The Unsustainable Building Boom at Colleges and Universities

Higher education should all be about tomorrow, yet the colleges and universities build as if there is no tomorrow. Just when the popularity of online universities makes many university presidents wonder about the future of their brick and mortar campus and economists warn of the ever large debt accumulated by graduates due to skyrocketing tuition fees, adding ever more fanciful brick and mortar buildings adds significantly to the expenses of higher education institutions.

A probably largely speculative graph of facility space in higher ed
from the New England Journal of Higher Education

The last round of decadence before disaster strikes, or a sound investment in a healthy future? The potential for a debacle hasn't gone unnoticed and has become the topic of national media:

A multibillion-dollar building boom is under way at U.S. universities and colleges—despite budget shortfalls and endowment decline.

Some $11 billion in new facilities have sprung up on American campuses in each of the last two years—more than double what was spent on buildings a decade ago, according to the market-research firm McGraw-Hill Construction—even as schools are under pressure to contain costs. (Washington Monthly)

The building boom sometimes just comes as part of ambitious masterplans, part of the agenda of presidents that worry about their legacy, or created under the guise of keeping up with the Joneses. Sometimes the Joneses live in Finland or China, where students are so much better in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) – as if the buildings are mostly responsible for successful education in those fields. K-12 schools call for the 21st century learning methods based on the four Cs: critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity.

CSU Campus masterplan, blue buildings are new

Higher ed can't get left behind with 20th century buildings. Sometimes, as we can readily demonstrate in Baltimore, the desire to compete with up to date buildings instead of highly-qualified faculty or cutting edge curricula and research takes on bizarre distortions between demand and supply. But lowly state universities are by no means the only culprits. MIT allowed themselves an original Gehry and afterwards sued the architect because the masterpiece Stata Center allegedly didn't function to the specifications.

Colleges and universities across the country have been building new facilities to keep up with expanding STEM – science, technology, engineering and math -- programs. Cornell University, University of California at Merced, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and George Washington University in Washington, D.C., are just a few of the many schools with slick new facilities for computer science and engineering (Network World, March 2015)

In technology terms, higher-education has spent massive amounts in “hardware” while dramatically under-investing in “software.” (Washington Post)

In part colleges and universities can justify the binge building with growth: in a growing population an ever larger number of kids select college as their destination, two trends adding up to increased demand and in some cases significant enrollment increases.

Enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 15 percent between 1992 and 2002. Between 2002 and 2012, enrollment increased 24 percent, from 16.6 million to 20.6 million. Much of the growth between 2002 and 2012 was in full-time enrollment; the number of full-time students rose 28 percent, while the number of part-time students rose 19 percent. During the same time period, the number of females rose 25 percent, while the number of males rose 24 percent. Enrollment increases can be affected both by population growth and by rising rates of enrollment. Between 2002 and 2012, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds increased from 28.5 million to 31.4 million, an increase of 10 percent, and the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college rose from 37 percent in 2002 to 41 percent in 2012. (Fast Facts)

This graph shows that facilities have outrun enrollment

However, the building boom is by no means always proportional to enrollment and sometimes the opposite, i.e. college presidents cling to the hope that new buildings would boost their enrollment, following the old adage "build it and they will come". This explains why across the nation the building boom outpaces the larger student body. Unfortunately it is very hard to determine the actual inventory of facilities and the annual growth rate. Here a quote from a 2007 attempt of a compus facility survey by the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP):

In 1974, there were 3,038 public and private colleges and universities in the United States. In the 2006 edition of its Almanac, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that there were 4,276 US colleges and universities1 . The net assignable square feet (NASF) on campuses today is unknown, but estimated at over 6.0 billion and growing. This represents a nearly five-fold increase from the 1.3 billion NASF reported after the last federal survey. Enrollment has continued to increase at a rapid rate. The projected enrollment for 2007 in postsecondary education is nearly 18,000,0002 , compared to 11,700,000 in 1979. Both figures are from the Digest of Education Statistics: 2006 Table 3, published by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 

Other factors that may actually reduce the need for brick and mortar space include new trends in learning from online learning to a departure from the lecture hall type of knowledge dissemination and an increase in evening enrollment allowing more efficient use of facilities.

