Student Unions Expands

Student unions are essential for all college campuses. This is a place where students can interact, eat, work out, study, hang out, or just get away from their crazy roommate. However, as colleges continue to grow, student unions should also expand. Student unions should be the center point of a college campus especially for the social aspect of students. If the student union is not the center of social life of everyday students, then higher education officials should consider making a renovation or build a new one that is better and gives students more opportunities to interact.

I am going to talk about my college undergraduate experience. Our student union was called the “UC”. The UC had a workout room, a theatre, a game room, the cafeteria, a computer lab, a food court, university clothing store, and several meeting rooms. As a freshman I lived on campus and went to the UC almost every day. I used to love going to the cafeteria and sitting in there for the lunch hour and seeing everyone. It is the social hangout on campus. If the cafeteria was closed, we would go to the game room and play a quick game of ping pong. It seemed like no matter who you were or where you came from, once you stepped in the UC differences were set aside. I think that every college should have a place like this for students to meet other people on campus.

However by my junior year, the UC seemed to be out of place and a little behind the times. We had just gotten a brand new computer lab upstairs with top of the line computers, but even with those renovations, it just seemed a little out of place compared to other division 1 schools. A vote was help on campus to build a new UC or not. It was passed and immediately floor plans were being drawn. Construction started during the spring of my senior year for this new three story complex building. A year after I graduated, I went back to visit my school and it was open. I wanted to go in and see the building. It had everything; a new workout room, four full size basketball courts, an indoor running track, racket ball courts, computer labs, small food court, ping pong tables, a gaming room with Nintendo, Wii, xbox 360, Playstations, and locker rooms. It was incredible, and I never expected it to be that impressive. This is to show how rapidly technology changes college campuses. In order for students to come to school, you must have the top of the line materials available compared to other schools. It is used for recruiting purposes. As soon as another school has a better union than another then the old one has to be upgraded.

Colleges’ constant competition has caused the renovations of these student unions to happen constantly year after year. Here is a website in which has links to other websites that talk about the college’s student unions:
http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/osl/unions.html#U
I think this website was really useful to compare the different student unions around the United States. I didn’t go to all of the websites, but I went and looked at a couple. There is a common theme of all the student unions that are on here. They even had the list of new ones that were being constructed. This supports my thinking that there is a constant demand to renovate these student unions in order to offer new students the best of the best.

I found another website that actually rate different aspects of college campuses. Here is Ole Miss’s:
http://collegeprowler.com/university-of-mississippi/facilities/
We got an overall vote of a B. If you scroll down and look at the individual stats and comments, many of the students say that the student union can use some improvements. I think that maybe the student union at Ole Miss is up for an upgrade especially if Ole Miss wants to compare with other schools in the SEC conference.

As higher education administrators, it is important to have a functional student union that is available for students. This building is a big contributes to college life and student development. We need to be aware of other schools facilities and make sure they are comparable to ours. Having the top of the line equipment and buildings is what brings attention to the school and therefore increase student populations.