Space Constraints

Elizabeth Redden is attending SCUP–43 for Inside Higher Ed. Her latest report from Montreal is titled Space Constraints:

It was standing room only; there were calls for extra chairs. One man made himself comfortable on the floor. “Talk about the obvious irony of this,” Tom Shaver, founder and chief executive officer of Ad Astra Information Systems, said to the group of university administrators and consultants squeezed in for the presentation: “Growing Enrollments in a Fixed Amount of Space.” “Space utilization” is a buzz-phrase on college campuses, and indeed it’s also in the air at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) Annual Conference this week in Montreal. But space utilization, in itself, is not the problem, as Shaver told the SCUP crowd. And solely focusing on average usage rates of existing facilities, he continued, leads universities to ask the wrong questions.