5 Cleaning Challenges Facing College Campuses

5 Unique Cleaning Challenges Facing College Campuses (and How to Solve Them)

A college campus is not a bigger version of a K-12 school. It is a small city, with residential neighbourhoods, research facilities, athletic complexes, dining operations, event venues, and administrative offices, all running on different schedules and requiring different cleaning protocols under a single facilities operation.

The industry framework for evaluating campus cleanliness is set by the Association of Physical Plant Administrators (APPA), the international body for higher-education facilities officers. APPA’s five-level cleanliness scoring system runs from Level 1 (“Orderly Spotlessness”) to Level 5 (“Unkempt Neglect”). Most campuses target Level 2 as their operational baseline, and achieving that standard consistently across an entire campus portfolio is a much harder operational challenge than it sounds.

This guide is a practical reference for higher-education Facilities Directors, Campus Operations Managers, and Directors of Housing evaluating cleaning operations at colleges and universities in Rhode Island and across New England. It covers the five cleaning challenges that define campus facilities and the operational solutions that address them.

It draws on 40 years of facility services experience across more than 150 buildings in Rhode Island and New England.

Before the Challenges: A Note on APPA Cleaning Standards

APPA (formally, APPA: Leadership in Educational Facilities) is the international professional association for higher-education facilities officers, representing approximately 16,000 professionals across nearly 1,000 institutions. Their Operational Guidelines for Educational Facilities (Fourth Edition, 2023) is the reference standard for campus custodial operations.

The APPA five-level cleanliness scoring system:

Level 1 — Orderly Spotlessness. Reserved for showcase facilities, presidential offices, and high-visibility public spaces.
Level 2 — Ordinary Tidiness. The industry standard target for most higher-education facilities.
Level 3 — Casual Inattention. Acceptable in low-traffic administrative and back-of-house spaces.
Level 4 — Moderate Dinginess. Signals the operation is under-resourced.
Level 5 — Unkempt Neglect. Requires immediate intervention.

Most campuses can’t afford Level 1 across all buildings and shouldn’t aim for it. Level 2 is achievable, defensible, and appropriate. Level 3 or lower signals a facilities operation losing ground.

The practical value of APPA is a shared language. When the facilities team, the custodial vendor, and the campus leadership all evaluate cleanliness against the same standard, disagreements about “clean enough” become measurable rather than subjective. Each of the five challenges below is scoped against the operational target of maintaining APPA Level 2 across a full campus.

Challenge #1: Multi-Building, Mission-Diverse Portfolios

A single campus might include academic classrooms, faculty offices, research laboratories, student residence halls, dining facilities, athletic complexes, event centres, libraries, health clinics, administrative buildings, and historic buildings from multiple architectural eras. Each of these requires distinct cleaning protocols, distinct scheduling, and often distinct compliance frameworks.

A cleaning operation that treats a research lab like a lecture hall will fail the lab. A crew that treats a residence hall like an academic building will fail both. The K-12 model of “clean the whole building on the same nightly rotation” does not scale to a college.

Why K-12 or standard commercial protocols don’t work:

K-12 buildings are single-mission (education, occurring on a fixed weekday schedule). Colleges are multi-mission and operate around the clock.
Commercial buildings are single-tenant or predictable-mix. Colleges have residential and research tenants under the same facilities budget.
Neither framework accounts for the coordination required across mission-diverse buildings under one operation.

The solution:

Zoned protocols per building type. Academic buildings, residence halls, athletic facilities, and laboratories each get their own cleaning specification, product list, staff training, and quality metric.
Building-type-specific staff rotations. Crew members trained on specific building types stay assigned to those buildings rather than rotating across all campus assets.
A campus-level quality assurance framework. The QA process has to roll up across building types, not report by building in isolation. Facilities leadership needs visibility across the whole campus.
Mission-aware scheduling. Cleaning windows have to respect residential occupancy, research operating hours, athletic events, and academic scheduling simultaneously.

A vendor operating from a single template applied to every building is not equipped for a college campus, regardless of what their proposal claims. For a wider view of what a properly scoped commercial cleaning contract should include, see the paired guide on K-12 janitorial contract requirements.

Challenge #2: Residence Halls with 24/7 Occupancy

Residence halls house students continuously from August or September through May or June, with high-density occupancy, shared bathrooms and common areas, and personal spaces that cleaning staff cannot fully access. Unlike K-12, where the building empties every afternoon, residence halls never empty. Unlike hotels, where turnover between guests creates a clean baseline, dormitories accumulate wear across an entire academic year.

The compounding factor is student behaviour. Residence halls host young adults with limited experience of shared living, high stress cycles (exams, semester-end deadlines), and social use patterns (parties, guest visits, all-nighters) that no other cleaning environment replicates.

