App State has grown significantly throughout the years. The most well-known instance is App State being founded in 1899 as a training school for teachers, while now having over 150 undergraduate programs. However, most students probably do not know that in 1903, only 250 students attended App State. Now the school is attempting to accommodate over 21,000 students. With the improvements and growth comes the criticism and nitpicking of App State’s current campus problems and issues.
While it is good to reflect on the past and see how far this campus has come, it also is necessary to continue progressing App State to its fullest potential, which the school has been having difficulty doing for quite some time. With the overwhelming number of students being accepted and the continuous growth of different undergraduate programs, there are some areas that were “improved” a decade or two ago, but now need attention more than ever.
In the past several years, App State has struggled with providing students with housing, causing many students to go into debt just to afford an apartment.
Housing in 2014 was chaotic with students having to live with resident assistants or in lounges just to have a place to sleep. In 2020, Raven Rocks, Thunder Hill and New River became the most recent addition to residence halls. This was great, but when App State converted East Hall into office spaces, along with the demolition of six different residence halls to make space for parking, the building of residence halls became a necessity again. App State needs to build more sustainable dorms that can hold the amount of students they are over accepting.
With the overwhelming amount of students being accepted into App State, the departments continue to grow.
In 2019, Sanford Hall had to hold the Department of English and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Even Sanford was too small of a building to house both departments, causing the English department to split up into different buildings until recently when Sanford finished remodeling. Sanford is not the only building that has ever been under construction; in 2023, Wey Hall began renovations.
Since Wey Hall’s construction, the art students have been scattered all over campus, just as the English students were four years prior. Displacing majors is not the main issue, but the growth of degrees, when ones currently on campus are lacking in so much funding.
App State recently introduced an online option to get a veterinary technology degree as a way to allow students more job opportunities. However, it is not possible to take in-person classes for this degree, because there is not enough room on campus. Before adding more degrees, App State needs to continue renovating buildings and distributing their funds better. Sometimes, striving to have the most becomes a hindrance to having the best.
There is another thing, other than housing, that App State has consistently disregarded throughout the years: parking.
In 2017, there was discussion on parking spaces being distributed at the hospital and possibly at the “new” Beaver College of Health Sciences, which had yet to be fully built; even then they knew that it was not going to work, due to the staff needing to park somewhere. The director of parking and traffic services was right, because students are having to take the bus or walk to the Leon Levine Hall of Health Sciences. In 2018, there were parking passes for cars to park on campus after 1:30 p.m., which was only $144.
Compared to now, that seems like the dream, but people in 2018 were not looking at the future problems. Instead, they disagreed with the idea that students had to pay to park on campus earlier than usual, just because the $276 semester parking pass was either too expensive or unavailable to lowerclassmen.
Sadly, the university has yet to change their ways and despite the push back from those parking passes. In 2023, App State released a parking pass that would allow students to park on campus from 5 p.m. onward for $120 a year. Students were in an uproar due to the fact that for the past few years, students were allowed to park on campus for free past 5 p.m., but now they would have to pay for the right to park until 7 p.m. Instead of making it better and listening to the student body for a change, App State went against everyone’s wants and needs, becoming money hungry in the process.
App State has attempted to fix things in the past, but instead of getting better, things have only gotten worse. A lot of it can be blamed on the over acceptance of students and the money grabbing person in power.
If the student body is continuously getting told that things will be fixed or things will be better, eventually people are going to stop listening if they have not already. Being disappointed over and over again is not what the student body wants to go through, but when scrolling through 2011 archives of The Appalachian, there were many that were easy to relate to. There is barely a difference between the complaints of the past and the complaints of the more recent print editions, such as the November 2023 paper.
App State needs to be held accountable for their lack of planning in the past and the failing system that is now catching up to them.
