Reports on Facilities Planning, Design, and Construction

As of January 7, 2010, recent reports shared on The Chronicle of Higher Education's Buildings & Grounds Blog include (not everything is listed here):

• Montgomery College Performing Arts Center
• Oldest Building at College of Marin demolished as part of fire training
• University of South Carolina Arboretum transformation
• Enotah Hall (residential) at Young Harris College
• Eastern University demolishes 1912 log cabin
• 1968 Hamilton College Building renovation gets LEED Gold
• University of Virginia South Lawn project nears end
• Tulane U converts cross-campus street into pedestrian thoroughfare
• And lots more

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

College Planning & Management Magazine - October 2009

Rather than focus on a specific item, we're going to share this issue's Table of Contents with you, so you can click through the specific articles you might be interested in: Designing the Healthy Residence Hall by Nadia Zihri; Sustainability and Managing Student Expectations by John Southard, Jennifer Baldridge, and Chris Heinz; Green: The Preferred Color Choice at St. Norbert College (mechanical systems department initiative) by Janet Wiens; Caller I.D. (anonymous tip lines and security) by one of our favorite higher education writers, Julie Sturgeon; The Bottom Line of Outsourced Facilities Services by Randy Ledbetter; Towson University Notifies the Masses (emergency alert system) by Jason Kneen; and Technology: The Netbook Phenomenon by David Dodd.

Student Housing, 2009: Downsizing Residence Halls: Space and Costs

College Planning & Management magazine's 2009 college housing report, "Living on Campus," finds that the median cost per square foot of housing has dropped by the largest amount since it was $80/sq ft in 1997, rising to more than $230 sq ft in 2008. A sub-report inside the full report is titled: "Housing Officers Are Juggling Student Expectations With an Uncertain Economy." Yep, aren't we all?



Read it here:
http://www.peterli.com/cpm/pdfs/CollegeHousing2009.pdf

Residence-Hall Market Sees Rising Demand and Falling Construction Prices

A "Buildings & Grounds" blog post by Lawrence Biemiller notes a residence hall building boom in Western Pennsylvania and that a drop in building costs is letting the University of Georgia move from a wood to a steel frame in a new residence hall.

It's behind password protection, but a related article from The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a negative view by Robert E. Ritwchel regarding the""mission leap" of two-year institutions building residence halls.

Dorms of Distinction" Winners and Runners-Up

University Business magazine received 76 nominations for its Dorms of Distinction competition. This lengthy article provides vignettes of many of the selected winners as well as a summary of trends from all of the nominations. The trends included: getting more student input at all phases of the design and planning process, more and more home-like atmosphere touches, and more sophisticated and intentional common and gathering areas. This is a must-read for anyone in the planning or design stages of a new residence hall or major residence hall renovation.

Outsourcing Student Housing in American Community Colleges: Problems and Prospects

This article, by Gray Bekuers of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, is published in Volume 31, Issue 8 of the Community College Journal of Research and Practice (August 2007).

You may or may not have access, depending upon your own or your employer's subscription to this and other journals. Here is the abstract:Today's community colleges are experiencing tremendous growth at a time when higher education is experiencing little success in the fierce battle for public funding. Administrators believe that providing housing on college campuses increases enrollment and improves access, but they are having difficulty meeting students' demands for both quantity and quality of student housing. Community college leaders are challenged to find alternative ways to achieve new housing on their campuses. With resources already stretched, institutions sometimes struggle to find funding sources for these projects due to their impact on institutional debt service. Many colleges are turning to private foundations and corporations for their financing, construction, and management needs. This practice has increased dramatically over the past 10 years. To date, there have been over 214 privatized, nonrecourse-financed student housing projects on college and university campuses in the United States, with at least 11 occurring on community college campuses. Due to increasing demand, privatization of student housing is likely to increase. Very little literature exists addressing the evolution, problems, and potential of this practice, but administrators may need to have an understanding of the process as it becomes more commonplace on community college campuses. Interviews with community college administrators, student housing administrators, and representatives of private development and management corporations and a literature review were conducted. The results are synthesized into a history and overview of outsourcing student housing construction and management in the United States, including problems with outsourcing, strategies to avoid failure, future possibilities, and recommendations for future research.