This week's material describes capacity cushion, demand cushion, and balanced capacity strategies. At Georgia Southern, we've usually followed a capacity cushion strategy. Buildings are completed before we have enough students to fill them. For example, the Parker College was completed in 1994 when the university had about 10,000 students and many classrooms were lightly used. Nowadays, it seems to be full all throughout the week during normal semesters. On the Statesboro campus, a great deal of money was spent on landscaping Akins Boulevard and the pedestrium when they seemingly went nowhere! (The biology building, RAC, Engineering Building, Nursing-Chemistry building, College of Education, College of Engineering and IT, and others hadn't even been built.) Similarly, we hope that the Interdisciplinary Academic Building completed in 2019 will eventually be much more heavily utilized than it is today. This has been beneficial for the university due to the ability to grow enrollments (and revenues and services) as the state's demographic characteristics have changed. Prospective students have seen the spacious campus and easy availability of resources. It has also been beneficial to students who have had more selection in class times, less crowded computer labs, better library services, more dining options, etc. However, due to projected reductions in the college-age population in the US, it has made enrollment management very critical and any downturn in enrollments is difficult to handle from a financial perspective.

For your initial post: Using the example above, describe a business and the capacity strategy they seem to be following. What are the pros and cons of that strategy for the business and for its customers? More generally, what are the pros and cons of each of the three strategies?