Watch the Full Conversation (13 min)
Space rarely reaches a president's agenda until it becomes a problem. Andrew Sama, Director of Higher Education at Huron, argues that higher education space planning has already crossed from an operational concern into a strategic one — tied at once to capital investment, deferred maintenance, workplace expectations, research growth, and carbon commitments. In this Bow Tie Tuesday conversation with Aaron Benz, he unpacks what year one of the State of Space Management in Higher Education survey surfaced across 31 institutions, and what the 2026 edition adds. Two subjects are entirely new this year: AI and carbon.
→ Year one drew 31 institutions, weighted toward R1 campuses with large portfolios — a group already further along than most on space approach, which makes what they reported harder to dismiss
→ Hybrid work, building divestment, and research space were the three areas respondents kept returning to, with growth no longer treated as the default answer to every space question
→ The 2026 edition asks whether institutions are using or exploring AI and automation for specific space functions, and how carbon impact factors into construction, renovation, and consolidation decisions
→ Expanded questions probe organizational structure directly: whether dedicated space roles exist, where they report, and how many FTEs support the work
→ Peer context does not make difficult space decisions painless, but it does make them more informed, more trusted, and more defensible
Add your institution to the 2026 survey
The survey runs about 40 questions and takes roughly 30 minutes. If you know whether your institution has updated its space allocation guidelines in the last five years, you are qualified to answer it. Take the State of Space Management survey.
Aaron Benz: Welcome to another Bow Tie Tuesday. I am pleased to be joined by my friend, Andrew Sama, Director at Huron in Higher Education, been in the Notre Dame program before, so welcome back again. I'm excited to talk about the State of Space Management report we did last year, and we're doing another one this year with some updates that we're going to want to talk about. But Andrew, welcome back to Bow Tie Tuesday, man.
Andrew Sama: Thanks, Aaron. Excited to be here, excited to be continuing this work on the State of Space Management in Higher Education survey with you and CampusIQ. I think this is really important to the industry and hopefully really helpful, and I think we've heard that it is, right? We're coming out of conference season. You've been traveling the country, I've been traveling the country, and I think we're hearing at a lot of stops that there's interest in the kind of topics that this is covering, and we think hopefully we're helping people have really important conversations on campus. So excited to be continuing this work with you and looking forward to chopping it up today and talking about what's new in here.
Aaron Benz: Yeah, awesome. For me, when I was looking at the data, we had several hundred people that actually downloaded and read the survey. I know you and I both got some feedback from different people who thought it was excellent, was really interested in some of the results, and also justified stuff in their gut that they thought was going on elsewhere. Almost one of those things of, hey, it's good to hear everybody else is also dealing with similar challenges. And I think that's part of the point, right? How do we help raise some of these trends so that as a collection in higher ed we can actually address some of them? And maybe that's where we start out. So for those who haven't seen the report, it's definitely worth downloading and reviewing, but maybe some of the big highlights, Andrew — from last year, what were some of the key findings?
Andrew Sama: Yeah, last year we had 31 institutions participate. They skewed pretty R1 heavy, pretty large campus portfolios, right? So one could argue these were respondents who were likely among the more mature institutions out there in terms of a space approach. There's five insights that you can get in the report. Do download it, it's worth a read, but I'd say probably three that really stood out and they get talked about a lot.
One is the hybrid mismatch — that there's this gap between what we are saying about hybrid work and the way we're doing it, and what's happening on campus, and that there's some challenges there in terms of space management. We talked about there seems to be an appetite for more divestment or even more demolition of buildings — that there's this appetite to not just make growth the default answer to every space issue. That came out of the report. And then research space came up as really a bit of a blind spot for our respondents, and something that they're really focused on. So a lot of good content in there, specific metrics and insights, but I think those were probably three of the hottest topics.
Aaron Benz: Yeah, I'll be really interested to see how many of those trends stay relevant, or maybe that have switched, or really what are the new trends. So for anybody who would read this report — who's this meant for? Why would they want to read it? Is it for the custodian crew to read it, or is it for the directors or VPs or the board? Who's our target audience that we're really trying to make this beneficial for?
