Parking at Northern Michigan University is frustrating, as a student I understand this. As a commuting student for nearly three years, I live this. This has been such an issue for so long, the dead horse is beaten and, yet, here I am beating it again because of the surplus of students that came to campus this year. This year, unlike previous, three students have been moved into what were once two-person rooms. This obviously shows a larger amount of students attending NMU, or at the very least, more students staying in the campus dormitories.
Yet, students are complaining about parking once again, that they have to find obscure parking lots since their ‘go-tos’ are taken, park off campus, or arrive a lot earlier. The students in their anger spitball solutions the campus could take: building a parking garage, preventing freshmen from bringing cars their first year, doing a better job allocating who can park in certain areas. Those are just a few I’ve heard. I even remember a student making a whole presentation in EN 111 about how the commuter and resident parking lots should be switched, because the residents needed the lots closets to their dorms. With this constant complaint, I decided to look at past student enrollment numbers, to see if the rise in students has shown a growing problem.
This fall’s student enrollment numbers have just recently been published by NMU. The total student body has risen by 212 students this fall at 7,409 in total, bringing it equivalent to pre-pandemic numbers. Yet, back just a decade ago in 2014, NMU had nearly 8,600 students. I cannot comment on the parking complaints from back then, but it must have been interesting to see as Jamrich Hall opened that same year. I believe it could be possible that there are more parking lots since the hall opened then.
All of this boils down to the fact that I don’t believe that parking is as big of an issue as it is made out to be. I’ve found parking every day, since I commute, with overall very little effort. My education entirely relies on having a parking space and not once in my three years had to miss a class due to not having one. To me, this is entirely just an everyday annoyance for some.
Yet, I do think parking passes should be included in tuition, just like the $93 Student Recreation Fee. Almost every student needs to park at NMU. Not every student needs to go to the PEIF. That just feels unnecessary, and parking tickets are a guaranteed way to ruin a student’s day. When a year of parking costs $150 per student, and the university can make that up in 6 parking tickets, it almost feels like a cash grab. The university ends up looking like its stealing from people who cannot afford a parking pass right when they get to college, and that is a despicable feeling.
I believe there are much greater things NMU can invest in than parking, like adding more substance to departments to get students more majors to bring in more students. The only evidence I can find in support of an opposing argument when looking at the statistics released by NMU is that, when comparing the 2014-2015 school year and the 2023-2024 year, more students are sticking through the winter semester. In 2014, nearly 900 students left after the fall semester compared with the 540 in 2023.
This could provide backing for the cold complaints during the winter semesters that parking sucks even more when already a small walk from a car is enough to make people shiver. However, overall, I haven’t seen parking ruin anyone’s day, nor have my days been spoilt by it. As someone who lives a half-hour drive off campus, to me, the complaints from people who live on it and a 10-minute walk away from their classrooms just fall on deaf ears.
