At HEFF, we host roundtable discussions on the real challenges facing facilities leaders at colleges and universities across higher education. These conversations are intentionally small so peers can compare how they’re navigating similar challenges on their campuses.
They’ve always been closed-door and unrecorded until now.
Thanks to an AI note-taker, and a promise of anonymity, we were able to capture the conversation without attaching comments to any individual institution.
At the table, facilities leaders dug into a challenge nearly every campus is dealing with right now: how to prioritize capital projects when the list of needs keeps growing but the funding does not.
The conversation moved quickly between stalled projects, aging infrastructure, leadership expectations, and the complicated math behind keeping campuses running while still improving the places where students learn.
Here’s what surfaced in the room.
One leader described their capital landscape in simple terms. Their institution has roughly $3 billion in desired projects. Only about $1 billion is realistically funded. Projects start moving forward anyway. Programming begins. Design begins. Planning conversations start. And then they stall.
“We’ll get to programming and stop. We’ll get to design and stop.” The expectations don’t disappear, though. Departments still want buildings. Faculty still want upgrades. Leadership still wants timelines. But the money simply isn’t there yet.
Aging infrastructure came up quickly. Not the things everyone sees, but the systems buried underground or behind walls. Utility tunnels. Pipes. Mechanical systems that quietly keep the campus operating.
Facilities leaders talked about the challenge of prioritizing these projects when the risk often stays invisible until something actually fails. Everyone in the room acknowledged the same truth. Deferred maintenance doesn’t really go away. The goal becomes slowing it down, managing it carefully, and protecting buildings that are still in relatively good condition before they slip into the backlog as well.
Another tension surfaced around decision-making. Facilities leaders are often pushing to address infrastructure risks while academic leadership is focused on classrooms, labs, and visible student spaces. Both priorities are valid.
But the funding still comes from the same place. One participant described shifting how those conversations happen. Instead of facilities raising concerns alone, they began bringing academic leaders into the conversation earlier.
“I’ve got the data. You’ve got the need. Let’s go to the provost together.”
That shift changed the tone of the discussion. Instead of competing priorities, leadership saw a shared problem that needed a shared decision.
Several leaders talked about the limits of reports and spreadsheets when trying to move projects forward. One institution had a structural report warning about a potential failure in a building. The document had existed for years without triggering action.
Then the facilities team started showing photos. Visible structural damage. Concrete deterioration. Conditions that made the risk tangible. The conversation changed quickly. The data had been there all along. But once people could actually see the problem, it became harder to ignore.
One institution described taking faculty and campus leaders on visits to modern workplaces, including Google’s headquarters, simply to show what contemporary environments can look like.
Many of the participants had spent their entire careers working on the same campus. Some had previously been skeptical of major space changes or new workplace models. Seeing something different shifted the conversation almost immediately. When they returned to campus, the reaction wasn’t resistance. It was frustration. Why haven’t we been doing this already?
One story from the discussion highlighted how visible facilities work becomes when something goes wrong. A campus experienced a chilled water outage that lasted nearly two weeks during the summer. Facilities teams worked around the clock to stabilize the system and keep the campus operating. When it was finally resolved, something unexpected happened.
Faculty members applauded the facilities team for how they handled the situation. For many leaders in the room, that moment captured a larger truth about their role. Most of the time, the work happens quietly behind the scenes. But when infrastructure fails, everyone suddenly understands how essential those systems really are.
Several leaders also noted that facilities executives are increasingly involved in conversations about how projects will be funded, not just which ones should move forward. Capital decisions now often involve facilities leaders sitting down with finance teams and CFOs to work through the real math behind projects. That includes looking at funding structures, timing, partnerships, and tradeoffs across the capital plan. In other words, facilities leadership is becoming as much about financial strategy as it is about construction and infrastructure.
Eventually the conversation returned to the central problem. Most campuses already have a list of priority one projects. The challenge is that there are often far more priority ones than the budget allows. So, facilities leaders end up doing something uncomfortable. They start prioritizing the priority ones. At one institution, the process became very literal. The leadership team drew a line across the project list. Everything above the line moved forward. Everything below it waited. The conversation ended where it began.
Not with a perfect solution, but with a shared understanding of the tension. Because right now, on many campuses, the hardest part of capital planning isn’t deciding what matters. It’s deciding which critical project has to wait.