Colleges and universities across the country are burdened with inefficiently utilized facilities, leading to unnecessary costs, wasted space, and misplaced financial priorities. This policy brief examines the systemic mismanagement of campus facilities and proposes market-based reforms to legislatures and trustees in order to optimize space usage,…

School plants are indispensable for effective realization of school goals and objectives. This is because the successful implementation of school curriculum is dependent on the school plants, which refer to the physical facilities available in the school system, that are provided in the school. The insurance of school plants serves as a means of…

This paper focuses on an area of privatisation that has not to date received significant attention in educational research: the privatisation of infrastructure, facilities and maintenance, and in particular the labour of cleaning. Analysing the case of Victoria, Australia, we demonstrate how successive governments have defended the privatisation…

This paper features an expanded Web-based "Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI) Report." The purpose of APPA: Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers (APPA's) Facilities Performance Indicators is to provide a representative set of statistics about facilities in educational institutions. The goal for this year was to…

Purpose: Given greater awareness of environmental issues and the acceleration of climate change, universities are increasingly requiring undergraduate students to complete coursework in environmental issues. Research has shown that environmental courses hosted in science departments can be too challenging for students with no science background.…

Over the past three decades, the number of people housed in local jails has more than tripled. Yet when it comes to reforming the nation's incarceration policies, write Jennifer Copp and William Bales, researchers, policymakers, and the public alike have focused almost exclusively on state and federal prisons. If you took a snapshot on a single…

The Department of Defense (DOD) spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually acquiring products and services. Since 1990, Congress and DOD have taken numerous steps to address issues related to the quality of DOD's acquisition workforce, which consists of contracting officers, cost estimators, and personnel in several other career fields. But…

The higher education industry continues to go through changes that it has to manage in very purposeful ways. Several factors have converged to create an almost perfect storm that has taken some colleges and universities by surprise, despite the fact that there have been warning signs for years. Stagnant economic opportunities for families to…

This article will provide an overview of the options for performing facility condition assessments. Quite often, the facility manager will choose a condition assessment method without deliberate examination of what type of assessment is best suited to the needs of the organization. In addition, the needs of diverse audiences usually differ--for…

This paper features an expanded Web-based "Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI) Report." The purpose of APPA: Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers (APPA's) Facilities Performance Indicators is to provide a representative set of statistics about facilities in educational institutions. "The Facilities Performance…

The 2016 Thought Leaders symposium, supported in part by long-time sponsor Jacobs, focused on "Remaking the Facilities Organization." The report makes the case for a customer-centric higher education facilities organization. Experts provide their insights on how a focus on the customer provides a framework for driving change. The…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe four phases for how universities have addressed a sustainability agenda and offer specific lessons for how and where experiences on one campus, the University of Colorado Boulder, have been met with success and other challenges. The authors offer general reflections for executing university-wide…

There is good reason to look at energy and sustainability as "the" capital investment--savings that can be achieved through energy conservation and other sustainability measures can help offset increasing deferred maintenance and capital renewal costs. The APPA Energy and Sustainability Assessment Tool (ESAT) provides a dynamic database…

The 2015 Thought Leaders symposium focused on the topic of "Facilities & Technology: The Transformation of 'Campus.'" Educational institutions that master new technologies will have an edge in the increasingly competitive higher education landscape. This report discusses the factors related to integrating technology and the campus…

Campus sustainability projects provide an opportunity to explicitly link campus operations and academics. College and university buildings and grounds offer the potential for numerous hands-on sustainability projects. Few schools explicitly link sustainability projects with academics as often the academic side of an institution is separate from…