Before You Rightsize the Campus, Look at the Schedule
A recent Inside Higher Ed article on rightsizing the physical campus raises an important question for institutions facing growing financial pressure: How much space do we really need?
There is reason to ask. Just 43% of institutions regularly use more than three-quarters of their physical space. Yet 44% of chief business officers say their institutions are maintaining their current footprint while renovating, another 31% are pursuing targeted expansion, and only 13% report strategically downsizing. Nearly 3 in 10 CBOs identify facilities as an area where costs and revenue are out of alignment.
One observation in the article deserves more attention: campus space can look underutilized because of how we build the academic schedule.
Traditional scheduling tends to concentrate courses into a relatively small set of preferred hours. Ad Astra refers to that as “prime-time”. (Monday-Thursday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.) This means that at certain times, it can feel as though there isn't a classroom to be found. A few hours later, the same campus can feel empty.
Before deciding that we have too much space, or that we need more, we need to understand the scheduling patterns producing the utilization number.
A utilization target isn't the same as a capacity threshold
The article notes that many institutions target space utilization of at least 70%. That's a useful benchmark, but it isn't the same as the point at which an academic schedule begins to run out of room.
In our scheduling work, we pay particular attention when prime-time classroom utilization exceeds 80%. At that point, an institution has very little flexibility left during the hours when students and faculty most want to be on campus. If a room must unexpectantly go offline or another section needs to be added to meet enrollment growth, an institution needs to have a little flexible capacity to absorb these last-minute changes.
Understanding the effect of prime-time means that a campus can have classrooms available across the week while simultaneously feeling as though it is out of space when it needs it most especially when that is broken into size categories or other factors that make some rooms more desirable than others.
High utilization isn't necessarily “good” utilization
Our HESI™ Benchmark data, representing more than 500 institutions, helps us look underneath the utilization metric and further understand capacity.
In a recent analysis of institutions with available demographic and classroom-utilization data, only about 14% exceeded 70% prime-hour classroom utilization. Those institutions also had substantially higher rates of overloaded courses - 28.7% compared with 17.1% among the rest of the institutions analyzed. Overloaded courses are those that fill at a rate higher than 95%. Students often find that they do not have access to seats in overloaded courses at registration. To compound the issue, institutions above prime-time classroom utilization of 70% are also more likely to see higher first year course overloaded courses (31.3% versus 18.7%).
Some institutions may be getting more from their space because they have built an intentional schedule around student demand and available capacity. Others may simply be running out of space. Utilization metrics alone can't tell us which situation.
Another key metric in the HESI™ Benchmark data is prime-time compression which measures the likelihood of a section being offered in prime-time versus outside of the prime-time period. Institutions above the 70% threshold had less prime-time compression (2.08x compared with 2.98x) and used more of their non-prime hours (13.5% compared with 8.1%). These institutions who are more space constrained were filling the prime-time period more effectively and offering more sections outside of the prime-time period as well.
Space and student success can work together
AASCU's Student-Centered Course Scheduling initiative, work Ad Astra has been fortunate to support, starts with student progress rather than space efficiency. The goal is to reduce scheduling barriers, including peak-hour bottlenecks, while making better use of existing institutional resources. In its initial pilot with 11 regional universities, AASCU reports a 12% increase in students completing first-year English and math courses. Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi also increased classroom utilization by 5%.
Better space utilization doesn't have to come at the expense of student-centered scheduling. Done intentionally, one can support the other.
Terry Brown of AASCU makes an important point in the article: universities aren't hotels or airlines. Some inefficiency is inherent in the academic mission. A specialized lab may never achieve the utilization of a general-purpose classroom and still be exactly the space an institution needs. Space, Brown argues, is a resource, like faculty, staff and funding, that needs to be stewarded carefully.
The schedule should be viewed the same way. The goal isn't to maximize every room or fill every available hour. It's to understand whether our use of time, space and instructional capacity is intentional and whether those choices support student progress.
Start with the schedule
None of this argues against rightsizing campus space. In many cases, rightsizing may be exactly the right strategy. It argues for getting the sequence right. Elliot Felix offers a useful principle in the article: “the most sustainable building is the one you don’t build.”
Before deciding which buildings you don't need, understand the schedule that made them look empty.
You may discover that you need less space than you thought. You may discover that you need different space than you assumed. Or you may discover that what looks like excess capacity is actually supporting an intentional student-access strategy. Either way, you'll be rightsizing the campus around real student demand and that is our real mission.
Source context for review
External context and quotations are drawn from Colleen Flaherty, “Rightsizing the Physical Campus,” Inside Higher Ed, September 17, 2026. HESI™ Benchmark findings are based on Ad Astra internal benchmark analyses provided for this draft.
