In considering the heritage preservation of higher education campus buildings, much of the attention gravitates toward issues of selection, cost, accuracy, and value, but the model for most preservation projects does not have a clear method of achieving the best solutions for meeting these targets. Instead, it simply relies on the design team and client team to intuitively arrive at a set of conclusions, and both may have a vested interest in either a new or preserved building. In order to gain the highest potential benefit from preservation, higher education institutions must have better protocols for determining their selection of buildings, levels of preservation, perceptual benchmarks, high-quality building performance standards, and reasoned approaches to sustainability. These authors contend that it is time that higher education institutions take a far more rigorous approach to these projects so that the results will be better-preserved buildings at a more reasonable cost and a better understanding of how new building projects can proceed with the same logic as that applied to heritage preservation. (Contains 1 figure.)