Higher education should all be about tomorrow, yet the colleges and universities build as if there is no tomorrow. Just when the popularity of online universities makes many university presidents wonder about the future of their brick and mortar campus and economists warn of the ever large debt accumulated by graduates due to skyrocketing tuition fees, adding ever more fanciful brick and mortar buildings adds significantly to the expenses of higher education institutions.

A probably largely speculative graph of facility space in higher ed from the New England Journal of Higher Education

The last round of decadence before disaster strikes, or a sound investment in a healthy future? The potential for a debacle hasn't gone unnoticed and has become the topic of national media:

A multibillion-dollar building boom is under way at U.S. universities and colleges-despite budget shortfalls and endowment decline.

Some $11 billion in new facilities have sprung up on American campuses in each of the last two years-more than double what was spent on buildings a decade ago, according to the market-research firm McGraw-Hill Construction-even as schools are under pressure to contain costs. (Washington Monthly)

The building boom sometimes just comes as part of ambitious masterplans, part of the agenda of presidents that worry about their legacy, or created under the guise of keeping up with the Joneses. Sometimes the Joneses live in Finland or China, where students are so much better in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) - as if the buildings are mostly responsible for successful education in those fields. K-12 schools call for the 21st century learning methods based on the four Cs: critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity. 

CSU Campus masterplan, blue buildings are new

Higher ed can't get left behind with 20th century buildings. Sometimes, as we can readily demonstrate in Baltimore, the desire to compete with up to date buildings instead of highly-qualified faculty or cutting edge curricula and research takes on bizarre distortions between demand and supply. But lowly state universities are by no means the only culprits. MIT allowed themselves an original Gehry and afterwards sued the architect because the masterpiece Stata Center allegedly didn't function to the specifications.

Colleges and universities across the country have been building new facilities to keep up with expanding STEM -