dumontjanks

Georgia Southern University, a public research institution headquartered in Statesboro, Georgia, serves over 26,000 students across three primary campuses in the southeast of the state. With a strong focus on student success, academic excellence, and research innovation, the university offers a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs. Its campuses feature a diverse mix of settings and facilities, reflecting a commitment to providing a holistic and accessible educational experience.

Recent donor-driven developments across the Statesboro campus prompted suspicions of surplus space. Recognizing the risk associated with an overbuilt campus, GSU found the need to understand current utilization so as to inform future planning and development decisions, guiding donor interest toward maximum impact that is still financially sustainable in the long-run. GSU sought our services per a recommendation based on a previous system-wide space utilization analysis our leadership conducted for all member institutions of the System. This enabled us to provide an apples-to-apples comparison with utilization ten years ago, and revealed that new construction indeed outpaced demand for instructional space. We also found other opportunities for space optimization, including a potential reduction of underutilized computer labs and strong evidence for excess office space. Lounges stood out as a space type that was potentially deficient on campus, especially as pedagogy shifts toward an emphasis on informal peer collaboration, as these soft spaces can be important workspaces for students.

We provided the client with a suite of KPIs to track utilization into the future, and we presented our findings to university leadership, painting a clear picture that future developments must consider the current surplus of certain space types.