In March 2025, RAND released the Building Impact report, highlighting gaps between architectural education and practice. The independent study—which featured surveys and interviews with hundreds of architecture students, faculty, and practitioners—identified several key issues within architectural education related to program requirements, curriculum, and relevance.
By exploring opportunities to revisit application requirements, ensure curriculum is tied to modern practice, and expand support for students, educators could help guarantee that a degree in architecture is accessible to students of all backgrounds. Here are five key considerations from the Building Impact report for educators:
1. Architecture program application requirements create barriers that keep students from pursuing a career in architecture.
Many students who participated in the Building Impact study noted that the process of putting together application portfolios—often with different rules and requirements across programs—was overly burdensome, especially for first-generation college students or those with no family history in design professions. For some participants, this impacted the accessibility of accredited programs.
By creating more uniform portfolio requirements for program applications—or even considering whether portfolios are actually necessary for program acceptance—educators could ensure that studying architecture is accessible to a broader range of prospective students.
2. Both students and practitioners desire a greater emphasis on technical skills and hands-on experience during architecture school.
Current tensions between what should be taught at school versus what should be learned on the job leave graduates underprepared to transition from student to working professional. Only half of students felt their education adequately prepared them in technical skills, such as documentation and building technology systems—areas that practicing professionals indicated were very important in practice.
Additionally, students reported that a lack of exposure to modern design software tools while in school negatively impacted their job prospects, as even internships required students to already have experience with tools like Revit.
By making time for teaching and developing these skills in architecture school, educators can help better prepare licensure candidates to use the design skills they’ve been taught in a practical setting.
3. Students and practitioners don’t feel that program curriculum is well-aligned to industry trends.
While more than half of faculty participants (51%) felt that their program’s curriculum was well-aligned to industry trends, only 19% of students agreed. In general, students and practitioners—especially early-career professionals—were more likely than educators to see academia as misaligned with industry trends, especially when it came to the amount of focus placed on topics like architectural history and sustainability.
For example, most practitioners (89%) reported that academia provides too much coverage of architectural history, compared to just 26% of educators. Meanwhile, 77% of educators believed that knowledge of architectural history was useful for practice, compared to 41% of professionals. Faculty were also overall more likely than students to report that climate change was a central or high focus of the curriculum, outpacing students by roughly 20 percentage points.
By connecting with local practitioners to explore how curriculum translates to modern practice, educators could better assess whether some topics are over- or under-taught in their program.
4. Licensure candidates need greater support when it comes to finding internships.
Participants in the Building Impact study generally agreed that internships are critical for developing hands-on skills and transitioning to the workforce—but many students and practitioners suggested that schools should play a bigger role in helping emerging professionals find the right job opportunities.
Through sustained partnerships with firms or local professional organizations or by incorporating internship requirements into education, schools could create the structured support that their graduates need to succeed in their chosen field.
5. Students rely on faculty to help them transition to the workforce and navigate their program demands
Throughout the Building Impact study, students noted the individualized attention and support they receive from faculty, such as explaining licensure requirements, reviewing application materials, guiding them through competitions, and generally being a listening ear for their needs.
By ensuring that their faculty have the bandwidth and network they need to appropriately support their students, architecture programs can better set their students up for future career success.
About the Building Impact Report
The outcome of data collected through surveys and focus groups with architecture students, faculty, and practitioners, the Building Impact report provides key insights into the accessibility, affordability, and applicability of architectural education. The study was commissioned by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and NCARB, with support from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), to better understand the current relationship between education and practice.
The Building Impact report is a direct follow-up to the 1996 Building Community report (also known as the “Boyer Report”), which identified several areas where education was misaligned with practice at the time and provided recommendations to build a stronger relationship between the two. Now, nearly 30 years later, the findings of the Building Impact report demonstrate that many of those gaps still exist.
Read the full report at www.ncarb.org/RAND.
