'Everyone is everywhere'

UGA Students face challenges of campus overcrowding

April 22, 2024

Housing

Transportation

Academics

Future Steps

Waking up two hours early to catch a bus to a morning class. Taking 30 minutes to scour the library for a place to sit down and study. Waiting 20 minutes in line for a coffee or a meal at the dining hall.

For many students at the University of Georgia, an average weekday includes plenty of time spent waiting, and although the minutes may seem small on their own, they add up to contribute to a fast-growing problem: the impact of campus overcrowding.

In the past year alone, UGA had a 2.5% increase in total undergraduate enrollment, according to the USG Board of Regents’ fall 2023 semester enrollment report.

While this increase may seem insignificant, it means there are over 1,000 more people on UGA’s campus since fall 2022, adding to the steady rise in enrollment the university has seen over the past 10 years.

According to the enrollment report, there are currently 41,615 students enrolled in Athens, compared to 40,607 just a year ago.

In spite of increased funding and other efforts from the university, this wave of admissions is having adverse effects on various aspects of student life, whether that is transportation, student housing, academic achievement or even mental health.

'There was nothing left': The Student Housing Crunch

Destiny Moore, a first-year computer science and Asian languages and literature major, is no longer able to live on campus for her sophomore year.

“By the time I had taken the portal, there was nothing left,” Moore said.

Although she applied for on-campus housing the day registration opened in January, Moore said by the time she was allowed to find a space, there were no available residences, even in farther away locations like the Health Sciences campus.

Families and students move around in the lobby of Creswell Hall, a first-year dormitory at the University of Georgia, during the fall semester move in day. Photo Courtesy/University of Georgia Marketing and Communications)

Because the dorm selection process is student-led and doesn’t provide availability updates, Moore said finding a space can also become tedious.

“I would have to basically sit by my computer all summer, waiting and hoping that a slot opened up,” Moore said. “I wasn't really guaranteed anything.”

Moore said for her, giving up her campus residence meant losing a lot of convenience.

“You're able to be more involved directly, whether it's extracurriculars or just hanging out with new people that you might meet,” Moore said about living on campus. “You're just closer to everything, so it's just more convenient in terms of getting to class and having to have less of a commute.”

Increased demands for on-campus housing is a problem UGA has faced for years. According to the 2017 and 2022 UGA Factbooks, the university saw almost an 11% increase in student housing occupancy between those five years.

Like many other universities, one of UGA’s solutions was to put more students into existing space. In 2015, UGA started creating expanded apartments in its East Campus Village, converting single-occupancy rooms to doubles. With the addition of these “expanded rooms,” many ECV apartments now house up to six students in a four-bedroom, two bath space.

As more freshmen are admitted, housing gets tighter, especially as UGA requires first-year students to live on campus. In spring 2022, UGA began offering upperclassmen up to $3,500 to give up their dorm rooms to make space for incoming first-years.

For vacating their main campus residence halls, the university also offered upperclassmen rooms at a 50% reduction in Brown Hall, which is located off Prince Avenue around 2 miles away from central campus in UGA’s Health Sciences Campus.

University Housing said in a statement that since 2022, UGA has been able to accommodate the incoming first year class without offering these incentives to returning students.

In spite of this, first-year students still face the impacts of dorm overcrowding when they begin the housing search for their second year.

The university currently has 14 first-year only residences, with plans to build another. However, when first-years can’t keep these spaces for the next year, they often have to look for off-campus housing in Athens.

“Because I'm in Brumby, a first-year dorm, they basically kick you out,” Moore said.

When looking for a space off-campus, students are competing with Athens residents for a limited number of affordable rental options, which have been further reduced by the city’s mounting housing crisis.

A decline in the number of housing units built in recent years, combined with a 7.7% increase in mean house prices in the past year according to Zillow when about 11,000 Athens residents are already classified as “housing stressed,” means that finding an affordable space is a challenge for students and Athens locals alike.

Bridget Goodman, a second-year journalism, comparative literature and Portuguese major, said UGA students’ search for off-campus housing can also have a negative impact on the larger Athens community when they begin outbidding local residents for spaces.

"We're a big part of Athens but not the most important part by any means," Goodman said. "So what we do ripples out."

‘Sometimes I cannot get on that bus’: Limited transportation

A student stands in a UGA bus on the way to central campus on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024 in Athens, Georgia. UGA bus seats often fill up quickly, and many students stand during their commute. (Photo/Navya Shukla)

So many students living off campus means that more people are crowding the roads getting to and from UGA each day. For many, this also means becoming increasingly reliant on the university transportation system to take them to classes or their far-away parking spots.