Why standard protocols don’t work:

Cleaning has to happen around occupants, not while the building is empty
Personal rooms typically cannot be accessed for routine cleaning, meaning common areas absorb the entire cleaning workload
Shared bathrooms see intensive use with limited natural break periods for deep cleaning
Student turnover between semesters and years creates significant deep-clean requirements between academic sessions

The solution:

Layered scheduling. Daily common-area maintenance, weekly bathroom deep-cleans, monthly stairwell and corridor deep-cleans, and end-of-semester room and hall resets.
Staff trained on residential environments. Residence hall crews should be background-checked, trained on student interaction protocols, and prepared for the specific conditions of occupied dormitories.
Post-event and reactive cleaning capacity. Weekend parties, spill incidents, and illness clusters, particularly norovirus, a persistent risk in high-density student housing, require reactive capacity that daily cadence doesn’t cover.
End-of-semester deep cleans built into the contract, not treated as extras. The room turnover between spring semester and fall semester is a major operational event.

Every campus housing department will confirm the same reality: residence halls consume disproportionate cleaning attention because they operate on a fundamentally different cadence than the rest of the campus.

Challenge #3: Laboratories, Research, and Specialized Science Spaces

Research campuses house wet labs, dry labs, chemistry, biology, medical research, engineering, animal research, and specialized instrumentation spaces. Cleaning these spaces requires an understanding of chemical safety, biosafety, controlled-substance protocols, and the specific operational constraints of active research.

Cleaning staff in a research lab may encounter chemical spills, biohazard waste, cryogenic materials, radioactive materials (in appropriately controlled environments), and delicate research equipment. The default response to any unknown material or condition should be “stop and escalate,” not “clean it up.”

Why standard protocols don’t work:

Wet cleaning around research equipment can destroy experiments or damage instrumentation
Biohazard waste and chemical waste have specific segregation requirements under the OSHA Hazard Communication Standard and the OSHA Bloodborne Pathogens Standard (29 CFR 1910.1030)
Research operations often run on 24-hour cycles that don’t fit standard nightly cleaning windows
Cleaning products used in adjacent spaces may not be safe or appropriate in research environments

The solution:

Specialized staff training. Research space cleaners need training beyond general commercial cleaning, including OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard and Bloodborne Pathogens Standard where applicable.
Documented coordination with research staff. The cleaning protocol should be developed with lab managers, not imposed on them. Some spaces require lab staff to be present during cleaning; others require cleaning only during specific windows.
Zoned equipment and product use. Cleaning tools and products used in labs never move to residence halls, dining, or general academic buildings. Cross-contamination in either direction is a safety event.
Escalation protocols for anything unexpected. Staff should never clean unknown spills, unlabelled containers, or damaged equipment. The correct response is to seal the area and notify the lab manager and facilities office immediately.

A vendor whose lab protocols exist only in a proposal deck, not in daily operations, is a vendor whose lab work will eventually create a safety event. For the underlying framework on infection control and disinfection standards, see the guide on infection control cleaning.

Challenge #4: Athletic and Recreation Facilities at Scale

College athletic facilities include intercollegiate competition venues, recreation and fitness centres, swimming pools, weight rooms, locker rooms with heavy shower use, athletic training rooms with medical protocols, and event spaces used by both athletics and the broader campus community. The combination of heavy sweat contact, communal showers, shared equipment, and high-volume traffic creates a distinct set of pathogen risks.

MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is a well-documented risk in athletic facilities and locker rooms, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishing specific guidance on prevention in athletic settings. Norovirus outbreaks are common in shared training rooms and dining halls attached to athletic facilities.

Why standard protocols don’t work:

Locker rooms and shower areas require higher-frequency disinfection than any other campus space
Athletic equipment and shared training surfaces require specific antimicrobial protocols
Post-event turnover (games, competitions) requires rapid deep-clean capacity that standard nightly cadence doesn’t cover
Pool and wet-area protocols require chemical knowledge that general commercial cleaning doesn’t include

The solution:

EPA-registered hospital-grade disinfectants for locker rooms, showers, training rooms, and shared equipment. The same product standards that apply to healthcare environments apply here.
Multi-touch daily disinfection for high-touch equipment: weights, machine surfaces, mats, handles, and shared training equipment.
Post-event turnover protocols with rapid response capacity.
Pool and wet-area protocols developed with the aquatics team.

Athletic facility cleaning is not a lower standard than academic cleaning. In terms of pathogen management, it is often a higher one.

Challenge #5: Semester Turnover Surge Periods

A typical academic year includes several major surge cleaning events: fall move-in (typically August, involving residence hall preparation), winter break (mid-December through mid-January, when the campus empties and deep cleaning can happen at scale), spring break (typically March, a smaller surge), and the summer window (May through August, the largest deep-clean cycle).

Each surge requires cleaning capacity well beyond the baseline weekly cadence. Move-in preparation for a residence hall community of several thousand students is not a one-crew job. It is a project.

