From The Conversable Economist, April 3:
Higher Education and the Edifice Complex
It’s been said that colleges and universities have an edifice complex: they like big buildings. Major donors like have having their names on buildings–or at least chiseled into the lobby. Faculty (setting aside the precarious position of adjunct faculty) feel that they need separate offices–even if they often work from home, or the laboratory or library, or even if they go off for a few weeks every year for seminars and lectures at other institutions. The conventional wisdom is that potential students, making their choices, judge by the evidence of their eyes whether the buildings of an institution seem stable and substantial.
My wife and I sometimes note that when you are a child, houses seem like nearly permanent objects, like the Egyptian pyramids. Then when you become a homeowner, it comes as a shock to discover that your house is instead a bunch of systems–roofing, windows, heating/air conditioning, water, electrical, large appliances, carpets, siding, painting–that are continually wearing out and breaking down. Across the country, many colleges and universities have been tempted to take a parallel approach to campus buildings: build them as if they were permanent and unchanging, and then be astonished at the concept of maintenance.
Scott Carlson provides a readable overview of the issues in “The Backlog that Could Threaten Higher Ed’s Viability: A Big Bill for Deferred Maintenance is Coming Due” (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 31, 2023). Carlson writes:
Meanwhile, bricks, steel, concrete, and mortar follow the laws of entropy. As a rule, buildings have two critical stages in their lifetimes: At 25 years, a building needs significant updates and renovations; at 50, a major overhaul of its structure and systems. In recent decades, colleges went through two peaks of construction, one in the early 1970s and another in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Do the math: Two building life cycles will come due in the 2020s.
Lander Medlin, the president and chief executive of APPA, an association of higher-education facilities managers, points out that the construction costs of a building represent only about 25 percent of the total lifetime expenses. Recurring annual costs, like utilities, everyday maintenance, and operations, represent another 35 to 40 percent. The rest is periodic costs in the lifecycle of essential building systems: replacing the roof after 50 years, updating the heating and cooling system after 20, the plumbing and wiring, the building’s skin, and more.
Carlson cites a number of examples: for example, the major state university branch in my own metro area, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus, “has a 10-year renewal need of $4.2 billion, with more than seven-million-gross square feet of space in poor or critical condition.” It is not an exceptional case.
Moreover, when money is tight, postponing some deferred maintenance often feels easier than the other options. But the number of college and university students has been declining for a decade now, and the combination of US demographic trends combined with pandemic and political factors that have made the US a less attractive choice for international students, the decline seems likely to fall. For a lot of what faculty members do, including the rise in online classes, work-from-home is a very plausible option....
....MUCH MORE
And a related problem:
"The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance"
To a certain extent nobody knows how to do anything anymore.
