New Medical School: Is BYU Always Under Construction??
Peaking at the BYU-Provo Construction Over Time in Honor of the New Medical School
Introduction
This last week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced they will build a new medical school for BYU-Provo. Having attended BYU myself, I always heard rumors of why BYU didn’t have a medical school… “There’s too much liability and would be more expensive than it was worth“ “They don’t want to make decisions about abortion procedures““BYU focuses on their prized law school, the U can have the medical school“ Despite these rumors whether true or not, it looks like they are pressing forward.
I always figured BYU might eventually build a medical school, after all, they have a law school, business school, and even a nursing school. Also, in retrospect, it makes sense it would come at this time as the head of the church is a heart surgeon. I think its safe to say a “Russel M. Nelson School of Medicine“ is in the works.
Today’s topic is tangental, but not directly related to the medical school. When I attended BYU, they announced a few large education buildings and finished the new heritage halls. It seemed as though the BYU campus was always under construction that never seemed to end (and Utah in general to be honest - looking at you I-15 in Lehi). So, today, I tried to find some data related to this construction at BYU which will soon include the new medical school, of course.
Data
I looked through several resources for data on the BYU-Provo buildings. They have a tri-annual inventory report of buildings, but access is restricted to this resource for commonfolk like me. So, wikipedia has list of BYU buildings which is likely not 100 percent accurate on every detail, but can hopefully give us a rough sketch of trends over time. For my sanity, I cross checked wikipedia with a few other resources at BYU including construction announcements and a Y-magazine article cataloging building dates the last 100 years. The information lined up well, so I proceeded.
Charts
So, to answer our original question, BYU has always been under construction especially the last 60+ years. After WW2 in the late 1940s, Mormons became increasingly interested in attending BYU (attendance quadrupled see year 1945-47) and they built out the campus in response to this; hence, the spike in buildings that opened in the 50s and 60s. Heavy construction continued throughout the 1900s as attendance grew. Recently, however, construction has slowed down since the 2000s.
Looking specifically at the type of BYU building, we see that from the 1950-2000 BYU built a lot of all three types of buildings: administrative, athletic, and educational. However, since 2010, they have slowed down on administrative and athletic buildings while keeping pace with educational ones. So, we can say the decrease in recent buildings is driven by a decrease in non-educational types of university buildings.
Zooming in on the education buildings, the SQFT of the most recent education buildings is decently larger than many of the previous buildings. This may suggest that the decrease in construction of “Other“ buildings may be due to more expensive and large education buildings.
Discussion
Previous Mormon Metrics posts show BYU-Provo has a decreasing number of applicants, why are they continuing to build more (and bigger) education buildings?