As Universities Age, Billions-Worth of Projects on Table

This is about Ohio, but we all know that Ohio is far from alone in this.

Students often complain about the sticker shock of tuition costs. But it is Ohio’s aging public universities and colleges that are facing a multibillion dollar backlog of construction needs.

The Ohio Board of Regents has estimated that 37.2 million square feet of education-related space requires rehabbing or rebuilding at the whopping cost of $3.9 billion to $5 billion. And while university presidents, officials and policymakers are scrambling to come up with all that money, a higher education building boom could provide a windfall for Ohio’s construction industry.

sustainable facilities vs. Sustainable Facilities

Writing in Facilities Manager, Kevin Folsom asks: "Everything we build will decay, but it may last longer if properly maintained. So here’s a puzzling question….If we build facilities that the natural law causes to decay at fairly predictable rates from birth to burial, why do we not plan for it?" He also notes:

Institutional leadership is not taking into account the renewal needs of their facilities. And, the maintenance operations run on average with about half the funding needed. Meanwhile, as we progress along through the years, we hit a quantum leap in environmental sustainability awareness. Then to everyone’s surprise, leadership begins to see that not enough is being done to support this, mostly in their facilities. As a result, we begin cramming all this new energy saving technology and techniques into old antiquated facilities needing significant renewal. What are we going to do about this? Fortunately, the solution has been used by numerous institutions for 30+ years.needs. Not all state institutions can carry funding over annually, or plan on interest income so we’ll go about this solution differently, but let’s work on the private institutions.

Read more about his solution here (PDF).

Deferred Maintenance Reporting for the Have-Nots (PDF)

'This topic is not for institutions that have plenty of money, which replace everything in the facilities inventory according to its 'industry standard expected life cycle.' It's nice to be able to travel that route. However, there is broader path that most of us follow. It is usually referred to as 'running systems and equipment to failure.'"

Crumbling French Universities Look for Help

The article, "Crumbling French Universities Look for Help," is from the Boston Globe by Anna Willard:

The ugly concrete campus of Paris 6 university is dominated by a tower that has been a building site for eleven years as asbestos is removed. Nobody seems to be able to pinpoint when the work will finish.

The government tried to brighten the dreary site with a modernistic red and yellow science building but forgot to put in air conditioning, a mistake because the laboratory machines heat up to temperatures that damage the research.

***

France's 85 universities are struggling. They have slipped down international league tables, many are overcrowded, lacking funds and facilities and losing their best staff to better paid jobs in the United States or elsewhere.