photo by: Shawn Valverde/Special to the Journal-World

The University of Kansas campus is pictured in this September 2023 aerial photo.

If the beginning of the new year is that dreaded time where you start listing all your home’s needed maintenance projects, the state’s higher education leaders can offer you a bit of solace.

At least you have a home rather than a university.

Leaders at the University of Kansas and the state’s other five public universities recently completed an end-of-year review of maintenance issues of all their facilities. Given their profession, they assigned a letter grade.

The overall condition of “mission critical” buildings at the state’s universities checked in with a ‘C’ grade.

Well, as the saying goes, ‘C’s’ do get degrees, but like a parent on the other end of that saying, the recent university maintenance results weren’t what leaders were hoping to hear.

The ‘C’ grade is the same grade that the system received last year, but Chad Bristow, director of facilities for the Kansas Board of Regents, noted that if you look closely at the report card, you’ll notice the actual condition score declined slightly from a year ago.

“So it is still a ‘C’ average, but a little less of a C,” Bristow recently told the Kansas Board of Regents as part of an annual report.

Also unchanged from a year ago is the expectation: A “B+” grade. To get to that grade will literally take more than $1 billion. A key finding of the recent report is that university facilities have a total of $1.66 billion of deferred maintenance. That was up from $1.57 billion of deferred maintenance a year ago and is up from $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2020.

The report found the increase wasn’t a sign that universities were ignoring the issue. Rather, universities increased spending on maintenance issues for the third consecutive year. Spending totaled $203.2 million in fiscal year 2025, up from $175 million in 2024 and $107 million in 2023.

But universities have watched the amount of needed maintenance pile up over the years, meaning they start each year in the hole. Construction inflation also is playing a major role in the increases. But a big factor is just time. As each year passes each of their buildings grow another year older, which increases the amount of maintenance dollars needed. An accountant, for instance, would tell you that a $50 million building with a 50-year lifespan would need $1 million per year in maintenance to keep its condition steady.

And universities have lots of buildings — 451 “mission critical” buildings totaling 20.5 million square feet of space across the state’s six Regents universities. The Regents’ goal is not to keep a building from deteriorating at all — that would take more than $3 billion of maintenance — but rather to keep their total inventory of mission critical buildings at about 80% of their new condition.

One of the strategies state lawmakers have pushed universities to consider is a reduction in the number of buildings they have. The state provides upwards of $60 million per year for university building maintenance. Normally, in order to use that state money, a university must provide a matching dollar amount. For example, if it uses $1 million of state money to repair a boiler in an academic building, it must also provide $1 million of university funds as well.

But the legislators several years ago included a provision that said if universities used the state funding to demolish a building, the university did not have to provide any matching dollars. The provision has led to some demolitions, but the strategy is only moving the needle so much.

From fiscal year 2023 through fiscal year 2026, which ends in June, the university system will have demolished 29 buildings totaling 742,000 square feet. That accounts for about 5% of the total building inventory and about 3.5% of total square footage. The report estimates the demolitions eliminated about $123 million of needed maintenance.

Those numbers have been encouraging enough that universities are considering ramping up demolitions in future years. However, the schools are taking a position of not publicly identifying potential demolition targets until further studies are done.

“The universities have studied several more buildings during their campus master planning processes that would eliminate at least another $250 million of the $1.66 billion deferred capital renewal and maintenance backlog and reduce the campus footprint by as much as 1 million gross square feet,” the written report delivered to Regents states. “The additional facilities will not be publicly identified until the necessary campus planning, and communications can occur. Realistically, this process will take several years to realize.”

While the university system hasn’t yet turned the corner and started reducing the overall amount of deferred maintenance, the report to Regents continued to express optimism that the planned spending would start to get the universities caught up on maintenance issues, and already has been “transformative.”

“Whereas in the past, campus facilities staff were commonly reacting to emergencies, they can now strategically plan repair and replacement projects before costly and disruptive system failures,” the Regents were told via the report.

The report also provided a scorecard for each university. Like the system as a whole, most campuses received a ‘C’ grade, but the report card did provide some statistics for each university. Here’s a look at some of the data and highlights for each university.

University of Kansas:

Number of mission critical buildings: 70

Building square footage: 5.68M square feet

Average age of buildings: 51 years

Required minimum maintenance: $436.2 million

KU Medical Center

Number of mission critical buildings: 48

Building square footage: 2.61M square feet

Average age of buildings: 53

Required minimum maintenance: $239.7 million

Kansas State University

Number of mission critical buildings: 179

Building square footage: 5.89M square feet

Average age of buildings: 53

Required minimum maintenance: $448.7 million

Wichita State University

Number of mission critical buildings: 46

Building square footage: 2.39M square feet

Average age of buildings: 46

Required minimum maintenance: $241 million

Emporia State University

Number of mission critical buildings: 33

Building square footage: 963K square feet

Average age of buildings: 61

Required minimum maintenance: $53.2 million

Pittsburg State University

Number of mission critical buildings: 30

Building square footage: 1.47M square feet

Average age of buildings: 53

Required minimum maintenance: $102.4 million

Fort Hays State University

Number of mission critical buildings: 45

Building square footage: 1.5M square feet

Average age of buildings: 57

Required minimum maintenance: $137.6 million