Ithaca College

I realize that my making this comment is somewhat irrelevant due to
the fact that I am graduating in May, but frankly it seems kind of
ridiculous to increase parking fees like that. First off, since i have
been at school here parking fees for upper classmen have more than
doubled from the $40 it was when i started here. Second, is the extra
3 or 6 dollars a car really going to make a difference? I would be
interested to see the breakdown of how the permit fees are used,
does all of the money really go back into the campus road and parking
lot system or does some go back to the school's general fund? If all
of the money collected is going into parking lot and road maintenance
I would feel a lot better about paying what we do for parking, but if
the school uses that money for other things I think that doesn't make
sense seeing as tuition is nearing the $40k mark (with room and
board). I would like to know if this is just and arbitrary decision or if
there is a really need for the strange percentage increase, I think it
would make more sense to raise fees only when the need is there.

Also, in addition to the above comment, I am not seeing any benefit to my fee anyway. For starters the parking lots have huge potholes and they do a horrible job at plowing and salting the lots and connecting sidewalks. It makes you curious as to what your money is truly going toward. The amount of student parking on campus is another issue in itself. I would really like to see a breakdown of how many student permits there are and how many student spaces there are in addition to the financial breakdown!

While seeing the breakdown of where our money is going in terms of parking spaces per registered vehicles is a good idea, I must say to the first comment on this page if you take the number of students who have cars and times it by the 6 or 3 dollar increase we are talking about a lot of money. I think it is justified they increased their price because it was just a few dollars difference. If they increased it by 20 or 30 a registration i would have a problem with it but obviously by this little increase we see that they are trying to work on fixing the lots, the signs, plowing etc. not just taking the students for all they have.

What bothers me is that I've always paid more for parking than any of my friends at other colleges, yet when I go to these other colleges their roads and parking lots are in much better condition (I don't even drive in the Park lot anymore). I don't know why it takes days to plow out lots. I recall a couple years ago a clearing of the Terrace lot so it could be plowed. Fliers on cars told students where to park and when, so the lot would be empty. Did that not work? Because I thought it helped a lot, but I never saw it happen again or in other lots (maybe I just missed it?). Wouldn't it be easier to do that all in one afternoon than to send plows out to clear a few spaces at a time as they open up, like I watched plows do in the Circles after storms. Instead, the lots stay snowy so that you can't see parking spaces. The parking situation is bad enough without each car taking up two spaces because they can't see where the lines are. To be fair, some paving has taken place around campus in the past few years. And maybe some of the lines have been repainted (on the roads, not in the parking lots). And the increase is small compared to everything else. I think students just want to know that they are getting what they are paying for. I think it could be good to say, We pay $blahblah dollars a year for all of this and that's why you pay us so much to drive here. Then students would feel better about only paying $100. And if the college isn't paying as much as they are getting from us, then they should charge less. This permit increase won't affect me at all, either, as I too will be graduating in May. I do feel bad for all the new students who don't know what they're getting themselves into, though, in general. Looking at how much more I'm paying this year than my first year, how much more in loans I have to borrow and how I live off campus to save a few hundred dollars a month--it makes me a little glad I'm getting out when I am.

Just another example of Ithaca College trying to rape its students for all
the money they can. This is rediculous. Nothing at this damn place is
free of charge. You get locked out of your room and you have to pay a
freakin dollar. You pay thousands of dollars for probably the worst food
this side of a trash can. You throw some trash away in the wrong trash
can and its another 15$. When does it stop? We already pay upwards of
40,000$ a year for this god forsaken place. I don't see what it's getting
me. I always have a hard time believing that someone isnt making a
profit from this. I'm waiting for you to prove me wrong, Ithaca College,
but until you do, this is unacceptable.

A prestigious college does come at an expense - I just think we need to see what our money is going to when they propose price increases and don't show concrete benefits.

College costs are expensive and sometimes ridiculous, but if we had breakdowns of these costs we could see exactly where our money goes to and what it used for.