Let’s be honest, college is not cheap. Every semester, students pay thousands of dollars for tuition, overpriced textbooks, school supplies, registration fees and more. You would think that you have paid enough to be a student. But what I’ve noticed this semester is the lack of parking, and on top of that, how expensive a parking pass is. For how much money students are paying for parking, the problem of not enough spaces needs to be solved. Why charge students for a pass, and then not have parking available to them daily?
The price for an annual U parking pass is $240 ($582 for a more prestigious EU parking pass). My friend Emma has an early morning class with me that starts at 9:10 a.m. Every morning it is the same cycle. If she doesn’t get to campus before 8:45, there are no spots left in the stadium parking lot, which has the most U parking spots. She was 20 minutes late to class twice in a row because she could not find a spot. Her most recent experience was on Thursday, Sept. 1, the same day of the first home football game. “I paid $240 this year for my parking pass and I had to park all the way up at the hospital at 9 a.m. because the lots are roped off so that all the tailgaters, who don’t pay $240 and tuition, can grill hot dogs before the football game that starts 9 hours later. There is no parking and I am constantly late, but I don’t have [$582] to hand over, because of the whole paying for tuition thing.” Emma is an ‘A’ student, and not being able to find parking for classes is now affecting her participation in those classes.
What I find astonishing is that people affiliated with the U, i.e., professors and hospital workers, even have to pay for parking passes in the A lots. Because their parking spots are in more “convenient” locations, the cost is upwards of $582 annually. Although there are usually A parking spots available, sometimes even these lots have limited availability. The U is paying our professors, then the professors are giving back their money to come work for the U. A nurse at the U hospital said, “I think it is odd that they make me pay for parking when I work there, but IHC [Primary Children’s Hospital] does not make their employees pay for parking.”
There is clearly a parking problem. A new lot is currently being built by the hospital, but this doesn’t do anything for undergraduates who are on the lower side of campus trying to get to classes on time. Traffic is also an issue. This combination of Foothill traffic and no parking is affecting students and employees of the U. For how much students pay to the U every year, I wonder where all the parking pass money is going.