Campus & Facility Planning
Aligning physical resources with institutional priorities.
Facilities represent one of an institution’s largest long-term investments. NorthStar helps institutions understand how existing space is being used, determine how much space will be needed in the future, and connect facility decisions to enrollment, academic programs, workforce priorities, and institutional strategy.
Campus Space Planning
Evaluate existing facilities, future program requirements, institutional priorities, and projected demand to help determine how campus space should evolve.
Space Utilization Analysis
Measure how effectively classrooms, laboratories, and other instructional spaces are being used, including weekly room hours, seat or station occupancy, scheduling patterns, and day/time distribution.
Space Needs Assessment
Determine current and future space requirements using enrollment, staffing, instructional activity, facility inventory data, planning guidelines, and institutional standards.
Career & Technical Education Facility Planning
Define program requirements before facility solutions are developed—helping ensure that program needs drive space decisions rather than space driving program decisions.
Enrollment & Market Analytics
Understanding who you serve, where they are, and how demand may change.
Enrollment Forecasting
Develop transparent enrollment projections that consider historical enrollment, student populations, persistence patterns, demographic trends, recruitment markets, institutional initiatives, and changing external conditions.
Demographic Analysis
Evaluate traditional-age and adult populations, high-school graduate trends, population growth and decline, age distribution, educational attainment, and socioeconomic characteristics.
Geographic Market Analysis
Use student, population, and institutional data to understand geographic markets, service areas, recruitment patterns, and areas of opportunity.
Drive-Time & Accessibility Analysis
Examine how travel time and geography influence access to campuses, programs, instructional sites, and potential service locations.
Workforce & Academic Program Planning
Connecting education with regional opportunity.
Workforce & Labor-Market Alignment
Evaluate how well academic and career programs align with occupational employment, job growth, replacement demand, wages, skills, employer demand, and regional economic conditions.
Academic Program Planning
Support decisions involving new programs, program expansion, modification, location, and longer-term academic direction.
Career & Technical Education Program Planning
Help colleges, technical colleges, and school districts identify and develop CTE programs that respond to workforce demand and create meaningful educational pathways.
Program Demand & Gap Analysis
Compare occupational demand with education and training supply to identify shortage, duplication, growth, and emerging opportunities.
Employer & Industry Engagement
Supplement quantitative workforce evidence through interviews, focus groups, advisory processes, surveys, and facilitated conversations.
Institutional & Strategic Planning
Turning evidence into institutional direction.
Strategic Plan Development
Guide institutions through environmental scanning, stakeholder engagement, mission and vision review, strategic priorities, goal development, KPIs, and implementation planning.
Academic / Educational Master Planning
Develop a long-range framework connecting academic programs, enrollment, workforce needs, student success, delivery methods, facilities, technology, and institutional priorities.
Environmental Scanning
Examine the internal and external forces most likely to affect an institution’s future.
Strategic Decision Support
Provide focused research, scenario development, analysis, facilitation, and decision support for specific institutional questions.
Planning Facilitation
Facilitate leadership teams, boards, faculty groups, advisory committees, employers, and community stakeholders through complex planning conversations.