During an era of tuition increases that were blamed on state budget cuts, Clemson and the University of South Carolina spent more than $1.2 billion on new buildings.
Over the past decade, Clemson built or is in the process of building $513.9 million worth of facilities, while USC spent $733 million on major projects, according to documents obtained by The Greenville News through Freedom of Information Act requests.
However, the level of spending for construction at the two schools, and at institutions of higher education across South Carolina, is dwarfed by that spent by its nearest neighbors.
While the General Assembly has allocated $250 million for higher ed facilities in 10 years, North Carolina lawmakers have spent $3 billion, and Georgia, $2 billion, according to Brett Dalton, vice president for finance and operations at Clemson.
The construction boom is part of a national trend, in which colleges and universities are locked in an arms race in the competition for students to pay the freight as state taxpayer support for public colleges retreats.
At Clemson, 3 percent of student fees goes to debt service and 5 percent for facilities maintenance, Dalton said.
At USC, debt service and renovations funding takes up 7.2 percent of what students pay to go to school, or $376 a semester, said university spokesman Wes Hickman.
The General Assembly hasn’t approved a bond bill for higher education since the year before Jim Barker took office as president at Clemson, in 1999. Before then, the state routinely approved a bond bill every two years to pay for maintenance and construction at colleges and universities, Dalton said.
State support for higher education has slipped from 70 percent of the institutions’ budget in the 1960s to about 10 percent now, and has fallen as low as 8-9 percent in recent years, Barker said.
The state has gone to using project-specific funding, primarily for facilities related to economic development.
Barker said that most of Clemson’s biggest construction projects have been off campus, such as the International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville and energy and environmental research facilities in the Charleston area.