It's so minute in the overall picture: On average, classrooms represent just 5 percent of the space on campus, and that's excluding housing, according to Ira Fink, president of Ira Fink and Associates, a university planning consultant based in Berkeley, Calif. And yet 15 percent of the campus administrators from 200 institutions surveyed by Hillier in 2005 cited lack of classroom space as a major issue.
That's kind compared to what's probably being said underneath the breaths of officials and faculty at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill these days. Happily, the state passed a bond referendum a few years ago to pay to renovate many of the campus's general purpose classrooms. Unfortunately, the construction schedules mean those classrooms must come off line temporarily. "And that's become increasingly difficult because the university also has an ongoing drive to increase enrollment over the next 10 years," says Megan Keefe, section head of scheduling at UNC.
Less space and more students equal mounting headaches, no matter how the statistics fall.
The reasons behind the incredible shrinking space vary. From a 5,000-foot view, Tom Shaver, founder and CEO of scheduling software provider Ad Astra Information Systems, believes it's because too few university officials consider space management their growth capacity tool. More practically, they don't enforce the scheduling policies in place. "You have to build the policy, then build reports that can then enforce the policy, and you need to be diligent about checking up on adherence to the policy on a term-by-term basis," he says.
Francis Hayes, vice president at Boston-based Shawmut Design and Construction, blames the spaces themselves, which were designed 10 to 15 years ago without building in flexibility. To add insult to injury, office space is encroaching on existing classrooms; Shaver's studies show the net amount of classroom space on North American campuses has decreased over the past 30 years, thanks to a need for private cubicles.
Plus, Shaver adds, "new construction dollars gravitate toward new workout facilities, libraries-stuff the presidents can give tours of." Planning for core academic space just isn't as exciting.
But it's not just a case of "so sad, too bad" for schedulers and students. The ramifications are reaching the highest levels as many funding sources for new construction projects are starting to require the campus to meet or exceed a base level of utilization first, warns Shaver. In other words, as Mother always said, "You have to clean your plate before you get seconds."
The good news? Conquering the space problem, consultants say, requires focusing on only two broad categories: logistics and politics.
Finding Primo Space
Jim Prince, vice president of operations at Geneva College (Pa.), figured his problem was obvious. Thirty-four classrooms simply wouldn't handle the course demands for 2,000 students at this private, Christian institution. He turned to consultants at Performa Higher Education to prove him right. Instead, Performa's classroom utilization study determined that only 13 classrooms were used more than the 67 percent benchmark. He could alleviate much of the bottleneck simply by subdividing larger classrooms and opening class sections during lunch.
Stories like this reinforce the importance of good database tools for Michael Schley, CEO of FM:Systems, which produces workplace management software. "Most campuses that don't have good information systems are probably wasting space," he says. "You can't manage what you can't track."
A good information system offers a way to store CAD drawings, so users have a graphic representation of each building, and allows officials to enter details like its location, including adjacency relationships between buildings and entities like parking lots or athletic fields. It should also track space by category, subcategory, and user-defined codes, and store employee information for everyone who uses that space.
Office space is encroaching on existing classrooms; studies indicate that the net amount of campus classroom space has decreased over the past 30 years, thanks to a need for private cubicles.
With the right input, when a department head requests space, you can pull up a graphical report within seconds and see which spaces are vacant, how many square feet that space uses, and the occupancy levels it allows, explains Dave Levenstein, manager of business development at FAMIS Software, which provides products that help organizations maintain and operate facilities assets, manage space, and control capital projects. Officials at Stanford University (Calif.) have even gone wireless with their FAMIS system, the better for officials to walk the campus entering information on the spot.