Andrew Sama: Really I would say it's anybody that has some responsibility for space management and space planning on a college campus. That's who can be consuming this. I would argue our hope is for that cabinet level position — those presidents, those provosts, those executive vice presidents. This should really be on their radar, Aaron, honestly, because I think as we may talk about, right now space is no longer just an operational asset. It is both a constraint and an opportunity for our clients in higher ed, and I think for the people that we're working with every day.
They're facing some really hard choices around capital investment, deferred maintenance, workplace expectations, research growth, and carbon commitments. And all of that in some way, shape, or form is going to manifest in the physical footprint of campus and the choices they make around space. So they have some really tough decisions to make as they deal with this.
Space is emotional, it's political, it's tied to identity, status, history, and donors. And in that environment, it's really helpful to know what your peers are doing. If you're going to have to make some difficult decisions, potentially have to say no more, some peer context can be really helpful. Not going to make those decisions painless, but can help those decisions be more informed, more trusted, more defensible, and start the conversations for you to take some necessary actions that we can talk more about. But we think the audience is people trying to do a better job of managing space on their campus and make best use of what they already have.
Aaron Benz: So who can answer it? How would I go, oh, this is something I should fill out, or who should I send it to to fill out?
Andrew Sama: Great question. I think that can vary by institution. One of the things that we know about space is it gets managed in lots of different ways at lots of institutions. That's going to vary based on the size and complexity of the org, of the overall institution. So I would say if you are in a facilities design and construction office, and you're the campus planning person, this is definitely for you. But you could be in finance, at a certain level or size of institution, and it could make sense for you.
I would say if you're unsure, you're also getting some information about how governance happens and how space is managed at your institution. But I would be looking first probably to — in some institutions it may be in the provost office. It could be a vice provost for budget and planning or academic space. I think maybe you want to convene a small group of people to answer it. I think we saw a range of different options in last year's survey responses, and it was everything from what I discussed — campus planning to facilities to folks more academic in nature.
And I would just say this: if you're unsure, let's get something in from your institution and have a conversation with you. That's something that we're open to. It hasn't happened, but if we got more than one from an institution, we would just call folks up and de-dupe it and work through with them what would be the most appropriate answers. I hope that's not too mealy-mouthed of an answer.
Aaron Benz: There's hundreds of people who downloaded this and we don't exactly know who all of them are, but in my conversations of where people read it, it was not traditional roles that I would think of that had an impact or care. And I think what's important about the survey is you don't have to have deep expertise in any of these to answer the key questions that we're asking, because of how we're asking.
Andrew Sama: And I think that's been the intentional focus of the survey. We're trying to not make this so burdensome. We think it's about 40 questions. We think you can do it in about 30 minutes if you're one of these folks who's aware. And as an example, I'll just tell you, one of the questions: have you updated your space allocation guidelines in the last five years? That doesn't require you to pull a bunch of data to do a bunch of analysis. You know that if you work in this space, you know that off the top of your head. We're getting at questions like that.
And I think trying to keep it intentionally multiple choice, intentionally easy to work through, with some select areas, as you and I have discussed, where we ask for free text responses. Those give us very rich information and we love those, and we will follow up with folks and get additional detail. But we're trying to keep this manageable. We know there's a lot on folks' plate. And so we're trying to get a lot of impact for a reasonable amount of investment. We think 30, 35 minutes of your time is worth what you're going to get from the back end of this.
Aaron Benz: Yeah, totally. And those open form text responses where it's like, what are the other things going on? That's kind of that undercurrent that happens on the beach and the waves, of the real pulse. That was incredibly interesting, I thought, last year. Let's talk about some of the new questions. Some of the feedback we got was, hey, there's some other adjacent areas, or areas that we think we want to find out more about and where the trends are. Maybe you could discuss some of the additional questions that we brought in this year.
