If you’ve been in student housing long enough, you’ve probably heard this before: If you’re a day late, you’re a year late. It’s a phrase that always sticks with me because it captures just how high the stakes are when delivering student housing on the semester cycle. The education calendar doesn’t change for construction delays — fall semester starts whether your building is ready or not.
Over the past few years, more of us in the industry have been asking ourselves a big question: how do we deliver faster, more affordable projects and still raise the bar for student experience? One answer that has gained momentum is prefabrication.
Prefabrication isn’t a new concept, but in the context of student housing, it’s starting to show up in some exciting and meaningful ways. It’s a practical response to real schedule pressures, tight budgets, increasing demand and a student population that expects more from where they live.
What’s Driving the Shift?
Across the country, we’re seeing higher education clients take on larger, more ambitious housing projects. Many are developing projects greater than 1,000 beds to gain economies of scale. We are also observing traditionally commuter schools provide full-fledged residential experiences to improve graduation rates and student outcomes.
At the same time, many institutions are wrestling with tight budgets, particularly in a post-COVID environment where the landscape for funding sources has changed. That’s pushing some toward prefab options, and all toward smarter, more cost-effective solutions.
What does that mean for those of us delivering these projects? It means we need tools that help us do more with less — without cutting corners. That’s where prefabrication comes in. For me, it boils down to three core drivers: scale, speed and affordability.
Prefabrication Redefined
If you ask ten people what prefabrication means, you’ll likely get ten different answers. So, it’s helpful to break it down into levels of complexity:
- Level one includes things like interior wall panels, electrical assemblies and pre-plumbed components. What I’d call the ‘building blocks’ of prefabrication are already found in many commercial projects.
- Level two incorporates more integrated systems like prefabricated bathroom pods or exterior façades. On McCarthy Building Company’s UC Riverside ND2 project, for example, structural wall and floor panels were built offsite, trucked to the site and installed with great efficiency.
- Level three is the most advanced: full rooms or modules built offsite, potentially including finishes, fixtures and even furnishings.
None of these are one-size-fits-all solutions. Some projects may benefit from just limited ‘level one’ integration. Others might explore full ‘level three’ prefabrication. The real value comes from finding the right fit early and aligning the team around that approach from the start.
The Real Benefits
Yes, prefabrication can shorten schedules. On some of our recent projects, we’ve even seen prefab outperform wood-frame timelines, which were once the industry benchmark for speed.
But the benefits go beyond the calendar.
Prefabrication often lends itself to better design efficiency, especially for student housing where repetition of room layouts and vertical stacking can be optimized. It can help reduce wasted space, increase usable square footage and ultimately maximize every dollar of the budget.
There’s also quality control. Building components in a controlled environment means more consistency and fewer variables than you’ll find in the field. Plus, with just-in-time delivery, you can avoid having to store materials onsite, which is often a huge challenge for constrained campus locations.
One of the innovations I’m particularly impressed with was the use of a QR-code-based inspection system on a recent ‘level two’ prefabrication project. Each component was tagged with a unique QR code that inspectors could scan with their phones. It pulled up raw material reports, approved shop drawings and assembly photos — everything needed for traceability and validation. That kind of transparency builds confidence in a prefabrication approach.
Meeting Students Where They Are
It’s also worth noting that student housing isn’t just about a place to sleep anymore. Today’s students are looking for community, convenience and amenities. We see things like wellness rooms, collaborative lounges, gaming areas and even social laundry centers becoming the standard. The nested neighborhood model with rooms grouped into pods, pods assembled into floors, and floors activated into building communities are quickly becoming the norm.
Prefabrication can support these innovative designs, particularly when approached with creativity. But we must also acknowledge its limits. One common concern is that higher levels of prefab can sometimes feel too institutional. By working closely with designers, teams can create variation and a residential feel and identity through branding within the standardization of prefabrication. That collaboration is critical to achieve the look and feeling expected in student housing.
Recognizing When it’s the Right Tool and When it’s Not
Prefabrication isn’t always the answer. It is only one tool in the construction material and process toolbox. Early in the planning phase, owners and their advisors should ask: Would this project benefit from any level of prefabrication? Are there site constraints, labor concerns or accelerated timelines that make prefab a strong candidate? Does the project have enough repetition to make it worthwhile?
These conversations ideally should happen during early planning, not after design has advanced. For collaborative delivery like in a design-build project, these discussions can occur with the entire team engaged including owners, designers and contractors, opening the door for productive and strategic collaboration from day one.
Looking to the Future: Prefab 2.0
The next phase of prefabrication — ‘Prefab 2.0’ — will likely be less about material advancement and more about mindset. Some owners haven’t yet adopted even ‘level one’ prefabrication techniques, so we must keep educating, asking better questions and building familiarity with what’s possible.
Looking ahead, we may see prefabrication evolve where entire housing pods are purchased by the owner and installed by the builder, like how equipment is purchased. That’s a big mindset shift and it’ll take time, but the foundations are being laid today.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will offer new opportunities in how we think of prefab and how it is constructed as well.
Prefabrication could also help address a major industry concern: workforce shortages. With an aging labor force and fewer people entering the trades, prefab offers a partial solution by shifting some of the work offsite, where fewer workers can do more with greater consistency and efficiency.
At the end of the day, student housing is about people. It’s about helping students thrive, while giving institutions the tools to support that mission. Prefabrication is one of those tools. When used thoughtfully, it can unlock speed, scale, quality and value in ways that traditional construction sometimes can’t.
If I had one piece of advice for those considering prefab, it would be this: don’t wait until it’s too late to have the conversation. Bring your team together early, ask the right questions and explore the possibilities. Because whether you’re delivering 300 beds or 3,000, every day — and every decision — counts,
— Jason Dunster acts as integrated design director with McCarthy Building Cos.