Crisis on Campus: the overpopulation issue on South Florida campuses

Florida is home to about 22 million residents and the Florida Census recorded that approximately Florida welcomes 600 new residents PER DAY! I can not blame people for wanting to move down south, there is better weather, beautiful scenery, and great places to go to school. Speaking of school, over 2 million of the everyday faces you may see in Florida are actually students. Since Florida has gained a lot of popularity since 2020 it should not be such a shock to see more and more students and faces every year however it is shocking to the crisis that has unfolded on many college campuses. 

In South Florida there are many fun and exciting cities to visit such as West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, or Miami. South Florida has a real problem of overpopulation in my opinion, let’s start with the schools. My small private university has just accepted about 1,000 new students for this school year which would be great news if there was space for them. There are only about 6 residence halls for my campus which holds about 4,000 students. The problems students are having as a result of the overpopulation is no parking, lines for laundry, not finding study rooms, etc. It has been an absolute shock to see that these colleges and universities are not equipped to take on such a large amount of incoming Freshman. 

Although these problems are frustrating there are so many ways schools can resolve them. In my opinion the schools that are having similar issues to mine did not build enough resources. If a school has enough money to buy a new resident building they should be able to facilitate enough parking for the entire school as they advertise. A school that is having issues such as overcrowding either needs to stop accepting every person they can or needs to expand its premise. 

I know some of these points I have made may sound like I do not know the logistics that go behind making these administrative decisions. I do understand what it will take to make the students at my University happy and that is something a lot of the staff do not seem to get or care about. We need there to not be a line every time we want something like food or to talk to our admission counselor, we need there to be more parking/study rooms/overall places to hang out, we need to not live on top of each other anymore. Florida is one of the most popular states and if administrators do not start to resolve their problems soon it will soon lose its title and become the least popular state.