Dive summary

• When businesses close or leave town, many people turn to community colleges in a bid to retrain for new jobs, and that demand has produced a need to expand – and that means work for commercial contractors who know how to work with the institutions.
• One good approach is to keep overhead as low as possible, and another is to make sure the architects and engineers stay in close touch with the client at the college, veterans of the community college system say.
• Colleges don't run like top-down businesses, so it's important to be able to manage projects with a group of clients, and try to be sure that designers will ask questions and suggest better alternatives when they understand better than the college does what will work best for it.

From the article:

"We know what you are used to spending on private-sector jobs. A pet peeve I have is when contractors don’t hold down overhead costs: Do you really need that second work-site trailer?" ...