Why baseline staffing doesn’t work:

Baseline staffing is calibrated to routine cleaning demand, not surge demand
Surge periods happen on fixed dates that can’t be shifted (academic calendar)
Failure to complete surge work on schedule cascades into the next academic term
Attempting surge work with baseline staffing produces incomplete work or exhausted crews

The solution:

Documented surge capacity commitments in the contract. The vendor should specify how they scale for move-in, break-week deep cleans, and summer projects, with named staffing levels and project management protocols.
Advance planning cycles. Summer deep cleans should be scoped in April, not started in June. Move-in projects should be scoped in June, not launched in August. For a full framework on the summer window sequence, see the paired guide on back-to-school facility readiness.
Project-management approach for major surges. Named project lead, defined scope, weekly milestone check-ins, sign-off walkthrough at completion.

A vendor without documented surge capacity is a vendor whose baseline services will be strained by every academic transition.

The Rhode Island Context

Rhode Island’s higher-education landscape is unusually rich for a state its size. The Ocean State is home to Brown University (Ivy League research), the Rhode Island School of Design (a global leader in art and design education), Providence College, Bryant University, Johnson & Wales University, Roger Williams University, Salve Regina University, New England Institute of Technology, the University of Rhode Island (flagship public research), Rhode Island College, and the Community College of Rhode Island, among others.

The diversity of missions and building types across those institutions (Ivy League research labs at Brown, art studios at RISD, culinary teaching kitchens at Johnson & Wales, marine science facilities at URI, the historic Newport campus at Salve Regina) means Rhode Island cleaning vendors serving higher education encounter more building-type variety per client than vendors in states with more homogeneous higher-ed sectors.

A local vendor with genuine higher-education experience in Rhode Island has typically worked across multiple mission types. A national franchise operating on a standard template usually has not.

The Janitech Approach

Across 40 years and more than 150 buildings in Rhode Island and New England, Janitech services educational institutions from K-12 schools through higher education campuses, including private schools and schools serving students with special needs.

The operational baseline for higher-education contracts:

Zoned cleaning protocols by building type, with staff trained on specific mission environments
Background-checked staff, vetted to standards applied across schools, government buildings, and financial institutions
Structured quality assurance process aligned with APPA Level 2 targets, with sensitive sites audited at least every other week and walkthrough reports submitted to ownership
EPA Safer Choice and Green Seal certified products available where a campus specifies green cleaning
General liability insurance, full workers’ compensation coverage, and commercial automobile liability
95% client retention; many clients with Janitech for 40 years or more, and most of Janitech’s growth has come from existing clients adding new locations

Veteran ownership has shaped how the business runs from day one. Accountability is how the work gets inspected, recorded, and reported every week, not a phrase in the marketing material.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is APPA Level cleaning?
APPA cleaning standards are a five-level rating system developed by the Association of Physical Plant Administrators (APPA) to help higher-education facilities evaluate cleanliness consistently. Level 1 represents “Orderly Spotlessness” and is reserved for showcase spaces; Level 2 represents “Ordinary Tidiness” and is the industry standard target for most campus facilities; Level 3 through Level 5 represent progressively lower standards that typically signal underinvestment.

How is college cleaning different from K-12 cleaning?
College campus cleaning differs from K-12 in five core areas: multi-building mission diversity (academic, residential, research, athletic, dining all under one operation); residence halls with 24/7 occupancy; specialized research and laboratory spaces; athletic facilities operating at intercollegiate scale; and cyclical semester turnover surges that create major deep-clean events multiple times per year.

Do college cleaning contracts include residence halls?
Not always. Some universities manage residence hall cleaning through their housing department separately from general campus custodial services; others contract residence halls as part of the campus-wide custodial contract. Facilities Directors should confirm which model their institution uses and scope contracts accordingly.

What is APPA?
APPA (formally, APPA: Leadership in Educational Facilities) is the international professional association for higher-education facilities officers, representing approximately 16,000 professionals across nearly 1,000 institutions. APPA publishes the reference standard for campus custodial operations, including the five-level cleanliness scoring framework.

How do universities schedule cleaning around students?
Campus cleaning schedules vary by building type. Academic buildings are typically cleaned in early morning or late evening around class schedules; residence halls are cleaned throughout the day, working around occupied rooms; athletic facilities are cleaned before or after event windows; and laboratories are cleaned in coordination with research staff. A single campus-wide schedule does not work; each building type requires its own timing framework.

Ready to Talk About Your Next Academic Year?

If your campus is evaluating cleaning capacity for the next academic year, it’s worth a walkthrough conversation.

40 years. 95% client retention. 150+ buildings across Rhode Island and New England, servicing educational institutions from K-12 through higher education.

Request a custom proposal for your campus or book a free walkthrough. We’ll assess your buildings and return a documented proposal within 2 business days.