I knew I wanted to start with deferred maintenance — a perennial issue for higher education, and decidedly unsexy, but one that is actually a big deal and that will very likely get worse fast. Campus buildings generally need a major overhaul after 25 years and to be replaced after 50, and most campuses went through major building booms that peaked in 1970 and 2005. Do that math.
To find out how two different kinds of colleges were grappling with all of that, I talked with Mark Conselyea, vice president for facilities operations and development at Ohio State University, which has a maintenance backlog of at least $1 billion. The scale of the campus is mind-boggling: 1,300 buildings spread over 1,700 acres. And the buildings are hardly all: “Across this campus, we have six miles of tunnels, we have 25 bridges, we’ve got 47 miles of storm and sewer,” he said on the podcast. “You can’t forget about all that infrastructure that’s connecting everything.” Getting higher-ups to allocate money for humble infrastructure is always a challenge. But listen to Conselyea, and you’ll wonder what’s lurking behind your walls — and probably want your campus to check it out.
Even more striking in that episode was my conversation with David K. Sheppard, chief legal officer and chief of staff at the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. He described how historically Black colleges and universities, mainly located “in the old Confederacy,” had been starved of state funds for years, leading to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in maintenance backlogs at many campuses.
“Suffice it to say that the government within those respective states has not placed the emphasis on providing equitable and just funding to historically Black colleges and universities,” he said. “And as a consequence of that, our institutions have suffered in terms of both dealing with issues of their physical plant and also having resources for appropriate instruction and modern-day research and development on our campuses.” Will anything change anytime soon? Maybe in Tennessee or Maryland, maybe with federal appropriations — listen to Sheppard’s take.
On sustainability, I wondered where we are now, more than a decade after the movement spread across higher education, as students drove recycling campaigns and institutions signed up for high-profile carbon-reduction pledges like the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment.
On our sustainability episode, Jay Antle, executive director of the Center for Sustainability and a professor of history at Johnson County (Kan.) Community College, insisted that the movement is still very much alive and students are pretty angry about the lack of progress campuses and governments are making. And like deferred maintenance, sustainability comes down to limiting exposure to financial and other risks. Bond-raters and insurance companies are definitely paying attention to climate change, energy costs, and fossil-fuel investments.
“Some of what we used to call ‘sustainability’ is now going to show up in what we’re calling ‘resilience planning’ for colleges and universities,” Antle said. Also on that episode, Nilda Mesa, a scholar with the Earth Institute at Columbia University, runs through the questions campus leaders should be asking, though she is “not so sure that they all are.”
The last guest I tracked down was an architect who applies his training to learning systems and student-success initiatives.
The pandemic coincided with a number of crises affecting higher ed, said Sukhwant Jhaj, vice provost for academic innovation and student achievement at Arizona State University, like a stark political divide in the country and the coming “demographic cliff.” Many colleges will respond with the usual, he said: Try to find new pools of middle-class students, or poach them from other institutions.
Another option is to redesign processes and structures to improve student support and create a better learning environment to attract and retain diverse populations of students.
To do that, you have to listen to students — and pay them for their time, said Jhaj. “Placing students at the center is an essential contribution, I believe, of embedding of design practices and design thinking into the problem-solving approaches of the institution,” he said. “Clearly we have designed a system that works for people who are capable of being successful in that system, students coming from a middle-class family and others. And we need to design a new kind of system, which will require the engagement of faculty, staff, and students, particularly those for whom the system is not designed.” —Scott Carlson
New tools of note.
- The Department of Education last week made it easier for colleges to assist low-income students in obtaining federal food assistance, subsidies for broadband connections, and other federal benefits. In a “Dear Colleague” letter, the department clarified that institutions can use information that students have submitted as part of their federal financial-aid applications to also inform those students of the other available benefits. Many aid administrators have been reluctant to use that information for anything other than determining financial-aid awards, although some student advocates have been pushing for this change.
- Higher education is very much on the agenda in many state legislatures this year, and not only among those looking to limit teaching about diversity and equity. If you’re interested in staying on top of what’s happening where, check out these tools for tracking legislation and other matters from the Education Commission of the States.
- If accountability is your bag, this easily searchable new database from the Century Foundation could be useful. Dubbed the PEPS Bot, it shows Department of Education records on where colleges stand in complying with rules about eligibility for federal student aid, including whether institutions are subject to additional oversight because of concerns about their financial viability.
Our ‘Shark Tank” Edu Edition’ is back live at SXSW EDU. Got an idea or a venture to pitch?
Austin, Tex., here I come. I’ll be at SXSW EDU to present the seventh edition of our annual pitchfest, as my fellow “sharks” and audience members weigh in on creative ways to improve higher ed. Joining me as sharks are Catharine (Cappy) Bond Hill, managing director of the nonprofit Ithaka S+R consultancy and former president of Vassar College, and Paul Freedman, a serial entrepreneur and now president of the Learning Marketplace at Guild Education. As in years past, we’re eager to hear ideas related to academics, business operations, affordability, career advising, faculty life, and more.
Will you be there, and do you have a new venture or even just a great new approach for us to consider? Please email your pitch, with “Shark Tank” in the subject line, to goldie@chronicle.com to be considered as a contestant.
Recommended reading.
Here are some education-related stories from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.
- Policy makers often lament the brain drain from rural communities. Yet it turns out something as simple as “a positive experience in grade school” can have a big impact on young people’s willingness to return home, according to Iowa State University researchers cited in this report in We Are Iowa.
- Hearing a lot about blockchain, the metaverse, Web3, cryptocurrencies, decentralized autonomous organizations, and other “buzzy” developments? Wondering what they could mean for higher ed? Rebecca Koenig’s wide-ranging feature on EdSurge presents some of the possibilities.
- The pandemic’s restrictions on travel and disruptions to lab access were difficult for academic scientists everywhere, but the pain wasn’t evenly shared. Writing in The Washington Post, four researchers who study the impact of science and technology on society said the additional, unexpected demands of child care and virtual schooling “fell most heavily on female and early-career faculty.”
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.