The university has responded to residence hall overcrowding issues by first improving resident assistants’ living situations – moving the students living with them into separate rooms. And we’d like to applaud Kent State for moving those 75 students living with RAs into real rooms. But we still have questions.

As of last week, 168 of the 184 students assigned to dorm lounges still live there. Residence Services expects some students will remain in the lounges for the rest of the semester.

So our questions are for the students.

Are you comfortable? If so, will you be comfortable for the rest of the semester living in the lounges? Is the 25 percent discount enough? Or do you actually prefer the living situation and would pay full price?

With Kent State’s enrollment increasing every year, by 11.76 percent this year, maybe Kent State officials should start planning for the future. This problem isn’t going to improve with the increasing enrollment rate. The Kent campus alone increased by 1,991 students. Kent State should begin to consider adding or opening a few new residence halls around campus to fix the growing problem.

That’s what the University of Washington has done. The school’s overcrowding became a problem as well, so it set up a plan for new facilities over a 10-year span to add 2,500 new beds to campus. Kent State, and the students especially, could gain from this approach.

We’re proud to go to a school where applying doesn’t automatically mean you got accepted. We’re proud to be part of a generation that finds higher education to be so important that we’re flocking to schools. And we’re sure many students at Kent State would be happy for the opportunity to study and become a professional, no matter where they had to live.

But these students worked to get to be where they are – and they deserve to be comfortable just as much as someone who worked his or her way up in any profession (for example: Kent State administrators) deserve to live comfortably as well.

What do you think? Students? Administration?