In 2009, Bowling Green State University struggled to maintain its aging campus and keep up with changing student needs. Knowing that they could not continue to operate and maintain all of their existing space, facilities leaders launched a new campus master plan. With an emphasis on upgrading the teaching and learning platform and improving overall asset productivity and utilization, Bowling Green recognized the opportunity to better align the classroom inventory with planned curriculum needs.
Download the report or explore the elements of Bowling Green’s new campus master plan below.
This resource is part of The Essential Guide to Cost Containment Strategies for Higher Education. Access this guide for 500+ critical tactics for immediate and long-term cost savings.
Quantifying the opportunity to take space offline
60%
The first step was to determine how much space could be decommissioned without detracting from academic programming. With the campus master plan’s emphasis on upgrading the teaching and learning platform and improving overall asset productivity and utilization, Bowling Green recognized the opportunity to better align the classroom inventory with planned curriculum needs. In 2012, Bowling Green tasked the provost, college deans, and other academic leaders with conducting a study to quantify Bowling Green’s true academic space requirements. At the time, there were 191 classrooms, nearly 1,900 sections, and an average classroom utilization rate of 60%. To better gauge actual need, the academic leaders modeled out the following changes:
- Elimination of low-census and low-demand courses from the curriculum
- Consolidation of low-census sections and multi-section courses
- Increasing station size to accommodate active learning pedagogies
- Optimizing the academic week to ensures courses are meeting between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., Mondays through Fridays, and between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Saturdays
Making strategic building investment decisions
How to improve space utilization
Discover how to work with academic leaders to redeploy underutilized campus space.
read the studyOnce Bowling Green quantified the opportunity to take academic space offline, the next step was to identify which buildings and spaces to invest in and which to decommission. Recognizing that this step involved a series of difficult decisions, Bowling Green assembled senior academic and administrative leaders to form the Building Investment Committee. This committee was a critical decision-making body responsible for translating the campus master plan into actionable milestones. It consisted of five members: the vice president of capital planning and campus operations, the chief business and financial officer, the provost, the dean of the college of business, and the president of the faculty senate.
The committee met regularly throughout 2009 and early 2010. The Facilities leader was responsible for providing data and information to help the committee make informed decisions about campus redesign and building investments. To ensure strategic relevance, every decision the committee reached was sent to Bowling Green’s president for final approval.
Generating faculty and student buy-in
Because Bowling Green set out to make a number of dramatic changes to the campus all at once, senior leaders were cognizant of the need to mitigate resistance and generate support. To achieve this, the Building Investment Committee established a two-part strategy: (1) engage end-users in developing new instructional space design guidelines through prototyping and (2) offer faculty upgraded classrooms in exchange for an extended academic week.