However, limited buses on each route and student numbers that exceed bus capacity limit the system’s efficiency, said Albert Chen, a fourth-year psychology major who lives off-campus and frequently uses university transportation.

“The buses are getting really crazy, especially in the morning, because everyone's trying to get to class,” Chen said. “The closer you get to class time, the more crowded the buses tend to get.”

Chen said he can also see the way overcrowded buses impact the students around him.

“Crowding becomes an issue when people are not able to get on the bus,” Chen said. “Sometimes I feel so bad for some of these students, because they have to wait for three buses before they can get back to where they need to go.”

Chen said planning his transportation around campus is an integral part of his day and can become stressful when there are a limited number of buses operating on his route. This bus shortage also impacts Chen’s sleep schedule, which he says forces him to wake up earlier to catch a bus that will get him to class on time.

“The whole semester, I've never gotten more than six hours of sleep,” Chen said.

Students get off a UGA bus while other students wait to get on at the Memorial bus stop on Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024 in Athens, Georgia. The memorial bus stop becomes especially busy during the early morning and late evening, when students are going to class or back home. (Navya Shukla)

Hear Chen talk about his full experience with UGA transportation here:

The UGA bus service currently consists of over 30 electric and 60 diesel buses, and has an average ridership of 33,716 per day, according to the university’s Transportation and Parking Services website. By comparison, the bus system operated by MARTA, which serves the metro Atlanta region of over 6 million people, had 87,096 daily trips in December 2023.

‘Daily Hassles’: Student life and academics

Campus overcrowding can limit physical space, but in doing so, it can also hinder students’ academic life and achievement.

Professor John Achee, a senior lecturer in the UGA department of psychology, has seen a gradual but large increase in some of his classes over the years.

“You'd see maybe 45. After a few years, we started to see 60. After a few years, we started to see 80,” Achee said.

Now, Achee’s social psychology class is often as big as 140 students.

Achee said that he has seen the growing class size have an adverse effect on student attendance and participation, as well as the rigor and writing-intensive nature of most upper-level classes.

“I don't feel like people leave with as grounded of an understanding of the material as they used to,” Achee said.

However, the impact of overcrowding on student academics also goes beyond the classroom.

“If there's a big chem exam and you want to sit down and write a paper, you're not gonna find a spot,” Goodman said. “Everyone is everywhere.”

Along with reducing both study time and study space, activities like looking for a place to sit, moving through crowds and finding parking can also impact mental health.

Studies have also found that human physiological responses to stress are increased in certain urban environments, specifically commercial and transit areas – both of which UGA has an abundance of.

Achee said these small “daily hassles” can add up to prolonged stress, which can become problematic without coping mechanisms in place. In particular, he said it can lower concentration levels and increase distractions, which can then hinder the effectiveness of study sessions, among other issues.

Excessive or chronic stress has also been linked to impairing cognitive function, attention and memory retrieval, which can make processing information and retaining new knowledge difficult, according to a study in the National Library of Medicine.

“Students, usually, I think, don’t have a lot of time to cope with stress,” Achee said. “Stress that you don't deal with causes all kinds of physical and mental complications.”

‘Keeping the university growing’: Next steps against overcrowding

For the class of 2028, UGA has admitted over 15,900 applicants, which is over 600 more than the admits of 2023, according to the University of Georgia department of undergraduate admissions.

While the number of admits who will choose to enroll is currently unknown, this slight rise in admissions rate creates the possibility of an even larger volume of students on campus for the upcoming year, making the issue of overcrowding more pertinent than ever.

However, some students believe admitting fewer students is not necessarily the solution.

“I think it's also important to keep the university growing,” said Kinsleigh Purvis, a biological sciences major from Talking Rock, Georgia. “You're always going to run into problems with space and not enough availability. But you also wouldn't want to totally stop that, because that would mean the university as a whole would stop growing and expanding.”

Goodman echoed this idea, saying that it’s more important for the university to invest in long-term solutions like higher-density housing, better transit facilities and study spaces proportionate to the campus population.

“Everyone deserves an opportunity to be here, and our goal should be to serve as many people as we possibly can responsibly,” Goodman said.

UGA has not responded with a statement that recognizes campus overcrowding or describes how it is being addressed. However, the university currently has numerous future plans and proposals in place to adapt its infrastructure to student needs, according to an article in UGA Today.

The university’s plans for summer 2024 include building a new 565-bed first-year residence hall, as well as a dining, learning and wellness center, both of which will be open to students in fall of 2026. UGA is also considering a proposal that would add an additional parking deck close to the existing West Campus Parking Deck.

“I don't think it's so much like, ‘stop admitting so many people,’” Goodman said. “It's ‘how can we make sure we have the capacity to take care of all the people we're admitting?’”

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