While students worry over parking, classes, housing and their financial situations, Kennesaw State unveiled a brand-new $1.8 million entrance on the Kennesaw campus, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It may make the entrance to the university much more appealing, but its cost blatantly disregards the individual and campus-wide needs that students have spent years asking for.
Any student at KSU — whether part-time or full-time — understands the universal struggles of college life. This includes expensive and limited parking, required classes never offering enough seats and the stagnant mediocrity of dining options on both campuses.
Although KSU reported millions of dollars of income last year, the Georgia Board of Regents approved a 2.5 percent tuition rate increase for students at KSU, according to the Sentinel, on top of the existing array of fees. It certainly costs a large amountofmoney to run the university, but any excess money available should be used on students and not on a shiny new entrance that serves no purpose or utility other than something for people in passing cars to point at.
“I was on two waitlists this semester for required major classes and I got kicked off both of them,” junior English major Elisabeth Roberts said. “I just feel like there are way more useful things we could put this money towards.”
KSU has made a habit of repeatedly ignoring students’ requests on popular topics in the past few years. Requests seem to circulate each year, from students frustrated with ridiculous fees,
But the new sign seems to take the mishandling of students’ needs to a new level. The administration insults students by creating such a grand and expensive reminder of how little they listen to what students actually want.
“It seems like a big waste of space,” graduate student Conner Sutton said. “We could have built a parking deck there. I think the money should have gone towards that.”
The cost of attending KSU increases each year and the least the administration could do is grow in a direction that addresses the concerns of the university’s main source of funding — its students. Campus aesthetics are secondary to the functionality that affects students’ everyday lives.
KSU students are tired of spending 20 minutes every day searching for parking and spending every registration period obsessively planning to avoid being waitlisted. Students are also tired of spending astronomical amounts of money on meal plans for dining options that never improve and watching professors suffer rapidly increasing class sizes.
The new entrance serves as yet another blatant reminder that university administration is growing more out of touch with student needs with each passing year.
