What Utah’s colleges and universities dedicate much of their campuses to may surprise you. Hint: It’s not classrooms.

The University of Utah has more than 80 buildings across its main campus perched on Salt Lake City’s hillside.

Spread over 1,000 acres, that includes spots for engineering and chemistry. There’s the Marriott Library, Rice-Eccles Stadium and Kingsbury Hall. And one building is dedicated entirely to dreaming up even more buildings within its architecture program.

But despite their different designations, the spaces inside each structure are more similar than you might think. Much of it is dedicated to one use — and it’s not classrooms.

About half of all assignable square footage — a whopping 45% — inside the U.’s many buildings is devoted to offices, counting those for faculty, staff and administrators. That office ratio is the highest for any of the state’s eight public colleges and universities.

Counted all together, Utah’s institutions also have more office space on their campuses than the high end of the national average, which ranges up to 30% for higher education. The state’s cumulative total falls at 33%.

That means one-third of the overall square footage at traditional schools here goes to offices.

The figures come from a new study commissioned by state lawmakers, who have been concerned about administrative bloat in higher education. For many, the data they got back from the SmithGroup, a renowned design firm based in Michigan, confirmed their worries. University presidents, on the other hand, pushed back.

“I’m concerned about the roughness of this methodology,” University of Utah President Taylor Randall told the group’s presenters last November.

If bloat is physically represented as anything on campus, it would be office space — which tends to serve more as a function of management than direct student support.

Higher office ratios also tend to suggest a bigger administration for a school; that’s because offices for a president and other high-ranking staff typically outpace the size of faculty offices by at least three times, according to a separate study from the University of Michigan that’s widely used for campus planning across the country.

The new study here also found that every Utah public university and college has more space, overall, than it needs for how many students are on campus — with the excess expected to grow in the next three-, five- and 10-year intervals with planned construction.

“It appears we have an extraordinary surplus of space,” commented Rep. Neil Walter, R-St. George, during a presentation from the SmithGroup to the Legislature on the findings.

Walter noted that the state has appropriated tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds for education facilities in the past five years. And in the next five years, about a million square feet will also be added. The study found much of that will include more office space.

Meanwhile, schools in the state continue requesting to build out their campuses even more. The U. and Utah Tech University this year have a joint request, for instance, for a medical campus in St. George; it would have capacity for only 10 students, at the start.

Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, noted that nice, new buildings tend to attract attention and interest at a school. “But what is financially sound,” she added, “and what makes people feel good, don’t always go together.”

State lawmakers last session began trying to rein in what they see as higher education bloat, starting with excising programs around diversity, equity and inclusion. This session, they have moved forward with a $60 million cut across the college system in Utah targeted at reducing “inefficient” programs that have few graduates and result in lower-paying jobs.

The point, said House Speaker Mike Schultz in a video promoting the ongoing plans, is to “trim administrative costs.” The push comes as state leaders expect college student enrollment to drop off in the next decade.

“Over time, administrative costs have grown and our universities have drifted away from their core mission,” Schultz said.

Offices vs. classrooms

The extensive 302-page study from the SmithGroup is the first time in at least the last decade that there’s been a comprehensive look at how space is used across the state’s schools.

The last time the Utah System of Higher Education set any standards for campus space was 2010, according to the study. Since then, construction has exploded on Utah’s growing campuses.

That dated guidance included how many hours per week a classroom should ideally be in use, and what percentage of classroom seats should be occupied. But there aren’t penalties for falling short — and every school in the state does on at least one measure.

The system also does not have any requirements for how much space should be dedicated for student use with classrooms or labs, for instance, versus offices. In annual data submissions to the system, schools aren’t asked to provide much data on offices.

That means schools largely have free rein to use their publicly funded buildings however they want.

After office space, the study found, six other categories all split the remaining 67% of cumulative square footage on Utah’s college campuses: classrooms, open labs, teaching labs, study spots, meeting rooms and support spaces (used for things like storage).

