The enrollment rate at Iowa State is increasing rapidly every year. We have more and more freshmen coming in and just this year became the largest university in the state. This is a great accomplishment, but Iowa State should consider closing enrollment at an earlier date. We simply do not have the means to take care of the number of students we are accepting, yet the number continues to grow.

This year we had  33,241 students, which is 2,201 more than we had last year and is yet another record year for Iowa State. Yes, it is great to see our numbers growing, but when we have no way to house or feed these students, we begin to have a problem on our hands.

Enrollment increases are putting the pressure on the university to get more residence halls and dining centers up. It also causes the university to hire more teachers for more sections of classes that we may not have needed before. The money for these things doesn’t come from nowhere. The students are paying for all of these things and although the amount of incoming freshmen is sure to help, they are the ones who should be the most upset. Freshmen are the ones who have it the worst from the enrollment increase.

The university is doing everything they can to accommodate housing for the incoming students, but we are just not keeping up. It has gotten to the point where the university is renting apartment buildings to house the students, yet we are still not able to get students out of living in the dens on their dorm floor. It is unfair to students to have to live with nearly zero personal space and still be expected to do well in their studies.

It is time for Iowa State to consider turning students away. Yes, we are a state school and we cannot tell qualified people that they cannot attend school here, but if we don’t have anywhere to house them, we might have to do just that. Iowa State should cap the amount of students that are allowed to enroll in the university each year to ensure that students are going to have a place to live, although it is not just housing that has become an issue.

Dining centers also suffer from an overload of students. With an enrollment increase, the dining centers should be working to better accommodate students by keeping their hours open each night for dinner for longer than two hours. There is just no way to get nearly 6,500 students through the dining center in the few hours that they are open for dinner. This results in students being turned away and forced to use dining dollars for meals, which means most have an overload of meals left at the end of the year. 

Enrollment in classes is another place that is affected by the increasing amount of students. When upperclassmen register for classes it seems like they almost fill up right away. It is unimaginable how many sections are unavailable for freshmen scheduling. Of course, they do save sections for incoming freshmen, but even those fill up rather quickly, leaving students scrambling to meet their credit minimums with classes they really don’t need for their majors.

By simply limiting the amount of students Iowa State was allowed to accept every year, all of these problems could be avoided. We would have enough room for students in the residence halls, we would have enough time to get dinner in the dining centers and classes would not be so full or fill up so quickly. It is great that Iowa State wants to be the largest school in the state and we want everyone to feel like they are welcome here, but we are simply not able to keep up.