It is fair to say that very few in Higher Ed have been fortunate to be working in an institution where priority has been given to maintaining the facilities at the level that they should have been. Sightlines, a company that provides guidance to higher ed institutions on facilities management, publishes an annual report titled “State of Facilities in Higher Education”. You can download and read the 2015 report here (note that you have to provide personal information to download and you may be contacted by Sightlines). This report is very detailed and you will notice that many of the institutions have deferred facilities maintenance by underinvesting over a long period. This underinvestment reached a new low as a result of the financial meltdown of 2008 and many haven’t caught up.

Given the scarce financial resources many institutions work with, prioritizing facilities expenditure is hard. In a widely quoted research, it has been shown that it takes roughly $4 for every $1 in deferred maintenance. Basically, postponing maintenance turns out to be far costlier than preventive maintenance, which requires commitment to spend on a regular basis. You can see how continually avoiding preventive maintenance compounds this problem several fold.

I believe that there is a lesson to learn from this when it comes to expenditures in Library and Technology. These are two important areas that connect strongly to the core mission of the higher ed institutions. We can no longer argue that technology is a “nice to have” in that it is here to stay and is integral to teaching, learning and research as well as business operations! How do we prioritize the investments in these areas so that the “deferred maintenance” problem does not catch up with us? It is an extremely difficult question to answer.

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