cost and priority. The reward, she says, is that even just spending a few thousand dollars to paint part of a building can send a strong positive message about the college.
And it’s worth remembering, says Mr. Kadamus, the consultant, that buildings have a lot of inherent elasticity that facilities managers can work with — at least as long as steam isn’t leaking into the walls. “We were in Tuscany a few years ago, and we stayed in an inn that is something like 800 years old,” he says. “Was it in perfect shape? No. Was the building still working? Sure.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
