🎓 Record Enrollment, Declining Quality

Kennesaw State University recently announced record-breaking growth, with over 50,000 students enrolled for the Fall 2025 semester. KSU celebrates this milestone as a victory, but it comes at a steep cost for students. While KSU continues to accept new students, it refuses to invest in the infrastructure needed to support us. Our campus suffers from a severe lack of housing, transportation, and campus resources, creating unsafe, stressful, and unfair conditions that threaten both the quality of our education and our daily lives.

📈 Explosive Growth, No Infrastructure

Over the past few years, enrollment has surged, increasing from just over 43,000 in Fall 2022 to just over 50,000 students in Fall 2025, but KSU has not expanded its infrastructure to keep pace with this rapid growth. In fact, KSU has not added a new parking deck on either campus since 2010, a year when total enrollment was 23,452 students, a mere 47% of our current enrollment. Since then, enrollment has doubled, parking spaces have remained stagnant, and a lack of alternative transportation, such as buses, has made the simple matter of getting to classes into a serious challenge at KSU. Students are rightfully frustrated as they face the results of KSU’s disinvestment in students:

🚗 Parking Crisis: Students spend 30 minutes or more circling lots and decks to find a spot. Many who are unable to find a spot in the area they have already paid for are forced to find parking in another lot or deck, risking tickets and fines, to make it to class on time. With fewer parking spaces and an increasing number of students every year, this problem is only worsening.
🚌 Overcrowded Buses: The Big Owl buses are routinely filled beyond safe capacity, leaving students stranded, waiting for multiple rounds, or packed into unsafe and stressful conditions. Public transportation should make campus life easier, not harder.
📚 Education at Risk: Overcrowded classrooms, stressful commutes, and campus congestion directly impact our ability to focus and succeed academically. KSU's current priorities, such as sports facilities, may benefit image and revenue, but they neglect the real needs of students.

🏛 KSU Chooses Profit Over Students

More students means more money for KSU in the form of tuition, fees, and on-campus services such as parking. KSU has brought in $10.8 million per year for the past three years on parking and transportation fees alone. However, while KSU receives millions of dollars from students every year, it refuses to invest that money in meeting students' needs. This is not a failure in planning, it is a deliberate strategy rooted in capitalist logic: protect profit margins by cutting costs on basic needs. The problem is clear. KSU operates like a for-profit corporation and sees its students as nothing more than streams of income. They want to keep accepting students and collect on the money we pay for tuition, fees, housing, transportation, food and more, but they don’t want to spend that money to expand desperately needed services and infrastructure for students.

KSU has the ability to immediately improve these services and infrastructure, but they will not choose to do so without pressure. It is up to us to build student-led power and demand that KSU start choosing students over profit!

✊ Our Demands

We, the students of Kennesaw State University, call on President Kathy Schwaig, the KSU Board of Regents & the University System of Georgia to acknowledge this problem and take immediate action to solve it. 

We demand that KSU and its governing bodies:

1) Immediately improve the Big Owl Bus (BOB) service by acquiring more buses and expanding BOB routes to serve more apartment complexes in the area surrounding KSU. This is an attainable and readily available option to mitigate transportation shortages.

2) Give full refunds of parking passes bought for the Fall 2025 semester and full refunds of parking tickets issued in the first two weeks of school to compensate students for their trouble with parking. Students should not have to pay for a service that doesn’t even function.

3) Release a public plan within the next year to address the lack of services and infrastructure for students, such as housing, transportation and classroom space. Commit to prioritizing student infrastructure before continuing with non-essential building projects. Universities should put student needs over profit.

🔔 Call to Action

Sign this petition if you believe KSU must take immediate, transparent, and student-centered action to make our campus safe, accessible, and genuinely worthy of the "Owl Nation."