Analyst Insight: The Changing Landscape of Educational Buildings

In 2020, the education sector had to quickly transition to distanced learning, and many schools were left with a tight budget while trying to plan for a safe reopening. Immediate changes to school buildings have included HVAC upgrades, occupancy sensor installations, and modified classroom spaces. In US higher education alone, colleges and universities will spend an estimated $74 billion in new costs to reopen campuses.

Although K-12 school construction in the US has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has also been affected by the accompanying recession, scarcer financing, and a declining birth rate. The US birth rate increased by 0.09% in 2019, after falling 4 consecutive years to its lowest level in more than 3 decades. Classroom sizes have peaked and are declining downward. Just as higher education and K-12 schools must continue to consider the pandemic’s impacts in their future decision-making, they must take into account the impacts of climate change, which highlight the need for resilient building design. The future of educational buildings is highly dependent on the safety of the students and teachers that inhabit them.

The Guidehouse Insights report estimates building stock across more than 230 countries and building types based on a rigorous modeling approach that uses available building stock data to fill gaps in publicly available information. The most recently updated database was published in 2Q 2021. This accompanying Analyst Insight report focuses on changes in the education building sector with a special emphasis on the US.