Imagine you’re in the market for a 2,000-square-foot house for your family of four. It’s just enough space, and it’s in the range you can afford. But some beneficent fellow comes along and says that he will not only buy you a 5,000-square-foot house but also cover the utilities, taxes, and associated expenses.
Would you take the deal, even though you don’t need the space? Most of us probably would.
That, campus planners say, is the economic calculus helping to drive constant expansion and poor utilization of space on many college campuses. The man in the story might take the form of a politician bringing home money for a building, a president hoping to pad his résumé with a construction spree, or merely a college administration not paying enough attention. Those spaces cost a lot to heat, cool, and fix up year after year. “Ultimately it costs the students,” says Persis C. Rickes, a prominent campus planner.
A contentious solution—tossed around for years, but now perhaps gaining traction—turns on market forces: What if colleges put a price on square footage and made departments or faculty pay, whether in actual dollars or some kind of exchange?
Colleges could also charge for utilities, which might encourage departments to save energy. The colleges might set up a fee for maintenance or a fund for major renovations.
Some prominent campus planners have pondered whether colleges could borrow a tactic from the travel industry and charge more for some spaces, like classrooms, at peak-use times, setting up a market incentive to schedule classes throughout the week.
This idea is not far-fetched: For more than a decade now, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has charged its various departments for space—currently $2 to $35 per square foot, plus utilities. Recently the university also instituted a charge for deferred maintenance—$2.70 per square foot next year—which will generate enough money to cover a $90-million renovation every two years. The Johns Hopkins University charges its departments $20 to $30 a square foot, which covers some facilities and administrative costs. Stanford University, where growth is limited by Santa Clara County, has a well-established space-charging program, too.
What if colleges put a price on square footage and made departments or faculty pay, whether in actual dollars or some kind of exchange?
Most American colleges do not charge for space—in part because doing so would raise the hackles of faculty members and others on campus. Space is a proxy for status in academe, and it is fiercely guarded. Charging for space is far more common and accepted on campuses in Australia, New Zealand, and England than it is in America, planners say.
“The British are more rational,” says Philip Parsons, a principal in the Boston architectural firm Sasaki Associates, who is British himself. In the “frontier culture” of American campuses, as he puts it, he frequently sees buildings with banks of isolated, underused faculty offices. (Offices, incidentally, account for 20 to 30 percent of the space on many campuses.) He wonders if an inverted form of space-charging could change that: If “rent” is seen as punitive, could colleges instead reward professors or staff members who give up their offices and agree to work in spaces that are smaller, more efficient, and more collaborative?
“The space you allocate [for offices] could drop in half or more, depending on how you did it,” Mr. Parsons says. “But you could also create a better learning environment.”
However it’s done, this kind of program would not be turned on with the flip of a switch. For starters, as Michigan and other institutions have found, colleges would have to find a way to transfer some central-operations money to the various departments so they could cover their rent. Colleges might have to evaluate spaces on campus if they plan to charge different rates for buildings of different ages or quality. If colleges plan to charge for facilities, they also would have to add energy meters to every building (a step that many energy and sustainability experts say colleges should take anyway).
Colleges would also have to figure out whether to combine a space-rate charge with other space policies, or just let the market do its work. Ms. Rickes, the campus planner, believes that charging for space would work best if combined with a strong set of standards—putting a limit on, say, the size of faculty offices or the square footage of research labs. A pure market model, some planners say, could create a campus of space winners and losers, based on departments’ funds.
David A. Kadamus, president and chief executive of Sightlines, a facilities-research firm, says colleges should also consider whether they are big enough to make a space-charging program worthwhile. It could add an administrative layer that might not pay for itself on smaller campuses.
Alan Fish, vice president for real-estate and campus services at Johns Hopkins, says space rates are worth considering—particularly now, as campus building slows down nationwide. “Universities all over the country have internal charges for all sorts of things all the time, so this is something that is not hard to do,” he says.
The hardest part may have nothing to do with budgets and logistics: finding the courage to make such an unpopular proposal.
“Anything that brings accountability into overhead costs is a good tool,” Mr. Fish says. “But nothing substitutes for having deans and administrators with backbones.”