Building social infrastructure through public-private partnerships: The case of student housing in public higher education

Evaluations of Public-Private Partnership arrangements as alternatives to traditional government procurement methods for the delivery of public infrastructure projects have been anecdotal at best. This paper proposes a framework to evaluate a public university's infrastructure asset management performance and a specific measure based on a new concept of the elapsed time required for services to be delivered (i.e., Project Completion Time). The results suggest that the choice to use a public-private partnership as a project delivery method for student housing at a public university can dramatically shorten the overall schedule. This research will serve as the foundation for future quantitative research on the relationship between PPPs and the performance of various types of public projects.