The calculations from the SmithGroup don’t count any on-campus housing or inactive facilities. And they don’t include health care facilities, like the major medical center at the U., or other “special use facilities,” which would bring the office ratios down a touch.

Overall, the study looked at 8.8 million assignable square feet across the state’s eight main campuses, such as Utah State University’s central Logan campus, but didn’t include any of the school’s satellites.

With that scope, classrooms account for 16% of space, on average, across campuses here. That means classrooms have about half as much dedicated space compared to offices.

At the U. — which has the biggest campus by assignable square feet — and USU, it amounts to even less. Classrooms there have about one-quarter of the space that offices do.

Both are research institutions. Even still, their percentages of teaching and open labs are also the smallest among the eight schools, largely because of how much space their offices are consuming.

USU, for instance, has 16% of its space dedicated to both open labs and teaching labs. The U. has 14%. Utah State also has the least amount of classroom space overall at 11%.

Salt Lake Community College, at 22%, is an outlier with the largest share of classrooms.

Sara Mathov, project manager for the SmithGroup, acknowledged that offices are essential to higher education “because of the number of employees needed.” At the U., alone, there are about 5,000 faculty members, not counting other staff and administrators.

But she worries about so much space being dedicated to them when compared to classrooms and labs.

“These are the spaces that are needed and essential to run a university and support students,” Mathov said.

The SmithGroup’s study notes that before the COVID-19 pandemic, offices were already “among the least utilized spaces on campus.” At that time, most were used between 20% to 50% of the time. That amounts to about an hour and a half during an eight-hour workday at the lowest use.

By comparison, a typical classroom is used 50% to 75% of the time, the study says.

Since the pandemic, faculty, staff and administrators are now in their offices even less while classrooms have returned to about the same use levels, the SmithGroup estimated.

Utah schools aren’t required to report how many faculty and staff members have either fully remote or hybrid schedules (with time both on and off campus); the numbers in the study, the SmithGroup believes, are the first time there’s been an attempt to quantify that in Utah.

If you build it, will they actually come?

Utah State University has three construction projects underway. The University of Utah currently has seven — and it has said it’s running out of space on its main campus, expanding now into existing buildings in downtown Salt Lake City, too.

Southern Utah University broke ground on a new business building last fall. Utah Valley University is working on an engineering and technology building. Salt Lake Community College is asking for $100 million this legislative session for updates to its buildings. Weber State University is also focused on renovations.

Over the past decade, colleges and universities here have been adding new buildings at a breakneck pace. The driving explanation has been that new spaces will draw more students into programs and push up both capacity and enrollment.

The SmithGroup challenged that assumption.

Frank Markley, a principal consultant with the organization, said the group’s analysis doesn’t address the condition of existing space on campus — if it’s old and not functional, for instance. And, he says, some ongoing campus projects are “related to things that provide unique programs and services at those institutions.”

Even still, there is a surplus in nearly every space category for every college in the state now. And there are no projected classroom or office deficits for any school by 2032.

Overall, there will be a 1.68 million square feet total surplus in buildings across the Utah system in five years.

And over that same time frame, Utah’s college enrollment is set to shift. There’s about 5% growth projected in the next five years, according to the SmithGroup. Then that will slow, with the college population expected to start declining by about 2030.

Numbers from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute chart a similar course, with an 11% dip projected over the next decade until 2040.

There’s roughly 207,000 college students in the state now attending a traditional public college or university. By 2030, that will probably peak around 313,000, the institute forecasts. Then it will slide back down to 260,000.

At the same time, more students are taking classes online than ever before — and that trend will likely continue. Right now, about 33% of students don’t actually go to campus for their coursework, according to the SmithGroup. That will jump to 44% studying entirely off-campus by 2032, the group says, even with new buildings being opened.

For its calculation, the SmithGroup only counted the full-time equivalent head counts for those who actually use campus buildings or will in the future. Based on those, it says there really isn’t a strong need to keep building new facilities on campus.

“Higher education is at a crossroads,” the SmithGroup report says. “… Given post-pandemic trends and future state demographics, it is apparent that future space needs, which drive capital funding, may not be aligned with the evolving strategies.”

