With enrollment trends changing rapidly during the recession and amid an increasingly volatile bond market, more colleges have been considering whether to take the step of developing a housing master plan to guide expenditures in construction, renovation, and replacement of residential facilities. In June 2010, we interviewed David Jones, then assistant vice president for student affairs at the University of Alabama and currently associate vice president for student affairs and enrollment management at Minnesota State University Mankato. An early adopter of master planning for university housing, Jones offered his advice about the critical steps to take when developing a housing master plan.

This week, we returned to David Jones for a more in-depth review of critical steps to include in your master planning process. Here is his advice.

Conduct a Facility Audit

Jones advocates beginning with a "total audit" of your space: "You need to know what you have and how you're using it. Don't assume that old data you have about that space is still accurate." When the University of Alabama undertook an audit of its housing space, the school realized it was actually under-occupying some of its space. It's critical to conduct a full audit to identify missed opportunities.

Jones also recommends ensuring that you have precise data for three distinct measures of occupancy for a given facility:

• Maximum occupancy
• Planned occupancy
• Decreased occupancy

Decreased occupancy is the minimal occupancy needed in order to justify keeping the facility open. If demand for housing -- or for a particular facility -- was to drop over time, you would need to know at what point that residence hall or community would lose its financial viability. If you take a facility that holds a planned 400 students with two students in each room, and you are prepared to flip double rooms into single rooms if demand drops, how much can you raise the price point, based on your local market?

Jones advocates making a practice of knowing both your maximum and your minimum occupancy.

Assess Current Facilities Condition

Whether you invest resources in an internal facilities condition assessment or hire an outside consultant, it will be critical to identify the deferred maintenance backlog, the cost of renovation, and the cost of replacement for your residential facilities so that you can plan for these costs as you're looking ahead several years.

"Don't cut the facilities condition assessment from your budget or your planning process," Jones warns. "It's a tempting cut when the budget is tight, but so many of us are dealing with so much deferred maintenance now; let's make sure we learn from the past and don't repeat that in the future."

Enrollment and Occupancy Trends: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Besides securing data on past enrollment and housing occupancy trends, it's critical to open conversations with the key stakeholders on campus about future directions and anticipated policy changes related to enrollment that are likely to have an impact on demand for housing. In other words, you need to look both backward and ahead.

Jones offers two examples. Suppose your enrollment manager provides data that charts a slow trend in the institution's mix of in-state and out-of-state students. Projecting that trend forward may tell you one thing, but if you don't realize that your enrollment manager is planning to make significant investments in out-of-state recruiting in the next two to three years to give the institution a more national presence, then you may reach the wrong conclusions about future demand and occupancy.

Here's a second example. Suppose your university is in the process of deciding to introduce a residency requirement for all freshmen. If university housing currently captures only two-thirds of entering freshmen, then the housing master plan needs to take into account the time and the cost involved in providing enough extra beds to make that requirement feasible.

Human Capital

Jones warns against the pitfall of only taking the facilities and their residents into account -- you need to consider your human capital as well. As you plan new facilities, what will the impact be on your personnel needs?

Jones recommends taking a strategic look at your human capital needs:

• What is the value your institution offers to students -- in other words, what is the student experience intended to be on your campus?
• What is the function of a particular housing facility, and how does it support that value?
• What personnel are needed to support that function?
• What is the expense of providing and training those personnel?

For example, suppose your institution has placed a high value on maximizing the academic experience outside the classroom, and in response, you are planning for a new residential living-learning community. "You will want to staff to support the delivery of that value," Jones advises. The living-learning community will require more housing staff (and differently trained staff) than a traditional apartment for upperclassmen (where there may be an expectation of supplying just minimal services).

"Make sure you aren't under-staffing," Jones warns. "If you say this will be an honors residence hall and it is literally no different than the non-honors residence hall next door, your housing plan is probably not reflecting your values."

Finally, remember to plan not only for the daily-use personnel you will need to add, but also consider the input and the needs of non-daily-use personnel, such as maintenance, housekeeping, and information technology staff. All of these staff will need to interact with your housing facilities. "Make sure the facility is planned and designed in such a way as to permit them to offer high-service delivery," Jones suggests.

Scenario Planning

Jones also warns against arriving at a fixed, easily printed and distributed plan. The reality, he suggests, is that as your enrollments and your costs shift frequently, you will need to be able to turn to a very dynamic model for measuring the impact of those shifts.

"You need a phasing model," he advises, "with enough flexibility to allow you to respond in the moment. If we took down this hall, what is the impact? If we wanted to tear down this facility but suddenly our enrollments are so high that we can't afford to, what does that do to our budget? We're short 400 spaces this year -- what will it cost to add a new building?"

Or, given a volatile bond market, you may establish that you need 300 beds, but in reality find that you can only afford 200 new beds. "Do you run the risk of just adding the 200," Jones asks, "or do you wait a couple of years to see if you can afford the 300 later? You need to conduct scenario planning up front, and ensure that your master plan is scalable."

Jones suggests developing spreadsheets and phasing models, and then populating these regularly with up-to-date enrollment data. "You may be updating your plan by the month," he says. "If you have the tools ready, you can do this." What you want to strive for is not a printed, glossy plan, but a set of objectives and a tool that will assist you in doing some sophisticated scenario planning.