Educational institutions can create virtual learning communities by using information and communications technology. The virtual environment can break physical borders, widening social networks and allowing greater interactivity and rewarding experiences. Many emerging technologies can emulate most traditional classroom equipment and enrich learning. (OECD Higher Education Facilities: Issues and Trends).

In Baltimore, the Maryland College of Art MICA (a small private art and design school) had an exceptional growth in enrollment and grew its campus accordingly much to the benefit of the city which saw investment in areas that hadn't seen any buildings rehabbed in decades, namely on the now infamous North Avenue. By contrast, Coppin University, (a small historically black college in the state university system) also located on North Avenue but several miles to the west of MICA, did a massive campus expansion while it saw shrinking student numbers.

MICA Brown Center, a Baltimore landmark.
Architect: Ziger Snead, Baltimore
(Photo: ArchPlan)

The University of Baltimore (UB), another school with an urban campus but about twice the size of the two other schools and like MICA poised to grow significantly has also embarked on a building spree with a new student center, dormitory, business school and law school, all occupying important urban corners and all making the area livelier by not only activating the sites themselves but supporting retail and restaurants in the surrounding areas.

The University of Maryland at Baltimore (UMB) is similar in size to UB, it too has many new buildings. However, hemmed in between the UM Hospital facilities, the new UM Biopark and the Veteran Hospital, its campus may have had the least urban design impact. Its massive new law school, for example rose on the same footprint as the old one and its net effect on the streetscape was rather small.

UB Law School. Architect: Behnisch, Stuttgart
(Photo: ArchPlan)

Johns Hopkins University with its Homewood Campus is much less visible even thought its enrollment is much larger (over 20,000 students, not all on this campus, though). Less through geographic expansion than increased density and demolition, JHU's Homewood campus also increased significantly with about 1,8 million of new area since 2001. It, too had an urban impact as an "anchor institution", reviving the area known as Charles North.

Just as architecture is more than a form that contains space-- -as Maya Lin once observed, architecture is also “an experience, a passage”--- a university’s physical infrastructure is more than a real estate investment. Its physical presence helps create, for good or for ill, its social---its civic---infrastructure.(Nancy Cantor, President Syracuse University 2012)

The presidents of all those colleges and universities are well aware of the role they have to play in their city and not only want to be a good neighbor but have embraced the idea of community engagement and empowerment.

 "Universities must not be remote and insular institutions. They should stand at the fulcrum of society's most important debates and issues, and should seek to connect the university's many strengths with the public at large." (Hopkins President Ronald Daniels)

JHU north of downtown has a traditional campus

In a city of 630,000, about 40,000 students located in the downtown and uptown college locations alone (the list above is not fully inclusive) are an essential part of the urban development, especially when the traditional industries continue to contract. Cities like Baltimore therefore have latched on to the concept of "anchor institutions" and the idea that colleges and universities are not only important for their educational contributions, their workforce or the economic product, but for invigorating entire neighborhoods and proving a city with the coveted image of innovation and creativity. Joined at the hip, then, the question of the sustainability of the building booms and campus enlargements is not only a question affecting the institutions themselves but also the city as a whole.

One can only hope that after serious overbuilding of suburban homes (the housing bubble), the ongoing oversupply of retail and the surplus of convention centers, colleges and universities are wiser and don't represent another bubble about to burst.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD


Links:

There is a Building Boom in US Higher Education. Washington Monthly, March 30, 2012
Computer Science Surge Sparks College Building Boom, Network World March 23, 2015
Why American Colleges should stop splurging on buildings...Washington Post, October 13, 2014
Is the college admission bubble about to burst? USN
Collegetown Baltimore
Universities as Anchor Institutions
New England Journal of Higher Ed: Another Brick in the Wall
To Build or Not to Build