It’s a complicated time to be running a higher education campus. It may have been five years since the Covid-19 pandemic began, but facilities teams are still struggling with low enrollment, funding shortfalls and changing perceptions of the higher education experience. For some, physical campus facilities and the obligations associated with them can feel like a burden, and there’s a gap between what institutions need to spend and what they actually invest.

According to the 2025 State of Facilities in Higher Education report from building intelligence solutions company Gordian, just over a quarter of the schools in its database (27 percent) are seeing signs of campus expansion, but this is at a modest level of three percent. Where schools are enhancing their facilities, the report notes, there is more caution about costs because of uncertainty over higher education trends in the future. 

Often, capital renewal investment has been deferred as institutional leaders prioritize other initiatives, meaning buildings aren’t kept in adequate condition. At best, this has a minor negative impact on student experience, but at worst, inadequate or unhealthy facilities can be dangerous or affect performance outcomes. And for most, this accelerates and compounds the backlog of demands the facilities will be placing on institutional financial resources.

“This situation has been going on for some time now,” explains Pete Zuraw, vice president of market strategy and development at Gordian. “There’s a misalignment between the scale of facilities and the resources institutions have to care for them.” Furthermore, cycles of improvement need to come around ever more frequently, some assets are less durable than others, and many areas face a shortage of construction workers.

One of the challenges of dealing with this perfect storm in campus facilities management is that institutions do not have a handle on what they have done in the past, adds Zuraw: “To make appropriate decisions for where you’re going, you need to know how you got to this position. Using data to understand the choices the organization made, what drove those choices, and the implications of those choices is essential. Then you can connect that data with other factors such as the social, the academic, even the athletic needs of the present situation.” With schools facing a shortfall in budgets of 32 percent, these data insights are crucial to ensuring future investments are well-targeted. 

Good data on institutional facilities can support teams to navigate these budgetary constraints. But this requires more than a simple spreadsheet of campus assets, their location and their condition. It should comprise more complex information, including the mix of assets, what can be used flexibly and what cannot, the appeal to staff and students, what is used the most and why. 

Not all of these variables are tangible. “Buildings define the character of an institution and affect the communities around them. They’re an expression of culture. All of this must factor into decisions around what we maintain and what we remove,” says Zuraw. As more institutions embrace hybrid learning, this argument does not cease to be important, either. “Leaders might be thinking, why do I need a campus if 60,000 of my students are off-site and 15,000 on it? But it’s also a question of place and institutional identity,” he says. 

To add to this complexity, reasons for increasing or decreasing investment on campus will be highly unique to each institution. Institutions will be experiencing different outcomes in enrollment, hybrid learning, utility costs and changes to their programs, for example. Facilities teams therefore have to carefully weigh up a number of local variables to see whether expanding campus facilities exposes them to greater risk than reward, and how this will affect budgets and management resources in the longer term. 

For this reason, making strategic decisions about facilities needs to be a collaborative exercise, even when institutions are facing crises. Zuraw explains: “During the pandemic, many schools deferred strategic thinking because they said they were too busy to be strategic. But you can have someone who is doing the crisis response work and then people who are thinking about what this means for the long term.”

For all but the most well-resourced institutions, investment in physical assets tends to be greater than all of the other financial resources in an institution, and costs only increase once these assets are built and open, so facilities cannot be a second or third-tier issue, Zuraw insists. Leadership teams that do not consult with facilities teams on the ground may find that their decisions lead to hurdles in the long run – financial or otherwise. “Facilities teams can be dynamic and creative if consulted at the right time. If the organization makes a decision that is unwise, too expensive or simply unnecessary and publicizes that commitments have been made before getting the complete input of those who must deliver on that promise, there’s often nothing to do but implement it – regardless of the implications,” he says. “But if you knew the challenges in advance, you might choose to do something different that met the same strategic goal.” 

Gordian’s report found that the amount of space facilities personnel are expected to work with is drifting upward, and more institutions are exploring ways to use technology to monitor and manage assets on campus. The report describes AI as an “emerging influence”, but its use and impact are hampered by the fact there is a paucity of data available to feed AI tools in this area since facilities information is usually proprietary and not publicly available. 

Almost a third of respondents to Gordian’s survey said they aspired to have AI overseeing the operations of buildings and systems at some point in the future. But without the data to draw answers from, AI tools have limited scope. That said, some institutions are exploring how AI can support their facilities management goals. Penn State, for example, has deployed alarm management tools that connect different building automation systems, using AI to provide early diagnostic behavior and inform how teams should react. People costs account for a huge portion of facilities budgets, so it’s easy to see how AI could streamline tasks and improve productivity for human teams. 

Zuraw believes that the future of higher education is a positive one. What has altered, he says, is “the financial equation, the experiential equation, and what it means to be a member of that community”. The role of the higher education institution is not as clear as it once was, he adds, but a sense of place will continue to be important even as thousands of students seek a virtual academic experience because it suits their needs.

In his 2018 book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Nathan Grawe talks about an impending enrollment cliff for students in the US. Although campus data shows that numbers have not started to decline just yet for most schools, Grawe signals a drop-off in college enrolment, due to declining birth rates since 2008, that will start appearing in 2026. While the numbers are not down to such a dramatic point, it’s clear that the smartest campuses leaders need to be, and are, scanning the horizon. Intelligent data insights can support them to make more strategic decisions about campus renovation and expansion to prevent facilities from becoming a drag on institutional budgets. 

With this in mind, Zuraw urges facilities leaders to ensure they are working outside silos and problem-solving in a collaborative way. “It’s a role that touches everyone in the institution every day, so if they’re not listening and collaborating with people in those communities, they will all make mistakes and have to make even more difficult choices,” he concludes.

Read Gordian’s State of Facilities report.

This custom content is sponsored by Gordian and developed by Inside Higher Ed's sponsored content team. The editorial staff of Inside Higher Ed had no role in its creation.