This editorial reflects the general opinion of The Spectator staff. 

Faulty air conditioning. No hot water. No access to information on bus routes. Limited parking spots. Sound familiar?

VSU has struggled for years with facilities on campus not working, or if they work, at a lower quality than advertised. Ask any senior who has spent their college career here– most likely, they will have complaints from seniors of the past as well as their own. While patience is necessary for many issues, so is communication, and this is where we as a university fall short.

Why, as a student body, are we ill-informed of a situation regarding student facilities until it reaches a critical point? We deserve to be more informed, whether it be a housing or transportation issue.

A year and a half ago, a student shared her experience with a large mold growth in her room on YikYak, an app where students can post their thoughts anonymously. According to her, the problem was only solved after she had flagged it an “emergency,” leaving her without answers until she posted about her situation.

Housing is not the only department with this issue; students have complained about the lack of communication surrounding the bus system on campus. The app connected to it, DoubleMap, has been faulty for years, leaving students in the dark regarding where the school’s most common (and some students’ only) mode of transportation is at any given point.

Students living on campus pay at least $12,000 on average per semester as of last year, with nearly $7,000 going towards housing and $3,500 towards transportation. This means, at minimum, students living on campus are paying over $10,000 a year for facilities that do not work as intended. This is unfair to students who use these every single day; not knowing if you will have a vehicle to get from campus to home or if you will have hot water for a shower is unfair for students paying full price for these amenities.

There are three factors that would best make up for paying the full price for faulty items. First, VSU can begin to give their students more transparency on situations causing problems on campus. If a dorm hall loses hot water, for example, it should be addressed within a day’s time, and frequent updates (such as what is given for network outages) should be provided as the situation goes on. 

Second, VSU should reimburse students to a certain degree for the amenities that were paid for but could not be utilized to their fullest extent. With the hot water example, students shouldn’t be paid back the full price of their housing fee, but the amount it would take to heat the water on a daily basis, multiplied out for however many students are affected. Alternatively, this price could be removed from the housing fee for the affected semesters.

Last, these issues should be handled quickly and thoroughly, making sure that there are no instances where the issue could go unnoticed to the point of coming back immediately after. These measures would prevent most of the student complaints.

Source:

https://www.valdosta.edu/admissions/financial-aid/documents/coa-in-state-independent.pdf