It urges schools to reimagine the spaces they already have to serve fewer students face-to-face.

For offices, that could mean not having a space dedicated to each faculty member. Rather, there could be unassigned desks that any professor could use when they are on campus. Similar moves are being looked at by Cornell Tech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to a study from Inside Higher Ed.

There could still be some private offices, too, that professors could reserve in advance if they needed to meet with a student about a sensitive issue. But for the most part, the SmithGroup suggests that faculty and students could meet in any kind of study or library space on campus, without harm to those essential connections.

The SmithGroup encourages more collaborative meeting spaces, too, for when faculty get together. “There’s a shift towards redesigning office spaces that emphasizes flexibility and community,” the report added.

The study doesn’t say what schools should do if they claw back some office space for other purposes.

It also doesn’t mention reducing administrative offices, specifically, but Markley noted during a presentation to the Utah System of Higher Education that those spaces in older buildings tend to be larger and could also be refigured. That would include the U., where the offices for the president and vice presidents are in the Park Building, which was completed in 1914.

The SmithGroup said schools should use the data on square footage and enrollment projections “for informing future campus planning efforts.”

Comparing to Utah’s technical colleges

Part of what’s fueling Utah lawmakers’ concern about perceived bloat in traditional higher education is that the opposite appears true for the state’s eight technical colleges.

The SmithGroup found there’s been up to 25% student growth at Utah technical colleges per year for the past five years — about five times more than traditional universities — but there’s far less available space.

In the three-year forecast from the SmithGroup, four of Utah’s eight technical schools didn’t have the minimum space needed to teach specialized programs, such as mechanics or cosmetology. And overall, there was a total deficit among those schools of 100,000 square feet — about the size of 100 average houses.

State-approved and funded construction projects should alleviate the needs of two schools — Davis Technical College and Tooele Technical College — but not the others.

A few legislators shook their heads at that. This year, they’ve been holding up technical schools as a beacon of success for post-secondary education, graduating students faster and landing them in jobs quickly.

But the space deficits for the schools persist in both five-year and 10-year projections.

Three technical schools — Southwest Technical College, Mountainland Technical College and Bridgerland Technical College — would not meet the maximum spaces needs for their programs by 2032, even with in-the-works buildings. All should meet the minimum.

Four will have deficits in office space for all years projected, and another four will have deficits in classrooms and computer spaces. All eight will have shortages in spaces needed for labs.

One lab for diesel engineering is currently at 145% capacity. Another for welding is at 98%.

“Space is a huge challenge for us,” said Uintah Basin Technical College President Aaron Weight, during a discussion with lawmakers earlier this month. “We don’t have a space excess at all. There’s not a space or a closet on campus that has room for anything.”

Weight said he’s worked to add more night classes, aiming to spread students out and make more use of campus buildings at different hours of the day.

Tooele Technical College President Paul Hacking said, too, that his school has long waitlists for students wanting to get into programs. But there’s not enough space to admit them all.

Still, even with about 85% less assignable square feet than traditional universities in the state, the study found technical schools fare much better than their counterparts when it comes to having less office space.

That aligns with their mission to teach students hands-on trades. The breakdown across the technical system shows 14% devoted to offices, 11.9% to classrooms and 56.8% for labs.

That means direct student learning spaces account for nearly 69% of the real estate.

The SmithGroup anticipates, too, that on-campus students at technical colleges will only increase. That’s because the learning model is designed to work better in-person.

There are about 20,000 students total across the technical schools in the state; most don’t attend full-time. Growth will also slow there, as it will with traditional colleges, in the next 10 years — unless, technical college presidents say, they have more space to admit interested students and buck the forecast.

Data problems and bias concerns

Some of the presidents at Utah’s traditional colleges and universities are not happy with the SmithGroup report.

They believe flaws in the metrics and data collection paint them in a more unflattering light than is accurate. In a tense November confrontation, Randall, the U.’s president, called the study biased during a Utah System of Higher Education meeting.

