Clemson is overcrowding us, and it’s affecting our overall college experience.
Clemson added over 8,000 new students to campus this year, which is more than it ever has in past years. Admittance into Clemson is harder than ever. The number of applications received are at an all-time high and increasing every year. At the surface, this is all great news, but the number of students is growing faster than the university’s infrastructure, which is starting to create some problems.
First, the most obvious stressor is parking. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of panic and despair that overwhelms you when you have a mere eight minutes left before class starts, and your class is a ten-minute walk away (on a good day), and you’ve already been circling the parking lot for five minutes trying to find the ever-elusive commuter spot.
Another unseen problem is the availability of spots in classes. Registration is one of the most stressful times of the year for students. This is a bold statement, considering all of the other stressful things we students deal with on the daily, but yes, registration is overwhelming. It is getting increasingly more difficult to get spots in the classes you need for your major, much less at the times you prefer. Also, if you have a specific gen ed class in mind, well good luck, because you’ll be lucky to get into any gen ed at all.
With the increasing number of students, the lines at the major food establishments on campus are increasing as well. I mean, have you ever been to the Chick-fil-A around 6 on a Monday or any other day of the week for that matter? Have you been to the dining hall after the 11:15 classes get out on a Wednesday, or to the Starbucks in Cooper any time during finals week? The lines are ridiculously long, so be prepared for your five minute coffee break to turn into a 30 minute fiasco.
When I first toured Clemson, I was told that students get tickets to every home football game. It was as simple as that. However, when I arrived at Clemson the following fall, the rules had changed. Now, students have to either pay a couple hundred bucks for season tickets or take their chances in the infamous lottery system and risk having to buy a ticket off of somebody or having to camp out all night before game day in an effort to get a last-minute hill ticket. Even with the season tickets, the lower deck is oversold and overcrowded, so you’d better get their early to get a seat.
The worst part of this whole thing, however, is that even though Clemson is adding more and more students each year, our tuition has not gone down at all. In fact, it continues to go up. We are paying more money to go here than we ever have, but we are getting less and less for our money. The resources on campus have stayed the same, but now they are being stretched over more students every year.
It is great that Clemson continues to get more popular and draw attention from potential students all over the world, but it has created some problems. Hopefully, if we give it a little more time, the campus and its resources will catch up to the demand, and we will all be thriving once again.