Andrew Sama: Yeah, so two big ones that are net new. They were not addressed at all in the 2025 survey, and that's AI and carbon. So on AI, we're going to ask whether institutions are using or exploring automation or AI for some very specific functions. On carbon, we're going to ask about how sustainability and carbon impact is showing up in the decision-making around construction, renovation, consolidation, and those kinds of decisions.
And then based on user feedback, and honestly some great input from a webinar that we had just last week with APPA — we had 300+ people, super engaged, the Q&A was just firing off, it was great. Part of what we heard during that was folks want some more depth to some questions that we asked last year around organizational roles and responsibilities. So we had some questions on that last year. We're expanding that to try to get a better understanding of how institutions are structuring their space optimization efforts. So do you have dedicated positions to this? And if so, at what levels do they report in the organization, how many FTEs? So we're going to build out a little more depth to some of what we gathered last year.
Aaron Benz: Yeah, I'm excited about that. I know carbon's come up in my recent conversations, and different institutional commitments, and what do we do now, or how much low-hanging fruit really is left before it even goes back to some of these buildings. An increased appetite it seemed from last year of how do we not just repurpose, but also how can we increase demolitions more, where more institutions I think are feeling that weight of this crazy deferred maintenance number that almost is untouchable. And it's like you've got to take buildings offline if you really want to change where that line is heading.
Maybe closing, Andrew — why did we do this? What did you think was most valuable? We did it year one, obviously we're doing it again because not just we got some value, we felt like a lot of institutions did, and the feedback especially for me, I thought personally it was great, and had several people at conferences come up and mention things that they thought were interesting. What's it from your perspective about why this is important ultimately for us to do, and for people to participate, for more voices to get included in the survey?
Andrew Sama: Yeah, I think this effort helps you understand what's happening on your own campus. I think the act of filling this out — like good survey instruments, the survey is also prompting some thought for you, and I think that is valuable. It's signaling to you. I would say just filling it out for your own purposes is going to give you some information about where you stand, and I think it's a worthy effort.
And then I think it's going to help you understand where peers are approaching some really critical issues. What data are people using? How are they governing space? Do they have dedicated staff? How are they handling hybrid work? How are they handling carbon? Some of these things that we've talked about. And I think it gives you the ability to move the conversation on your campus forward towards progress, whatever that looks like for you. Every institution's at a different place in maturity of all this.
And I think if we can build — in my highest hopes, if we can build a large enough participant group here, I think we can really inform how the whole sector is moving. Where institutions are stuck, what it takes to manage space as an institutional resource and not just local entitlements. So I think the reason to fill this out is to help yourself, help peers, help the industry as a whole.
I think if you're doing this work, you have some appreciation in this moment of some of the challenges that higher education is facing, how important it is that we get this right. This is one of the biggest asset classes, one of the biggest resources on any college campus. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to do better. And I think the content and the information that comes out of an effort like this can meaningfully advance those efforts. So I think there's lots of good reasons to participate and to do this, and I hope people will do it. Tell a friend. And let's get a lot of participating institutions this year.
Aaron Benz: Yeah, awesome, I agree. I think sometimes when I do roadmap planning and all of these kinds of things, it's like inevitably I know the planning of what I think is going to happen in Q1 of next year is probably not going to be what I write down on paper today. But the act and process of me going through the planning becomes way more informative. And you can get a taste of that in what, 20 to 30 minutes. And the threshold is, if you know that your space standards have been updated in the last five years, you can actually participate in this. And hopefully just like last year, we can turn this around and add something that valuable to you and your institution, to have a better perspective of what's going on in higher education when it comes to space management.
Andrew Sama: Yeah, absolutely.
Aaron Benz: Awesome, Andrew, thanks so much, man. Another Bow Tie Tuesday, always great to see you, talk to you, and can't wait to see what these survey results bring this year. Have to book a date to come back when we have the results, right?
Andrew Sama: Absolutely. This time I'm going to make sure I actually give you a bow tie so you can wear a bow tie on Bow Tie Tuesday too.
Aaron Benz: Fair enough, I look forward to it. All right, man. Thank you.
Andrew Sama: Take care.