Some of the spaces on his campus, Randall said, have multiple uses — such as labs that are also used as classrooms or offices. The study didn’t account for that. He also raised an issue with the SmithGroup not factoring in the age and suitability of buildings — including some that might need to be torn down or renovated. He doesn’t consider that bloat and doesn’t want state lawmakers to believe it is either.

Outgoing Utah State President Elizabeth “Betsy” Cantwell joined in support of Randall, noting that some of the buildings on her campus are more than 100 years old. Utah Valley University President Astrid Tuminez also voiced her concerns with “how problematic the data collection was.”

Markley, with the SmithGroup, acknowledged there wasn’t a code for spaces that double in use, but he said that wouldn’t apply to much of any campus in the state and likely wouldn’t change the numbers significantly.

“I wouldn’t say it’s biased,” he said.

Randall later added more in a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune: “Our space needs are unique. Using a one-size-fits-all methodology to analyze and compare the university’s space use with a community college or tech school results in obvious oversights.”

He also said he doesn’t feel the study factored in the U.’s goals for growth, including reaching a student body of 45,000.

The report said the U. would have the biggest surplus of any school, with 546,000 unnecessary square feet and an additional 246,000 in the pipeline to be built by 2032. Even adding students at the rate Randall would like to see, though, wouldn’t entirely eliminate that excess.

The Utah System of Higher Education had a second meeting about the SmithGroup report in January where members again pressed back against the findings.

Nate Talley, the chief financial officer for the system, said the group’s state enrollment projections are “materially different” from those from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. While there’s a decline in the college population in both, he said, it’s less steep with the institute’s data.

The U., for instance, projects that it will have 27,904 students attending classes on campus in 2032. The SmithGroup said it would have 23,597. That’s a difference of 4,307 and makes a “significant impact” on the need for space, Talley said.

But he also confirmed there would still be a surplus of space at the U.

Using the different set of enrollment numbers, though, Talley found that Utah Valley University and Utah Tech University would have space deficits by 2032.

Because of that, Geoff Landward, the commissioner over the system, issued a memo saying the report should be “treated with a high degree of uncertainty.”

Institutions here, Landward said, are already working on different strategies to try to avoid enrollment drops. That includes, for example, enrolling older, nontraditional students.

“We’re not going to ignore the report because of the errors,” he still asserted. Colleges and universities in the state should still look at the numbers and take them seriously, Landward added.

For its part, the SmithGroup also had frustrations working with the state’s schools to collect data — and wrote extensively about that in its report.

There’s supposed to be a unified coding system that schools use to report such data. But the SmithGroup found there wasn’t much guidance, and most of the numbers provided by universities and colleges differed widely from what the group found when it looked at buildings and blueprints.

The University of Utah, for instance, reported having 277 classrooms with 17,828 seats. But the SmithGroup could only confirm 240 classrooms and 16,254 seats.

What does the report recommend happen next?

Compared to other states, the SmithGroup found that schools here fall short in almost every metric.

USU and Utah Tech University, for instance, met the state’s “room utilization” rate, which measures how many hours a classroom is scheduled for use. They’re supposed to be used for at least 33.75 hours of instruction a week, according to Utah System of Higher Education guidance. USU was at 36.9 hours, and Utah Tech was at 38.2 hours.

Every other school fell below. Weber State was the worst at 19.9 hours.

Meanwhile, California State University pushes for 53 hours a week in its classrooms; Nevada, for all its institutions, is 65.3 hours.

No one here is looking at which classrooms are used the least and how to fix that, like Nevada does, added Mathov, from the SmithGroup. And that’s not even addressing the office-space issue.

Mathov said that Utah could be and should be collecting much more data to better assess how well it’s using its spaces and how much is unnecessary bloat. The firm recommended the state start doing more regular space audits and standardize the definitions for spaces to do those.

“We like to think of this as really a starting place,” Mathov added, “for conversation with the institutions.”

If lawmakers continue with their push against higher education excess, it’ll likely be more than just a conversation.