Have you walked past the student entrance into football games recently? It takes students 30-90 minutes just to get into football games (if they don’t have to leave the line to go find a port-a-john during the wait. We saw this editorial in the Technician this morning, and thought SFN readers should take note.
We’ve noticed the student lines at Carter-Finley for a couple of years and think that whatever is happening is absurd. They’ve killed Hillsborough Street. They’ve killed the Greek system. They’re working hard on killing tailgating. Why not just go ahead and dissolve the Alumni Association NOW!? The alums currently being produced at NC State have such a lackluster social experience while in Raleigh that they won’t have enough fun experiences upon which to fondly reflect when they become successful to have any motivation to contribute to the University.
The student body has been concerned with two main things this fall: football and fees. Undergraduates pay $126.50 toward the intercollegiate athletic fee, which increased from $119 the previous spring. This is in addition to the intercollegiate athletic indebtedness fee that jumped from $25 last spring to $66 this fall. This is a huge increase with negligible returns, considering the fact that the new soccer and track complex has yet to open, I have never set foot in the Murphy Center, Vaughn Towers remains a liquor-fueled alumni haven and the number of Event One staff at football games has not noticeably increased.
Just like last fall, every time I enter the stadium, I am practically strip searched. On the other hand, the alumni I tailgate with stroll to their seats without hassle — airplane bottles tucked safely away in their pockets. Students are now paying more than ever to be treated like second class citizens.
I have a few problems with the comments in the editorial:
First, alumni do NOT ‘stroll’ to our seats with no problems. We also have un-necessary lines. I have been going to NC State games for over 30 years and rarely had to wait in lines until the lines’ sudden materialization about four years ago. They have never subsided; and it is miserable for alums to try to get into games on the East Side. (Not as miserable as the students’ experience, but far from “strolling to our seats”).
I always thought that my dissatisfaction was just personal impatience, so seeing some of the comments from other ADULT readers provide me some solace that I am not alone. Whatever happened to the pictures of the Carter-Finley expansion that they used to show us that included new bathrooms and gates around the stadium? They haven’t finished the job!!!!
Secondly, shut up about the ‘fees’. NC State’s athletic fees for students are easily amongst the LOWEST in the country. You pay $200 to support an ACC Athletics program and get FREE TICKETS to all football and basketball games?!?! And you WHINE as opposed to jumping for joy? Just shows how out of touch folks are with the real world.
Even when I was at State I wondered why our fees weren’t bigger. Many schools have mandatory athletics fees and THEN students have to actually BUY student season tickets for games. If you want to complain about student fees, then the most effective way to do so is to compare the fees to those of other ACC, SEC, Big 10 and Big 12 schools. Of course, once the student journalists start actually doing the work instead of whining they will not like what they see — that they have it better than almost everyone in the country.
