If you have never been to a college campus during the heat of an average semester, then you have never felt the anger and frustration that comes with being a college student in modern day society. Let me break it down for you. Colleges force students to buy parking passes and commuter passes for hundreds of dollars just to get to class, and then they oversell passes and make students pay the meter. When the meter runs out (because it inevitably will) they seize their opportunity to charge you more money and give you a ticket.
You may be thinking, “why don’t you just walk or park on the street without a meter?” Well if you live in the Midwest, there is no way that you can walk two miles to school in 20 below weather. And at UW-Stout, there is not non-metered parking. In fact, the whole town only has one street that you can actually park overnight on. It’s like the whole city just unanimously agreed to screw over all the students and make them pay for a parking pass that won’t come in use anyway.
I have a friend who was unable to purchase a parking pass because there were no more open spaces in the dorm parking lots. So I had to drop his car off at a Walmart parking lot and drive him everywhere he needed to go because the number of parking spaces did not correlate with the number of students living in those particular dorms. This is just one example of many that I know of where students just get screwed over by the university.
My point is, that students really get the bad end of the deal. Not only do we have to pay ridiculous amounts in student loans, interest, books, all while not being able to work full time jobs. I think that administrators and college heads need to stop being so greedy and focus on the student’s needs for once. And that is my rant on college parking.